BRITISH ARTISTS BLAKE : \X](XaajuA COi. VORrHV*s LiOO'r S'lORt 0"' OOf’M: -ill ss. BRITISH JRTISTS BLAKE Edited by S. C. KJINES SMITH, MM. BRITISH ARTISTS EDITED BY S. C. KAINES SMITH, M.A., M.B.E. The volumes at present arranged comprise the following here given in [approximately) chronological order. Vol. I. The XVI. Century Painters. With a note on the influ- ence of Holbein. II. Cornelius Johnson and Jamesone. III. Dobson and Walker. With a note on the work of Van Dyck in England. IV. Lely and Kneller. V. J- Riley, Greenhill, J. M. Wright and Mary Beale. VI. Thornhill, Jervas, Dand- ridge, Richardson and Hudson VII. Hogarth. VIII. Richard Wilson and J oseph Farington. IX. Reynolds. X. Gainsborough. XI. Romney. XII. Wright of Derby. XIII. Paul Sandby.Towne, Cozens. With a note on the rise of water-colour painting. XIV. B.West, J.S. Copley, and G. Stuart. With a note on American painting in the XV III. Century. XV. Barker of Bath and the Bath Painters. Vol. XVI. Kauffman, Bartolozzi, and Zoffany. With a note on Foreign Mem- bers of the Royal Academy in 1768. XVII. Downman and Dance. XVIII. Hoppner. XIX. Opie and Cosway. XX. Raeburn. XXL Rowlandson. XXII. Morland and Ibbetson. XX1I1. John (old) Crome. With a note on the Norwich School. XXIV. Lawrence. XXV. James Ward. XXVI. Girtin and Bonington. XXVII. Constable. XXVIII. Cotman. XXIX. Cox. XXX. De Wint. XXXI. Copley Fielding. XXX11. Bewick and Clarkson Stanfield. With a note on the Newcastle group. XXX11I. Turner. XXXIV. Alfred Stevens. Watts. XXXV. OTHERS IN PREPARATION. Boston Museum THE CREATION OF EVE' WATER-COLOUR ( frontispiece ) E2VBB&- i'Y <: ivivilTH, - .a. T t '■ C* I' 1 .-'- F;.fM>£ ; •■ .. ••’ \ ; ■■ A'-" ii'i : IHaUs, t-t U 'A . ..... ' . . •AJ -A -... ;V:: - Xi PUB ! REX • BRITISH ARTISTS EDITED BY S. C. KAINES SMITH, m.a. BLAKE By ERNEST H. SHORT Author of History of Sculpture, G. F. Watts, etc. NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS Made and Printed in Great Britain EDITOR’S FOREWORD. The work of William Blake is of a kind which arouses, as a rule, one of two extremely opposite sentiments. It is either the object of enthusiastic admiration or violent dislike. The balanced judg- ment necessary to temper, on the one hand enthu- siastic admiration, and on the other hand instinctive repulsion, is a quality rare in conjunction with either state of mind. In the present volume of this series, I feel that Mr. Short has exercised that judgment, and has applied to his task enthusiasm tempered by a clear appreciation of the limitations of his subject. He is, I think, the first writer upon Blake with whose work I have become acquainted, who has had the courage to divest Blake of the garment of the mystic, and to place him in what I believe to be the truer light of a man of completely materialistic experience, using that experience for the expression of his spiritual insight. This is not mysticism, it is merely the frank consciousness of the narrow groove within which human experience, literally interpreted and applied, must necessarily move, combined with a boldness of expression of the greater life which to him this material condition seems to symbolise. The position which Blake himself assumed is one which disarms criticism of his limitations as an artist. I must confess that I am one of those to whom occasionally his draughtsmanship is a source VI. Editor’s Foreword of sorrow, that to me the struggling character of his technique is an obstacle to full enjoyment, and that the obscurity, and at times, the fantasy, of his imagination is confusing to the point of distaste. But in the following pages much will be found which has lessened this obstacle for myself, and I think is calculated to do the same for others. Mr. Short does not seek to explain. He makes no apologies for the artist, but in admitting shortcomings claims compensatory values for his work, and his presen- tation of his subject seems to justify his contentions. Blake, by reason of the medium he used, and by reason of the conditions under which he appealed to his public, has not the same chance of being generally recognised as an artist pure and simple, as a painter, say, of portraits or of landscapes, for the subject matter of his appeal stands between his public and himself to a very great extent. The pure aesthete is very often not prepared to undertake the philosophic or imaginative effort necessary for the grasp of Blake’s purpose, and it must be confessed that on purely aesthetic grounds, Blake’s work might not stand the test of analysis. Consequently a book like this, in which the spirit is brought into close and constant relation with the letter of the art, is one which will help many who have hitherto regarded Blake as an eccentric phenomenon to grasp his artistic as well as his philosophic value. S. C. Kaines Smith. Leeds. 15th December, 1924. CONTENTS. Chapter I : PAGE Blake, the Man : Biogra- phical and Personal . i II : The Craftsman. Training and Association with Artists . . . .44 i y III : The Seer : Style and Subject Matter . . . -75 IV: The Quality of the Artist . 114 Appendix I : Books and Pictures in Public Galleries . .160 II : Bibliography . . .166 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 1. The Creation of Eve . Frontispiece Page 2. Pity (from ‘Macbeth’) • . 20 3. Glad Day .... • • 50 4. Hecate .... • • 58 5. Dante Entering the Flame • • 78 6. Elijah in the Chariot of Fire • . 106 7. The Sacrifice of Job • . 130 8. Death on the Pale Horse . . . 146 The frontispiece is reproduced, by courtesy of the Boston Museum, Mass'., and Nos. 4 and 6 by kind permission of Mr. Graham Robertson. No. 8 is from a photograph by Mr. W. A. Mansell of Teddington, and Nos. 2, 5 and 7 from photographs by Mr. F. Holly er. WILLIAM BLAKE. CHAPTER I. Blake, the Man : Biographical and Personal. T HERE would seem to be associations with the quality enthusiasm which are antagonistic to humour. Not only do we refuse to judge the enthusiast with a due sense of humour, but, instinc- tively, we deny him possession of the saving grace, and this in proportion to the signifi- cance of his mission. For this reason alone many men of burning zeal have been mis- understood. Among the pioneers who have suffered from being denied possession of the priceless gold of a merry heart, the subject of this study, William Blake, calls for special sympathy, and the more because he could claim in all honesty, ‘ Fun I love.’ With high courage a Dean of Saint Paul's recently urged that the Creator himself might well be credited with a sense of humour, adding that not a few difficulties would be removed from a world which appears full of absurdities, if 2 William Blake God were pictured more genially. May we enter the same plea for the man among British painters who possessed the divine attribute of enthusiasm in the largest measure, and who moved most continually with the Angel of the Presence of the Infinite ? By derivation enthusiasm means ' being possessed by a god.’ The phrase happily describes an abiding characteristic of Blake, poet and painter, but the sense in which he was ‘ possessed ’ must be carefully defined. When Blake says ‘ I touched the sky with my stick,’ we rightly smile because the quaint exaggeration for the moment persuades us to take literally an expression which Blake well knew to be figurative. Similarly, when Milton, in his spiritual form, descended upon Blake’s household and demanded that an error in Paradise Lost should be corrected by means of a new poem or picture, Blake fully appreciated the whimsicality under- lying his emphatic “ No, I have my own work to do.” The whimsicality of the answer, however, in no way conflicts with Blake’s recognition that Milton had a perfect right to solicit his aid as a fellow artist. As a fact Blake spent many months in bringing Paradise Lost up to date by means of corrigenda supplied by the spiritual form of Milton. That was the sort of job Blake felt he was on earth to do. If Blake’s emphatic “ No ” failed to arouse the fleeting smile, we Childhood 3 might well doubt his power to give form to enthusiasms which escape most artists just because they arise on one plane of experience and find expression in another. Blake’s absorption in the inner world of spirit was so intense that he could afford to smile, just as the visions of his imagination were so full of detail that he could afford to be precise. It is this very precision which delights us in such a typical bit of Blake-ian fancy as The Fairy Funeral. “ Did you ever see a fairy’s funeral, madam ? ” he once said to a lady, who hap- pened to sit by him in company. “ Never, sir ! ” was the answer. “ I have,” said Blake, “ but not before last night. I was walking alone in my garden, there was a great stillness among the branches and flowers and more than common sweet- ness in the air, I heard a low and pleasant sound, and I knew not whence it came. At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath, I saw a procession of creatures of the size and colour of green and grey grass- hoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose leaf, which they buried with songs and then disappeared. It was a fairy funeral.” Know a happy-hearted child, who never passed beyond the years in which he could enjoy the sight of a fairy funeral, and the real Blake is revealed. Remember that Blake lived in an age which had little joy in 4 William Blake the things of the imagination, and the tragedy of his life is explained. But above all remem- ber the happy-hearted, enthusiastic, unrea- soning child. Blake was bom when the Industrial Revolution was coming into being, at the beginning of the age which was to make wheels in a great social machine, instead of thinking and feeling human beings. Because he foresaw certain dire results which must arise from crushing the spiritual in man, he was ridiculed by many of his contemporaries. We who live in an age that is satiated by the discoveries of science, and welcome those who can reveal the spiritual forces moving behind the material facts of life, may be more for- tunate. A hundred years have taught us that every new experience requires a new artistic method if it is to find due expression. But first we must assure ourselves that William Blake was no weak-minded, weak- handed adventurer in uncharted spheres, but a traveller strong in faith and sure of craft. Those who read the poems of Blake and seek to understand his pictures, will be more receptive of his influence if they are con- vinced of the simplicity of his character and see it growing in strength through a long life of useful endeavour. So the first approach shall be by way of the life-story of the man. A discussion of the artist’s professional environment and technical qualities will Childhood 5 follow. Then we shall be in a position to judge Blake's contribution to imaginative art and his message for our own time, with special reference to his most mature work, the twenty-one engravings illustrating the Book of Job, and the hundred and two pictures for Dante’s Divine Comedy. William Blake was born in Broad Street, Golden Square, London, on November 28, 1757, the year in which Swedenborg taught that the Last Judgment was to come in the World of Spirits and a New Jerusalem was to arise on earth. To-day, Golden Square is an out-of-date haunt to the east of Regent Street, destined to be swallowed up in the near future by monster restaurants, hotels, and stores. When Blake was a child the district was the dwelling-place of middle- class traders or professional men, whose callings kept them near Central London. The actual birthplace has disappeared, but a London County Council tablet affixed to No. 28 Broad Street records that ‘ William Blake, Poet and Painter, lived here.’ It is more important to remember that, a hundred and fifty years ago, Golden Square lay on the confines of the City, and that a short walk brought a lad of spirit to Saint George’s Fields, on the southern side of Westminster Bridge, and the pretty villages of Newington Butts, Camberwell and Dulwich. It was on Peckham Rye that William, when a boy of 6 William Blake nine, had one of his early visions — in this case a tree, bright with the wings of angels, which bespangled the boughs like stars. Mr. James Blake, the poet’s father, was a worthy hosier in a fair way of business, who had full faith in angels at Church-time on Sundays, but doubts regarding their appearance to his small son on week-days at Peckham Rye. We are told that William narrowly escaped a thrashing when he mentioned what he had seen. A happier memory of these boyish rambles is enshrined in William’s earliest known lyric, written before he was fourteen : How sweet I roamed from field to field, And tasted all the summer’s pride, Till I the Prince of Love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide. He shewed me lilies for my hair. And blushing roses for my brow ; He led me through his gardens fair Where all his golden pleasures grow. Little is known of Blake’s ancestors. There is no evidence of Celtic extraction, though several of his biographers have made great play with the notion. Families of the name of Blake were established in the Golden Square district throughout the eighteenth century, and the painter’s father, James Blake, seems to have been in business there all his working life. William was the third EduGation 7 son by Catherine, his wife. Of their six children, James, the eldest, succeeded to his father’s business ; John, whom William called ‘The Evil One,’ enlisted in the Army, and came to an early and unhappy end. Robert, the poet’s youngest brother, was trained by William as an engraver, and died in early manhood, though he continued to exercise an important formative influence upon his painter-brother, as we shall see. Lastly, Blake’s only sister, Catherine Eliza- beth, lived with him for some years, and died unmarried. To his father, William owed a priceless gift — the absence of formal educa- tion, which might well have set a veil between the creature and the Spirit which was to be the painter’s guiding-light throughout life. In later years, Blake cried : ‘ There is no good in education. I hold it to be wrong. It is the great sin. It is the eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. . . . Everything is good in God’s eyes.’ Blake’s conception of education was a mechanical stocking of the brain with ready-made ideas. As he wrote : Thank heaven I never was sent to school, To be flogged into following the style of a fool. To his father, William also owed a life- long interest in John Wesley, Whitefield and the doctrines of Swedenborg. Later in 8 William Blake life Blake placed Wesley and Whitefield in company with Saint Theresa and Fenelon, among ‘ all the gentle souls who guide the great Wine Press of Love.’ Lastly, to James Blake the boy owed an early introduction to good art. In his manu- script notes upon Reynolds, Blake wrote : ‘ I cannot say that Raffaele ever was from my earliest years hidden from me.’ Before Blake was eleven years old his father had discovered his son’s bent and put him to Mr. Pars’s drawing school. Pars had been to Greece on behalf of the Dilet- tante Society to make drawings of the temples and marbles. When he returned he opened a drawing school in the Strand, preparatory to the Academy of Painting in St. Martin’s Lane, which Hogarth had founded and which was to develop into the Royal Academy Schools at Burlington House. Pars taught young Blake to draw from plaster casts, the basis of the teaching being a belief that an artist could best be trained by constant acquaintance with the master- pieces of the Greco-Roman sculptors. William also frequented the print-shops and auction-rooms, which were an outstanding source of art inspiration in times before the National Gallery and the Elgin Room at the British Museum were in being. As a small boy Blake shewed the soundness of his Art Training 9 taste by collecting reproductions of the pic- tures of Michelangelo, Raphael and Durer. In those days an art auctioneer would accept a three-penny bid, and a pleasant tale is told of a certain Langford, who called William ‘ his little connoisseur/ and, at times, knocked down a cheap lot to the boy with friendly precipitation. James Blake would have been well content that his son should become a painter, but apprenticeship to an established artist was beyond the hosier's means. Instead, young Blake was apprenticed to James Basire, an engraver who had a shop and studio in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and here Blake’s career developed between 1771 and 1778. Basire was an old-fashioned crafts- man, dry and hard in his line, but conscien- tious and liberal-minded. From the first Blake was a diligent apprentice and, to the end, his engraving methods were based upon the solid style he learnt from Basire. Within a year he had established himself in the confidence of his master and was allowed to work alone in Westminster Abbey and other London churches, making drawings of the monuments and architectural features. Some of Blake’s drawings of this period were reproduced in the Archceologia of the Society of Antiquaries, and in Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments. They may be found in the publications under Basire ’s name. 10 William Blake The Society also owns half a dozen of young Blake’s original drawings, including an interesting study of the north front of King Sebert’s tomb. Blake’s earliest known en- graving is the Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion. It dates from 1773, when Blake was sixteen, and shews that the mysterious beauty of Gothic architecture and sculpture had already struck in upon the lad’s soul. Underneath his copy of the engraving Blake wrote : This is One of the Gothic Artists who Built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, Wander- ing about in sheep-skins and goat-skins, of whom the World was not worthy. Such were the Christians in all Ages. Already the influences fostered by the Greco-Roman casts of Pars were passing and, for Blake, Gothic became the dominant in- spiration. The figure of St. Joseph was copied from Michelangelo’s fresco of the Crucifixion of St. Peter, which Blake had seen in an engraving. The young artist added the background, the title, and the idea. Working in the London churches for Basire and engraving imaginary portraits of the mighty dead of our islands for the satisfaction of his own imagination, Blake completed the seven years of his apprentice- ship. When his term with Basire ended, Blake spent, some months at the Royal The Royal Academy ii Academy Schools, and then began to earn a livelihood by engraving for the London book-sellers. His earliest Academy picture, The Death of Earl Godwin, was exhibited in 1780, the year in which the Academy held its first summer exhibition in Somerset House. Among the 489 works were paintings by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Richard Wilson, Stothard, Sandby and Cosway, and the exhibition established the Royal Academy summer show in public favour. Four years later Blake exhibited the drawings, War Unchained by an Angel and The Morning After a Battle. In the early work of Blake a dominant influence was that of John H. Mortimer, a student of Reynolds, who died at thirty-eight, the year in which he was elected to the Royal Academy. Blake’s drawing The Penance of Jane Shore in Old Saint Paul’s, and The Ordeal of Queen Emma, which date from the time Blake was attend- ing the Academy Schools, shew the influence of Mortimer. So far Blake’s training had been of the ordinary academic type, and his methods did not differ materially from those of other young engravers of the time. What was new was the spirit of the youth and the enthusiasm with which he fed his broadening imagination. He was an earnest student of the books that matter to an Englishman, the authorised version of the Bible, Shakespeare’s T2 William Blake plays and the poems of Milton. To these must be added the works of the mystics Boehme and Swedenborg, over which the boy Blake had pored under the guidance of his father in earlier years. From these years, too, dates Blake’s interest in Johann Lavater, the Swiss mystic. ‘ Sin and destruction of order are the same,’ wrote Lavater. ‘ A golden sentence,’ added Blake in comment in the margin of the book. We can imagine, too, Blake’s delight in such a sentence as this : " Keep him at least three paces distant who hates bread, music and the laugh of a child.’ Perhaps, the best of Blake’s commercial engravings was his plate of Lavater in a skull cap, published in 1800. Never was Blake an idler. When not working with his hands, he was awake with eye and brain. ‘ I do not know what you mean by wanting a holiday,’ he said to a friend. Later Mrs. Blake described him as 4 always reading, writing, or designing, day and night.’ Which brings us to Blake’s marriage, a master-act on the part of the Shaper of Things. The youth had fallen in love with a certain Polly Woods, and found himself jilted after a short courtship. Sick at heart and desiring change of scene, Blake took lodgings with a market gardener, William Boucher of Battersea. Blake chanced to tell his experiences to the gardener’s Ya b jG X) Marriage 13 daughter, Catherine, a dark-eyed, generous- spirited girl, who not only proved a ready listener, but, frankly, declared that she pitied the young lover from her heart. “ Do you pity me ? ” “ Yes, I do most truly.” “ Then I love you for that.” In later years, Catherine admitted that when she came into the room and saw William Blake for the first time, she was aware that she was in the presence of her future husband. Her emotion was so in- tense that she had to withdraw for a time. When Blake found that he was in love a second time, he left Battersea and, it is said, did not meet Catherine for a full year. He wished to test his affection by absence, and also to prove his love by working to establish a home for his wife. In August 1782 this constancy was rewarded and Catherine Boucher and William Blake, the maid being twenty and the man twenty-five, were wedded in the parish church of Batter- sea. The young couple made their first home in Green Street, Leicester Fields, Blake making a modest livelihood by work as an engraver. On one occasion, he decorated the advertisement sheet of a carpet sale, picturing the various operations of manu- facture and, on either side, a stately pillar 14 William Blake draped with carpets, the letter-press reading : ‘ At Moore and Co’s Manufactory and Warehouse of Carpeting and Hosiery, Chis- well Street, Moor-Fields — the greatest variety of carpets from the lowest Scotch and Kidderminster, Wilton and Brussels, to the finest Axminster, Turkey, and Persia.’ Some- what nearer to the fine arts were the plates which Blake engraved after designs by Stothard, whom he had met in 1780, and who introduced him to Flaxman the sculptor. Flaxman proved a good friend, and, in later years, not a few of the sculptor’s classical drawings were engraved by Blake. It was at the time of their first meeting that Flaxman helped Blake to publish his first book, the thin octavo volume, Poetical Sketches by W. B., which included the song already quoted and other lyrics in the manner of Spenser and the Elizabethans. Remember this was in 1783, three years before the Kilmarnock Bums heralded the rebirth of artless song in Britain. A book which in- cluded ‘ My silks and fine array,’ the Mad Song, and ‘ I love the jocund dance ’ might well have established the reputation of Blake as the most winning singer since Shakespeare. The cost of publication was defrayed by the Rev. Henry Mathew and his bluestockinged spouse, the ‘ celebrated Mrs. Mathew.’ The lady read Homer in Early Friends 15 Greek and kept open house for young artists and poets at 27 Rathbone Place, which was decorated by the grateful Flaxman ' with models of putty and sand in the Gothic manner.’ An invitation to the home of the elegant Mrs. Mathew must have been a pleasant change after a day’s work in Green Street. Picture Blake singing songs to his own music, though he was quite ignorant of the art of composition, and was forced to memorise the simple melodies he had com- posed. J. T. Smith, ‘ Nollekens Smith,’ records that Blake’s tunes were, at times, singularly beautiful, and ‘ were noted down by musical professors.’ Somewhat later the young engraver visited the house of the publisher, Joseph Johnson, in St. Paul’s Churchyard, where a band of revolutionary Radicals were wont to meet, among them Mary Wollstonecraft, an eighteenth century type of repressed woman- hood. Included in the group were Mary’s anarchist spouse, Godwin, Tom Paine, author of The Rights of Man, and Dr. Priestley, the scientist. In 1791 Johnson published Mary Wollstonecraft’s engaging volume, Original Stones from Real Life ; with Con- versations calculated to regulate the Affections and form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. It was illustrated by six plates designed and engraved by Blake. A collector’s treasure this, if only for the picture of Mrs. Mason i6 William Blake impressing upon Mary the necessity for calmness. “ Be calm, my child, remember that you must do all the good you can the present day.” Horace Walpole would have revised his judgment of Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘ a hyena in petticoats,’ had he studied the Original Stones and their dulcet illustrations with greater care. No more than a hint of the real Blake is to be found in this journeyman work. The writer and illustrator of the Songs of Innocence, and the creator of the symbolic mythology embodied in the Daughters of Albion, America, and Jerusalem, came to his own in the peace of Blake’s own home and workshop. In 1784, Blake had established himself in business as a print-seller next door to his father’s shop in Broad Street. Here he set up a printing press at the cost of forty pounds, and took Robert Blake into appren- ticeship. The affection between William and his youngest brother was very real. For three years Robert lived with William and Catherine ; then he fell ill and died. Blake nursed the youth with unwearied patience, and, when the end came, he tells that he saw the soul of Robert pass from mortality, clapping his hands for joy. William was so overcome with emotion and fatigue that he fell in exhaustion &nd slept Illuminated Printing 17 for three days. Some months later the spirit of Robert appeared in a dream and revealed the method which was to impress the imaginings of William Blake upon a careless world. For some time the young engraver had been seeking a means of publishing an illustrated edition of his lyrics, possibly following up a suggestion made by George Cumberland, who had experimented in a similar method of relief etching in 1784, the year in which Blake seems to have first turned his mind to illuminated printing. Blake did not etch his first plate until 1788. Goaded to a final effort by the vision of Robert, Blake devised and perfected a method by which the poems and their illus- trations could be printed, coloured, and bound by the poet-painter and his willing assistant, Catherine. The spirit promptings were that Blake’s verses, with their marginal decorations, should be drawn in reverse with the stopping-out varnish of an engraver upon a copper plate, and that the metal should then be eaten away by an acid until the lettering and the design stood out in sufficient prominence for the copper sheet to be used as a printing plate. From these plates Blake was to take impressions upon paper in ink, and then colour them by hand in imitation of the original drawings. On the morning following the vision Mrs. Blake i8 William Blake was in possession of the spirit-secret. She went to market with half-a-crown, all the money her husband had in the world, and spent is. io^. upon the material necessary to test the value of Robert’s dream message. Did ever is. io^. bring in a richer return, material, mental and spiritual? Blake set to work to etch the plates for the Songs of Innocence. For a time, however, and on the corporeal plane, Robert’s proposal proved far from remunerative. A century was needed to test its full value. When he first etched the Songs of Innocence, Blake undertook to supply the twenty-five coloured prints for five shillings, a price which obviously could not admit of any perfection of handicraft. In later years, an admirer might give as much as twenty pounds for one of the volumes and then the sheets were coloured by Blake him- self, the original print being little more than a goad to a fresh invention. In such cases the Songs were illuminated with a distinction which made each page ‘ bright with fiery blossom,’ or ‘ musical with blowing branches and falling water,’ to quote from Swinburne’s beautiful apologia. A single page of the Songs of Innocence and Experience may now be a collector’s treasure. In July 1924 Mr. MacGeorge’s copy of the 1789 Songs of Innocence and the 1794 Songs of Experience was sold for £760. It is Songs of Innocence 19 now in the Print Room at the British Museum. Nevertheless, when Blake issued the early copies of the Songs of Innocence in 1789, it should have been plain that a force had come into English art and letters, not less potent than that which issued from Kilmarnock four years earlier, when Burns poured forth the first wild effusions of his heart. With the Englishman's effort, not only poetry but the sister art of design was spiritualised afresh. From the time Blake answered to the spirit-promptings of his brother and pro- duced the first of his illuminated books, poems, pictures and prophecies poured forth from the Blake Press in testimony to the burning enthusiasm of the engraver and the loyal devotion of his wife. Catherine at the time of her marriage does not seem to have been able to write, though the evidence of this is doubtful, being founded upon the fact that she signed the marriage register with a cross, as did several other damsels of Batter- sea who were wedded in the same month. In any case, love and admiration made her an apt pupil. She soon learnt to take off the engraved impressions from the copper plates and tinted some of them in imitation of her husband’s original drawings. A copy of the Songs of Innocence or one of the later Prophetic Books owes not a little of its charm 20 William Blake to this homely method of production. Blake extended his antipathy to the factory system into book publication, and so the Blake Press of Golden Square or Lambeth came into being as the first protest in art against the Industrial Revolution. The Songs of Innocence was followed by the Book of Thel and the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and then was completed by its complement, The Songs of Experience, the two volumes being advertised in Blake’s prospectus at five shillings apiece. Each contained twenty-five designs, apart from the frontispiece and title-pages. Later Blake designed a general title-page to the two books, which were issued in a single volume. The quarto of the Book of Thel consisted of seven etched plates, printed in red ink, and the designs, like the poem itself, are among the most charming which issued from Blake’s press. What could be more delightful than the picture of Thel, the daughter of the Seraphim, listening to the counsel of the polite lily of the valley ? Recal] the flower’s pretty bow. Only less charming is the frontispiece in which Thel watches the Cloud wooing the fairy Dew, whose home is in the heart of the flowers. Tiriel, with its Indian- ink drawings, belongs to the same period. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell dates from 1790. Three years later the Blake Press was moved from Golden Square to A COLOUR-PRINT Early Prophetic Books 21 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth (later 23 Hercules Road), where the poet lived for seven years. At Lambeth Blake etched and printed the remarkable series of Pro- phetic Books, among them America, Europe, Urizen, The Book of Los and The Visions of the Daughters of A lbion. The last book included eleven plates and was adver- tised for sale at 7s. 6 d., America, a Prophecy, with eighteen plates, which also appeared in 1793, being offered at 10s. 6 d. Perhaps the most characteristic of the Lambeth works was the First Book of Urizen, dated 1794. The Second Book of Urizen apparently appeared in 1795, under the title Ahania. The year 1795, which ended Blake’s first effort upon his prophetic books, was also the year of a dozen coloured-prints, among them the Pity, the Elijah and the Nebuchadnezzar. In the following year Blake made no fewer than 537 designs for a poem which was very popular in the latter part of the eighteenth century, Young’s Night Thoughts. Forty- three of the designs were engraved and published in folio by R. Edwards of Bond Street in 1797. Surely the record of a busy life and suggesting that the diligent appren- tice had grown into a trusty, active-minded professional man. Unfortunately, Blake’s industry brought little to the family exchequer. When it became necessary to replenish the larder, 22 William Blake Catherine Blake was wont to set an empty platter before the artist, as a gentle reminder that there were needs of the body as urgent as those of the spirit. At once Blake would turn to the drudgery of a drawing or engraving for the open market, perhaps after a design by Flaxman, Stothard or some other supporter. While living at Hercules Buildings, Blake also met Mr. Butts, a well-to-do man who lived in Fitzroy Square. He bought paintings and drawings until the walls of his large house were filled with works of the engraver-etcher of Lambeth. Butts paid from a pound to 30s. for a design, his merit from the point of view of Blake being that he took what was given him without com- ment. On one occasion he ordered fifty pictures. In six years, between 1805 to 1810, Butts paid Blake £339 5 s. 6 d. His judgment was justified when his art treasures were shown before their dispersal at the Carfax Gallery a hundred years later. There is no reason to think Blake could not have made a comfortable income had he so desired. The earnings which kept happy- go-lucky Stothard contented were well within his grasp. But Blake had no desire for wealth, and the trustful Catherine not only accepted her husband’s decision but approved of it, unless the occasional presenta- tion of the empty platter can be 'construed into a protest. On one occasion Blake had William Hayley 23 the offer of a regular income from the Duke of Richmond if he acted as a sort of ‘ painter in ordinary,’ with opportunities to paint miniatures for the Quality associated with the ducal family. Again, he seems to have refused the position of teacher of drawing to the Royal children at Buckingham Palace. It was as well. His tenure of the office would have been short. When some of Blake’s works were shown to George the Third, the King threw up his hands, with a cry : “ Take ’em away ; take ’em away.” Until 1800, Blake had been a Londoner, with no experience beyond the town and the country-side within twenty or thirty miles of Golden Square and Lambeth. This was well known to him, for William and Catherine were great walkers. In September 1800, Blake left London for Sussex. The oppor- tunity came through an introduction which Flaxman gave Blake to a certain William Hayley, of Eton, Trinity Hall, and the Middle Temple. Hayley is forgotten to-day. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, he had some reputation as a poet, due to a volume entitled Triumphs of Temper (1781), and his fame was sufficient to bring him into conflict with the writer of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Indeed, when Warton died in 1790, Hayley’s position was sufficiently assured to allow of his declining the poet-laureateship. Apart from William Blake 24 poetry, Hayley was a well-to-do gentleman of middle-age, who could patronise artists of promise, and even achievement, without appearance of arrogance. Gibbon, Cowper and Romney were among his friends, and when Hayley suggested that Mr. and Mrs. Blake should come into Sussex and live near his own ‘ turreted marine cottage ’ at Felp- ham, the proposal was accepted gladly. Hayley wished Blake to help him by illus- trating his books, among them the Life of Cowper. The joy with which the Blake family anticipated their move into the country, and the satisfaction they derived from their early experiences of Sussex life, are plain from Blake’s letters. ' My wife is like a flame of many colours of precious jewels whenever she hears Felpham mentioned ! ’ When he came to Sussex, Blake wrote to Flaxman, ‘ heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates.’ The journey from Town, ‘ in seven different chaises ’ alone justified the trouble of removal. At the end of his stay he cried, ‘ O lovely Felpham, to thee I am eternally indebted for my three years’ rest from perturbation and the strength I now enjoy.’ Wandering on the seashore, Blake found himself in a new communion with Homer, Dante, Milton, Moses and Ezekiel, ‘ all majestic shadows, grey but luminous, and superior to the common At Felpham 25 height of men/ as he chronicled with characteristic precision. Freed from the distraction of town life, Blake was caught up into a rapture of glorious revelation in which the very atoms of material existence became living symbols of the unity of man with the created whole. In particles bright, The jewels of light Distinct shone and clear. Amaz’d and in fear I each particle gaz£d. Astonish’d, amazed ; For each was a Man. Let there be no doubt. Again and again in this study the word symbol will be used to denote the persons or things by which Blake summed up his imaginative philosophy — symbol, not metaphor or simile. 1 1 was not a chance similarity which dictated Blake’s choice of a symbol, but a belief in absolute identity. When he found these living men in the material atoms, and also when he created Urizen, Enitharmon, Los and Ore, the creatures of his imagination seemed real things, corresponding to real facts which he found in his experience. Blake’s visions of God, Adam, Eve, and Mary the Mother of Christ were equally real, and for the same reason. Blake was a mystic, but he was not c 26 William Blake of the number who seek to disconnect them- selves from things finite and find peace through absorption in some larger unity. The understanding of Blake the man begins by accepting the reality of his symbols. Whatever they may seem to us, they were real to Blake. Apart from illustrating Hayleys ballads and engraving plates for the Life of Cowper, Blake composed the greater part of his own Milton at Felpham, and the longest and most abstruse of the Prophetic Books, Jerusalem. The plates were etched after Blake’s return to London, but both books bear many traces of the poet’s first contact with country life and scenes. Felpham was, indeed, a sweet place for study. Probably Blake would have returned to London life in any event ; his actual return was hastened by the activities of his fussy patron, the squire of the ‘ turreted marine cottage. When Blake wished to commune with the spirit form of Milton, Hayley bustled in with a well-meant proposal that Blake should paint a firescreen for a lady friend, or a miniature of an aristocratic acquaintance. He was always desirous to add a few shillings to the Blake exchequer. Hayley has suffered unduly at the hands of Blake biographers. He was a busy little . gentle- man, but he had a manifest affection and admiration for the poet-painter, who had to At Felfiham 2 7 acknowledge many benefits from him. If Hayley’s generous instincts at times hurried him into absurdities, Blake was amply avenged by securing an opportunity to fire off an epigram, which was not intended to pass beyond the secrecy of Blake's notebook or the semi-secrecy of a letter to Mr. Butts of Fitzroy Square. Among the epigrams at Hayley’s expense was the delightfully comic inversion : Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache, Do be my enemy — for friendship’s sake. Here is another, entitled ‘ On H. the Pickthank ’ : I write the rascal thanks, till he and I With thanks and compliments are quite drawn dry. At the worst Hayley said no more at Felpham than Blake’s other friends had said in London. In a letter to Captain Butts, Blake complains : ‘ I find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery of business, and intimations that if I do not confine myself to this I shall not live. . . . This from Johnson and Fuseli brought me down here, and this from Mr. Hayley will bring me back again.’ From the standpoint of Hayley, Flaxman told 28 William Blake almost the whole truth when he wrote, ‘ Blake’s irritability, as well as the association and arrangement of his ideas, do not seem likely to be soothed or more advantageously disposed by any Power inferior to that by which man is originally endowed with his faculties.’ Hayley’s advice was sound enough, but it was wasted upon Blake. Even worse, the seer of Felpham troubled him with three years of polite disapproba- tion, until Blake became convinced that he was bartering his birthright for a mess of pottage and determined to return to London. Hayley was, indeed, a corporeal friend, but a spiritual foe, which was Blake’s way of saying that Hayley acted like a perfect gentleman and afforded no excuse for an open quarrel. At the end of the three years at Felpham, the so-called ‘ treason trial ’ gave Hayley an opportunity for displaying his kindly generosity to the Blake family, on the bodily plane. The story will be found in full in Gilchrist’s Life, together with a letter of the poet to Captain Butts on the subject. In the autumn of 1803 Blake was in his garden, when he became aware of a strange presence. As the interloper appeared to have no excuse for his intrusion, Blake re- quested him to leave. The man, a burly trooper in the Royal Dragoons, by name Sergeant John Scholfield, who had recently The Scholfield Affair 29 visited the Fox Inn, refused to go. Where- upon, Blake turned him round, seized him firmly by the shoulders and thrust him into the highroad. Though small of stature, Blake was broad shouldered and vigorous in body, so he had little difficulty in ridding his garden of the tipsy dragoon. Unfortu- nately, he was to discover that, in fact, Scholfield had an excellent excuse for his presence. He was an acquaintance of Blake’s gardener, who had asked him to assist in digging and weeding, which certainly gave the burly trooper reason for discontent. In the highroad, as Blake tells us, Scholfield put himself into a posture of defiance, threat- ening and swearing. I, perhaps foolishly, perhaps not, stepped out at the gate and putting aside his blows, took him again by the elbows and keeping his back to me pushed him forward down the road about fifty yards, he all the while endeavouring to turn round and strike me, and raging and cursing. Two other troopers then appeared from the Fox Inn and there were all the elements of a troublesome affair. A day or so later, as the Sussex Advertiser of January 16th, 1804, records, the poet was arraigned before a bench of magistrates at Chichester, the charge being the use of seditious words and ‘ damning King George.’ It may be that rumours of Blake’s earlier association with 30 William Blake Paine and Godwin had reached Felpham and caused the troopers to risk this fabricated perjury. Blake had to find bail for his appearance at Quarter Sessions. Towards this Hayley provided £100, and also secured the services of his friend, Samuel Rose, as defending counsel. A day or two before the trial, Hayley, who was a fearless horseman, and ’added to the difficulties of riding by carrying an open umbrella to shade his eyes from the glare of the sun, was thrown from his horse. All the persuasions of his doctor failed to prevent Hayley from attending the trial. ‘ Living or dying,’ he said he must be there, and he had the satisfaction of witnes- sing a triumphant acquittal. The Duke of Richmond and the other Quarter Session magistrates unanimously decided that Blake did not ‘ damn the King, his subjects and his soldiers ’ ; neither did he say that ‘ when Bonaparte comes, it will be cut-throat for cut-throat and the weakest must go to the wall ; I will help him.’ The Duke, at any rate, treated the treason trial with due seriousness, inasmuch as he sat from ten in the morning until eight at night, without quitting the court or taking refreshment. To the student of Blake, however, a more inter- esting aspect than the strictly legal one is Blake’s spiritual attitude towards the affair. This was very different from the corporeal attitude revealed when Blake took Sergeant The Treason Trial 31 Scholfield by the shoulders and marched him down the Felpham highroad to the door of the Fox Inn. At the end of his letter to Captain Butts, Blake wrote : If a man offends me ignorantly and not de- signedly, surely I ought to consider him with favour and affection. Perhaps the simplicity of myself is the origin of all the offences committed against me. If I have found this, I shall have learned a most valuable thing, well worth three years perseverance. I have found it ... I must now express to you my conviction that all is come from the spiritual world for good and not for evil. Give me your advice in my perilous adventure. Bum what I have peevishly written about any friend (meaning Hayley). I have been much degraded and in- juriously treated ; but if it all arise from my own fault, I ought to blame myself. The troubles of the next ten years, the darkest in Blake’s life, may be traced to this difficulty of combining corporeal needs with spiritual ideals. Returning to London, William and Catherine settled down at 17 South Molton Street, between Oxford Street and Brook Street, and lived there in a first floor flat for seventeen years. The dark years were devoted to rebuilding a Heaven of Innocence from a Hell of Experience, and Blake found the task a difficult ohe. His childlike faith and buoyancy of spirit had been sorely tried, in particular by Cromek’s publication of the drawings for Blair’s poem The Grave, after they had been 32 William Blake engraved by Schiavonetti. Cromek’s issue of The Grave sold for 2\ guineas a copy, and £1,800 seems to have been paid by the public, of which Schiavonetti received five-hundred guineas and Blake twenty guineas ! Still harder to bear was the feeling that what was given to the world was only a travesty of his vision. Under Schiavonetti’s graver, the Blake designs lost their fierce energy and spiritual fire. Cromek was also associated with the publication of the Canterbury Pilgrims engraving, which led to Blake’s quarrel with his old friend, Stothard. Lastly, arising from the differences with Cromek and the quarrel with Stothard, there was the memorable exhibition of Blake’s works in several rooms above the hosiery shop in Broad Street, Golden Square. The exhibi- tion, in turn, resulted in the publication of the Descriptive Catalogue, containing, in Charles Lamb’s words, ‘ the finest criticism of Chaucer’s poems I have ever read.’ Lamb bound his copy of the Catalogue with his own Confessions of a Drunkard. Un- fortunately Blake and the public knew nothing of this. What they learnt was that Leigh Hunt, in the Examiner, having considered Blake’s pictures and the apologia which accompanied them, came to the conclusion that the Descriptive Catalogue was ‘ a wild farrago of nonsense, unintelli- gibleness and egregious vanity.’ On August Years of Obscurity 33 7th, 1808, under the heading ‘ Fine Arts/ appeared a notice of Blake’s illustrations to Blair’s The Grave, which was published in the year preceding the exhibition at Broad Street. In this, the writer, Robert Hunt, alleged that, ‘ At the awful Day of Judg- ment, before the Throne of God Himself, a male and female figure are described in the most indecent attitudes.’ Truly, if the Voices had been contrary at Felpham, they were no less estranged when Blake obeyed the recall to London. Nevertheless, in London, he was once more alone with Catherine and ‘ at liberty from the doubts of other mortals.’ This was much, even if the price paid included the pen-pricks of a Robert Hunt. By this time Blake’s increasing absorption in mystical experience had largely destroyed the child- like buoyancy of spirit which sang through the Songs of Innocence. His imaginative power and energy of vision were now his chief tools for creating the New Jerusalem in England’s pleasant land. At times, the human burden was too heavy to be borne, and we find in Blake’s notebook such an entry as : Tuesday, January 20, 1807, between Two and Seven in the Evening, Despair ! For nine years between 1809 and 1818 few facts are known regarding Blake’s life and 34 William Blake work. It has even been suggested that for a period he was confined in an asylum. The only direct evidence is an unsigned article in the Revue Britannique of July 1833, h ve years after Blake's death. The article was reprinted by Mr. Horton in the Occult Review of November 1912, and is quoted in full by Mr. Foster Damon. It tells that among the tenants of Bethlem Hospital were the incendiary Martin, elder brother of Martin the painter, and Blake, nicknamed the Seer. The writer speaks of the Blake of Bethlem as a painter of ghosts, of his conver- sations with Michelangelo and Moses and of his talents as an engraver and draughtsman. Incidentally, he claims that he actually saw the portrait of a flea being produced in the cell of the madman. The story is replete with corroborative detail, but on examination its falsity is manifest. Mr. Horton searched the records at Bethlem from 1815 to 1835 and could find no mention of a Blake. We also know that the transformation of the flea into the form of a man was painted for John Varley during the last years of Blake’s life, long after the period of obscurity which ended about 1817. If the story is not a complete invention, the French writer wove some recollections of a real madman named Blake with what he had read of Blake, the poet-painter, in Varley 's Zodiacal Physi- ognomy, published in 1828. Certainly none Later Prophetic Books 35 of Blake’s many friends and acquaintances even hint at such an episode. Mrs. Riches, a granddaughter of Linnell, tells a story which aptly illustrates what those who knew Blake thought of the accusation of madness. John Martin, the outspoken old Baptist minister of Keppel Street Chapel, who died in 1820 at the age of eighty, was once asked if he not did think that Blake was ‘ cracked.’ “ Yes,” retorted the old man, " but his is a crack that lets in the Light.” Even the obscurity of the eight or nine years following the unfortunate exhibition at Broad Street can be exaggerated. True, Joseph Johnson had died in 1809 and other publishers and patrons could not be found to replace him. The quarrel with Cromek had alienated Blake from Stothard. Never- theless, a second edition of the Chaucer’s Pilgrims was issued in 1812, and Mr. Russell attributes The Chaining of Ore, a relief etching, to the year 1813. A copy of America is watermarked 1815, as are two copies of the Songs, two of Thel, three of the Daughters of Albion and other Prophetic Books. In 1816 Blake w r as at work upon the thirty- seven plates for Flaxman’s Hesiod. Above all, Mr. Keynes has shewn that the great quarto Jerusalem, with its hundred etched pages, though dated 1804, was not actually published until about 1818. It is also note- worthy that in 1818 Blake was in a position 36 William Blake to ask ten times the prices he asked in 1793 for copies of the Songs of Innocence, the Prophetic Books, and the large colour-prints. The prices suggested to Dawson Turner in this year included £2 2 s. for the Book of Thel, £$ 5 s. for the America, £g 3s. for the Songs of Innocence and £5 5s. for the colour-prints, each two feet by one and a half, of which there were twelve. By this time the period of lonely neglect had ended, and a new circle of friends and admirers were gathering around Blake. George Cumberland introduced him to a brother painter, John Linnell, and to the genial John Varley. Blake was now sixty years old, but his powers of craft had not failed in any way. Samuel Palmer has recalled his ‘ never to be forgotten first interview,’ when the copper of the plate — Thus did Job continually — was lying on the table where he had been working upon it. ‘ How lovely it looked by the lamplight, strained through the tissue paper ! ’ In 1820 Blake began to paint the vast Last Judgment, which was not finished until the year of his death. To 1820 also belong the seventeen woodcuts illustrating the Pastorals of Virgil, in which Blake engraved on wood for the first time. Apparently, experience in the new material gave his engravings upon copper a fresh freedom. At any rate, the vision and the craft of William Blake were The Last Years 37 ready for their final effort, the designs and engravings for Job and the water- colour drawings illustrating Dante’s Divine Comedy. If public neglect brought misery on the bodily plane, it also prepared the way for this final blossoming of Blake’s spiritual ex- perience. There are artists for whom the ‘ terrible applause of countless unknown beings ’ is a necessary condition to vital production. Not so Blake. Failure did not make him an idler or lessen his determination to cry the truth as he found it. Ten shillings a week, to cover food and clothes, which seems to have been a customary allowance to William and Catherine during these testing years, made bodily comfort difficult, but nothing could prevent the spirit-life of the poet-painter from coming to flower and fruit. Some of his old friends lost their trust in him for a while, but through these dark years Blake retained the temper of the Roman, who answered the jeers of the un- thinking and the unknowing with the cry “ Cano Equitibus ” (“ I sing for the nobles ”). His idea of nobility differed from that of the Roman, but there was no pose in the state- ment to Crabb Robinson : ‘ I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much taken from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to 38 William Blake live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy.’ In full faith and with a grateful heart, Blake felt that the full truth was expressed in his whimsical description of himself as a book which his fellow countrymen did not require : " Well, it is published elsewhere — and beautifully bound.” Strange that, in spite of this delightful after-thought “ and beautifully bound ” there are those who refuse to credit William Blake with a sense of humour in regard to things of the spirit. The last years of Blake’s life had some of the serene joy of his early married life. In 1821 the Blakes left South Molton Street for 3 Fountain Court, Strand (now Southampton Buildings), where they occupied two rooms on the first floor, the front being a sitting and reception room and the back serving as a kitchen, bedroom and studio. There was no surplus of comfort during these years at Fountain Court, but Blake’s friends are in- sistent that there was no grinding poverty, still less squalor. Samuel Palmer records that a millionaire’s upholsterer could not have furnished enrichments like those of Blake’s enchanted rooms. ‘ Himself, his wife, and his rooms were clean and orderly ; every- thing was in its place. His delightful work- ing corner had its implements ready, tempt- ing to hand,’ Lady Charlotte Bury, the John Linnell 39 diarist, writing in 1820, described Blake as careworn, but with an expression irradiated by his art, and she contrasts his simplicity of mind with the mental attitude of that em- bodiment of artistic success under the later Georges, Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A. Crabb-Robinson tells of Blake’s pale Socratic countenance, his expression of sweet langour and his air of inspiration, while other people who saw Blake insist upon the widely-opened eyes ' large, bright and luminous ’ and the high forehead with waves of thick hair stand- ing up above. He was about 5! feet high and favoured a plain black suit and a rather broad brimmed, but not. Quakerish, hat. For days, he would not leave his workshop save to fetch his pint of porter from a neigh- bouring public-house. Lastly we are re- minded that a print of Durer’s Melancholia hung above his working desk, and con- nected William Blake with the royal line of master engravers. Surely a record of impressions indicative of bodily, mental and spiritual fitness. Linnell was the good angel of Blake’s last years. He met Blake in 1818 and has re- corded, ‘ I never saw anything the least like madness, for I never opposed him spitefully as many did.’ Linnell introduced Blake to Sir Thomas Lawrence and, in 1822, secured him a grant of £25 from the Royal Academy funds. Linnell also took the old painter to 40 William Blake Drury Lane Theatre on at least two occasions, and accompanied him to picture galleries, and to the British Museum ‘ to see prints.’ Happy Linnell, he had his reward. ‘ To the British Museum to see prints ’ with William Blake ! When the Linnells moved from 38 Rathbone Place to Hampstead, the old painter used to walk over to Collins’s Farm, North End, where Mrs. Linnell sang Scotch songs, bringing back memories of Blake’s own singing days at the ‘ celebrated Mrs. Mathew’s evening parties.’ In 1821, at the time of the Academy grant, Blake was badly in need of work. Linnell tells that ‘ before I knew his distress, he had sold all his collec- tion of old prints to Messrs. Colnaghi and Company.’ Another mischance, for Linnell might have saved the gleanings of a life-time and we should be able to look upon the Raphael, the Michelangelo, and the Durer prints which Langford, fifty years earlier, had knocked down to the boy Blake, ‘ with friendly precipitation.’ In order to relieve the old couple at Fountain Court from im- mediate anxieties, Linnell commissioned the 102 Dante drawings which Blake commenced at sixty-seven years of age and left un- finished at his death three years later. Characteristically, for he never spared pains, Blake began to study Italian as, in earlier years, he had learnt Greek, Latin and Hebrew. In these last years, too, Blake embarked upon Blake’s Death 41 the engraving of the Job designs, which he first painted in water-colour for his faithful patron, Captain Butts. For the set of twenty-one engraved plates, Linnell paid £150, giving the money to Blake in instal- ments of £2 or £3 a week, as he needed it, a method which gave William sufficient for his requirements, without placing upon the old man the necessity for working when he was disinclined. Blake’s health had broken down in 1825 from trouble which he described as ' mixing of the gall with the blood,’— gall stone colic — but he went on with the Dante illustrations even after he was compelled to remain in bed. ‘ Dante goes on better,' he wrote on one occasion, ‘ which is all I care about.’ The end, or it may be a new beginning, came on Sunday, August 12, 1827, at six in the evening. Blake had been colouring a copy of the frontispiece to Europe , known as The Ancient of Days, and as he finished his gaze fell upon his wife. “ Stay,” cried the dying man, “ keep as you are. You have ever been an angel to me ; I will draw you.” Blake’s last service to art was also a testi- mony to the worth of the woman who had lived and worked with him for forty-five years and whose only complaint at the end was : “ Mr. Blake has been so little with me. For though in body we were never D 42 William Blake separated, he was incessantly away in Paradise ! ” t One remaining memory, the blessing which old Blake bestowed upon the golden-haired daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Aders : “ May God make this world as beau- tiful to you, my child, as it has been to me-” , r . Surely this record of seventy years of life justifies the question why did it take his countrymen a hundred years to recognise the worth and wisdom of this great lover of things beautiful, whether in childhood, in human history and thought, or in Nature. Indeed, are they fully recognised now ? When Blake died he shared six feet of the graveyard in B unhill Fields, City Road, with three other paupers. Later, four others were buried in the same grave. It cost twenty-two shillings to bury him. The devotion of Mr. Herbert Jenkins has traced the precise spot where the dust of Blake mingles with that of the 120,000 other Londoners who sleep in Bunhill Fields, but, to this day, there is no stone to mark the graves of William Blake and the woman whom Swinburne called ‘ the most perfect wife in the world.’ It is too much to hope that when she died in 1831 Catherine was laid, literally, by the side of her Mister Blake, but William’s grave may fitly be- regarded as the resting-place of both. That nameless grave is a reproach to Londoners who love Bunhill Fields 43 poetry and love painting. A century of ever-growing understanding alone should ensure a more fitting memorial than the gravel path which at present covers Grave Seventy-Four in Bunhill Fields. CHAPTER II. Blake, the Craftsman : Training and Technique. S UCH was Blake, the man. What of the social conditions which deter- mined the product of his genius? What of the artists who passed on to him the traditions of their common craft ? And what of the technical methods by which Blake found expression for his thought and his visions ? A mystic born in an age of reason, Blake could make relatively little use of the technique of his fellows. Nevertheless, there is a body of craft which every painter must learn from his predecessors, if only because art is a form of speech and a common craft is necessary if an artist is to be articulate. Even Blake had his teachers. Blake was born at a time when the reasoning mind was judged more worthy than the intuitive imagination. In the eighteenth century imaginative art in Eng- land, that is painting apart from portraiture, landscape and the essays in realism of a 44 Eighteenth Century Outlook 45 Hogarth, was overshadowed by the achieve- ments of sixteenth century Italy. In the Renaissance outlook human experience was the central factor. Not so for Blake. In his philosophy, human experience was a product of mysterious powers which were above and beyond thinking man, and in this Blake was akin to the sculptors and painters of the Gothic age, and the craftsmen in the bottegas of pre-Raphaelite Tuscany. In spite of his profound admiration for Raphael and Michelangelo, Blake was really a pioneer in the revolution against Greco-Roman and post-Renaissance craft which made up so much of nineteenth century art history. As Blake grew to manhood, there was a marked change in the influences which deter- mined the art outlook in England. Instead of urban life, literary argument and purely intellectual tests of knowledge, not a few men desired to come into closer touch with Nature. They had a new sense of individual vitality, and a desire for spiritual and emotional experience of a more personal sort. During the preceding hundred years, a cultivated Englishman had been enthusiastic about well-kept gardens. He looked upon a rugged hill-top as ‘ monstrous ’ and 2 misshapen.’ The sea was ‘ a waste of waters, dangerous at times and always wearisome.’ Evelyn once described the Alps as the place where Nature swept up the rubbish of the earth to 46 William Blake clear the plains of Lombardy. Bishop Burnet, who died in 1715, was actually , in trouble with the Creator on one occasion because of the disorderly fashion in which he conceived the stars to be sown in the heavens. ‘ What a beautiful hemisphere they would have made if they had been placed in rank and order ; if they had all been disposed in regular figures ; the little ones set with due regard to the greater, and then all finished and made up into one fair piece, or great composition, according to the rules of art and symmetry.' This rational outlook upon the world of Nature and humanity was not for Blake. He resolutely refused to subject the experi- ence which he embodied in his pictures and prints to an intellectual test. Instead, he sought forms and rhythms which would embody a reality known only to those who can rid themselves of the impressions of the visible world. Blake did not know it, but, when he was nearest to Michelangelo, he was least true to his best vision. A revo- lutionary in life, Blake was necessarily a revolutionary in craft, and for his popular rivals of the brush, he had only pity : * They pity me, but 'tis they are the just objects of pity. They have bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage.’. 1 Compared with Reynolds, Gainsborough, Raeburn, and the other successful portrait Blake’s Art Masters 47 painters of the later eighteenth century, Blake’s professional career was a failure. Fortunately there was another influence which, at any rate, was sufficiently potent to start the young engraver in life and give him an opportunity of developing an individual craft and outlook. This influence may be roughly described as that of the Society of Dilettanti. The members were young British noblemen who had made the Grand Tour through France and Italy and returned to London equipped as arbiters in matters of taste. The Society endowed student scholar- ships at the Academy Schools, conducted excavations, and issued finely illustrated books on antiquarian subjects. As we have seen, Blake’s early training under Henry Pars (1734-1806) and James Basire (1730- 1802) owed much to the interest in conti- nental art and classical archaeology fostered by the Society of Dilettanti and the Society of Antiquaries. The drawing school in the Strand, to which Blake was sent as a boy of ten, had been established by William Shipley, better known as the founder of the Royal Society of Arts. Pars took over the manage- ment after he had spent three years in Greece in the pay of the Dilettanti Society, sketch- ing temple-ruins and architectural detail, years which filled his portfolios with classical material. The classical interests of Pars might well haye influenced Blake even more 48 William Blake directly than they did. What Blake took over from Pars was an elementary knowledge of Greco-Roman form, which was fostered by his own small collection of Renaissance prints and the few casts which James Blake purchased, ‘ in order that his boy might study in the evenings at home.’ During the ten years of his studentship Blake drew with great care ‘ all, or nearly all, the noble antique figures in various views.’ But the classical influence was not an abiding one. Almost the only classical picture of Blake’s maturity was the Judgment of Paris, a water- colour painted after 1810, now in the pos- session of Mr. Graham Robertson ; it is interesting and competent, but reveals nothing of the real man. There is neither the lyric throb of the Songs of Innocence and the Book of Thel, nor the dynamic power of the designs for the Prophetic Books, Dante and the Job. Before Blake developed what was in- dividual in his technique by the painful process of trial and failure — the Gothic method — he passed through the Academy Schools. The apprenticeship to James Basire ended in 1778, when Blake was twenty- one, and he at once commenced his studies in the Antique School under George Moser (1704-1783), a chaser, enameller and medallist, best known for his designs for ■watch-backs. Moser had been a primary Royal Academy Schools 49 agent in the establishment of the art school in Arundel Street, Strand, and Peter’s Court, St. Martin’s Lane, and had an established reputation as a teacher. But, to Blake, as he tells us in his pencilled notes to Reynolds’ Discourses, Moser was a cause of inward turmoil. I was once looking over the prints from Rafaelle and Michael Angelo in the Library of the Royal Academy. Moser came to me and said — “ You should not study these old, hard, stiff, and dry, un- finished works of art ; stay a little and I will show you what you should study.” He then went and took down Le Brun and Rubens’ G ulleyiss . How did I secretly rage ! I also spoke my mind ! I said to Moser : “ These things that you call finished are not even begun : how then can they be finished ? The man who does not know the beginning never can know the end of art.” _ Where Moser failed, Mortimer, the historical painter, succeeded, at any rate for a time. John Hamilton Mortimer (1741— 1779 ) had studied under Cipriani and Reynolds, and, at the time of Blake’s student- ship, was an established favourite with the public and a hero in the Academy Schools. Blake’s early water-colour, The Ordeal of Queen Emma, dating from about 1778, shows Mortimer’s influence in the carefully drawn and prettily composed figures and draperies. Another historical picture of the period, The P enance of Jane Shore, a water-colour which 5o William Blake was varnished by Blake in order to preserve it, has the same pretty sentiment. Perhaps, the first work which reveals the real Blake is Glad Day, a design which exists as an engrav- ing dated 1780 and also as a colour-print, dating from ten years later. There is no more exquisite invention in the whole range of Blake’s design than Glad Day. A nude male, symbolising the Dawn, has alighted on some hill-top. An aurora of radiant light encircles the naked form, which stands, in exultant joy, with hands outspread to the world of natural and human things. In the original engraving to be seen at the British Museum there is little more than a bare outline, but the later print glows with joyous colour. Glad Day made it plain that Blake s proper metier was not the painful reconstruction of old-time history but the translation of personal thought and emotion into clear-cut designs, preferably in a medium which afforded more speedy results than painting in oil-colours. In professional matters Blake was unsparing in effort, but his impetuous nature was unfitted to produce what Titian did from oil paints, a truth which Blake admitted in characteristic fashion by promptly declaring that Titian was a second- rate painter, whose men resembled leather and whose women were like chalk. What those who admired the great Venetian called British Museum GLAD DAY COLOUR-PRINT {face p. 00) . ■' — — , — Tempera Paintings 5i ‘ his golden glow/ Blake described as ‘ a yellow mask.’ There are a considerable number of easel pictures on canvas or wood panels which Blake intended to serve the purpose of oil paintings. He called them ‘ frescoes/ but they are really due to a composite method akin to tempera. In the * frescoes/ Blake painted with water-colours, stiffened with white of egg, and when the picture was completed, it was varnished with glue. To-day, most of these tempera paint- ings are ruins, which only dimly suggest the stress of hand and spirit which went to the making of their original beauty. In The Bard, a white-bearded bard of Wales is pictured weaving blood-curses from his harp, which descend upon King Edward and Queen Eleanor, who cower below. The spirits of three dead bards, floating in the air, strive to add their power to the male- dictions against their country’s foe. The Bard, which can be seen in the Tate Gallery, has darkened so much that the colour scheme of gold and silvery greys and browns can now be seen only with difficulty. The ‘ fresco/ Bathsheba at her Bath is also in the Tate Gallery. It is a painting in tempera on canvas, but though the colours have darkened and the surface is cracked, the grace of the three nude forms remains. Nelson guiding Leviathan (Tate No. 3006) depicts the victor at Trafalgar as a 52 William Blake golden-toned nude, who stands against a deep-green background, while on all sides writhe the agonised nations in the green and golden coils of the Leviathan, who, to Blake, was the embodiment of sea-warfare. The Nelson has been skilfully cleaned and gives a good idea of Blake's substitute for oil- painting. The technique of Nelson gains in meaning by comparison with the long descrip- tion of a companion ‘ fresco, Pitt guiding Behemoth, to be found in the Descriptive Catalogue, though few of Blake’s readers will admit his claim that he had discovered the secret of permanent pigment. Among the ‘ frescoes,’ none is more lovely than The Nativity, belonging to Mr. Sydney Morse and reproduced by the Blake Society. This was painted in tempera on copper. Time has proved unkind to the work, but it is still one of the most lovely commentaries upon the mystery of the Miraculous Birth in the two- thousand-years record of Christian art. The beautiful form of the white-robed Virgin, supported by Joseph, swooning in the light which streams through the window from the Star of Bethlehem, is a supreme creation of vision allied with craft. Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s annotated list of Blake’s paintings attached to the Gilchrist Life gives full particulars of these .essays in tempera painting, many of which were purchased by the faithful Captain Butts, Early Drawings 53 among them the large Canterbury Pilgrims. Enough has been written here to suggest that some medium other than oil-painting was better fitted for an artist whose main object was quickly to set down the workings of his imagination, while a vision was strong upon him. Which brings us to the water- colour drawings, and the even more charac- teristic colour-prints. Among the minor follies of uninstructed criticism is a belief that an oil-painting is the final achievement in pictorial art, and that water-colour sketches, prints, or drawings are things of lesser worth. Blake rightly refused to accept this distinction, and in his note upon the beautiful Ruth in the Descrip- tive Catalogue, he characterises the belief as proceeding from ignorance of art. The merit of a picture, he tells us, is the same as the merit of a drawing. ‘ The dauber daubs his drawings ; he who draws his drawings, draws his pictures.’ Blake's water-colour sketches and colour-prints certainly call for just as much careful attention as the so-called ‘ frescoes,’ and offer even richer rewards to study. The more important of Blake’s early drawings were in Indian ink, and the twelve drawings for the poem Tiriel, in particular the beautiful Har and Heva Bathing, dating from 1789, show what Blake could make of wash drawings in Indian ink without added 54 William Blake colour. In the later part of the eighteenth century water-colour painters were in the habit of laying a foundation of design in pale Indian ink, adding colour until the picture secured unity and the necessary strength. Blake’s early custom was to add Indian ink or water-colours to his pencil drawings. From the first, he found water-colour a suitable medium for his sketch designs, and, later, he utilised it when preparing an elaborate version from some popular print in the engraved books, such as the well-known Last Judgment, with its hundreds of figures, which he built up from a simpler design used to illustrate Blair’s Grave. The Last Judgment is still in Petworth House, its first home, another version being in the possession of Sir John Stirling Maxwell. The Last Judg- ment in ‘ fresco,’ including about a thousand figures and measuring seven by five feet, has been lost. A full description from Blake’s pen of The Last Judgment design can be read in a letter to Ozias Humphrey, to be found in The Letters of Blake, edited by Mr. A. G. B. Russell, together with a reproduction of the large water-colour. The highly finished but mannered Ascen- sion of the Just in the British Museum, intended as a dedication page to The Grave, and the Vision of Queen Katharine,' specially painted for Sir Thomas Lawrence, are other examples of Blake’s use of water-colour Water-Colour Drawings 55 in highly - finished work. Many of these drawings date from between 1804 and 1809, the years of prolific production between the return from Felpham and the disastrous exhibition at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square. In 1804 Blake visited a collection of old masters shown in London by Joseph, Count Truchsess. The impression left was compar- able with the vision of Robert which led to the early illuminated books. ‘ I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth,’ says Blake in a letter to Hayley dated 23rd October, 1804, and then follows the oft-quoted passage which answers almost every adverse criticism to be made against the life and art of William Blake. ‘ I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand, even as I used to be in my youth.’ There will always be those who distrust the enthusiast who is drunk with intellectual vision, but there will also at all times be men and women who feel that the imagination sees most clearly and the memory works most surely when it is not bound by reason to the things of the earth, and from these Blake draws his lovers. A fine example of the finished water-colours is the Creation of Eve, one of nine designs for Milton’s Paradise Lost, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, other subjects in the series being the Casting of the .ebel Angels 56 William Blake into Hell; the Son as Intercessor ; Satan watching Adam and Eve; Satan as a Toad, haunting the Dreams of Eve ; Raphael and Adam ; Eve eating the Forbidden Fruit ; Michael foretelling the Crucifixion and the Expulsion from Eden. In the Creation of Eve, Adam lies on a carpet of leaves, which represented the world of fallen Nature in Blake’s philosophy. At the bidding of Christ, the Creator, Eve floats up from Adam’s side. The beautifully statuesque quality in the form of the virgin Eve saves the conception from the pretty unreality which mars other designs of the kind by Blake. The Creation of Eve in the Metropolitan Museum at New York, for example, lacks this statuesque quality, greatly to its loss. The highly-finished Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve, painted in 1806, and now in the collection of Mrs. Sydney Morse, with its meaningless twine of flowers and leaves, suggests the sentimen- tality of an expensive valentine. For once Blake is perilously near to vulgarity. There is another very interesting series of highly finished water-colour drawings illustrating Milton’s Paradise Regained, in the collection of Mr. T. H. Riches. These pictures for Milton’s poems and the corresponding Bible pictures are nearer to mere illustra- tions than the more characteristic works in which Blake illustrated his own body of Colour Prints 57 ideas. For this reason they are more open to comparison with the work of less imagina- tive, though more scientific, painters. Yet, if it is true that Blake is not of the number of the scientific draughtsman, there is not wanting evidence that he was well aware of the importance of such a mundane science as ‘ artistic anatomy.' Mr. W. Bateson’s collection of Blake treasures includes a sketch of Adam and Eve asleep, guarded by angels. At the side of the sketch is a note : ‘ Remember to make the thigh of Eve join better to the body and also to make her a little bigger and Adam less.’ Not only every art, but every medium, is more clairvoyant in some respects than others. Water-colour drawing may express a thought or emotion which could not rise to vision through oil painting ; so with engraving, etching, and the rest. Each has its special value as a medium of expression. It would seem that the coloured-print was the best fitted for Blake’s imaginative moods, though every student of the painter may well have his own ideas upon the subject. Cer- tainly no craftsman has used the colour-print with better effect. In his water-colour drawings, Blake had to face the difficulty, (Mr. Binyon has an interesting passage on the point) of preventing his broader washes from appearing weak and empty, especially when the outstanding merit in a design was E 58 William Blake to be its strength. When he put aside his early method based upon Mortimer, Blake denied himself the possibility of filling in a space by such devices as the addition of pattern, or the play of light in the folds or upon the texture of drapery. The ' mossy ’ effects secured by impressing wet paint upon paper were just what Blake required to give variety to his large washes of colour. The slight roughnesses of the pigment gave the eye something to work upon, without dis- turbing the impression of bold mass and definite outline to which Blake attached primary importance. Final definition and strength of tone were obtained by working upon the print by hand. This definition and strength would have been sacrificed if the impression from the wet colour had been the whole of the process. When producing his larger colour-prints Blake’s method was to draw the main lines of the design upon mill-board in a warm brown pigment and take an impression upon paper. When the impression was dry, local colours were laid upon the millboard and transferred while wet to the printed paper, the ‘ mossy ’ effects in many prints, such as Glad Day, Newton, and Pity, being due to the accidental manner in which the damp colours clung to the grained paper. Finally, the whole was worked up by hand with water-colours, until veiy little of the original COLOUR-PRINT “ Hecate ” 59 outline remained and even the impressed colours were altered out of all recognition. For this reason no two of these semi-printed, semi-painted, designs are the same. Some of the most brilliant and significant of Blake’s pictures were built up in this fashion. Recall the Hecate, of which there are copies in the Tate Gallery and the Edin- burgh National Gallery. The triune form of the Goddess of the Dark Moon, who presided over the world of magic, so that earth and sea and hell were alike within her dominion, is represented by a semi-naked woman, whose lower limbs are draped in a dark robe. Here the ‘ mossy ’ effect was not required and Blake painted in deep tones and bold masses. On either side cower the Other Selves who make up the triune Hecate, hiding their faces against the shoulders of the parent goddess, the lovely lines of the male and female nudes combining to form a whole, which as design may surely be ranked among the sublime creations of the Greek or Asiatic myth-designers. The gleams of metallic colour and the reds and greens which illumine the darkness, add as much to the fantastic horror of the design as the demon owl, the frog and the bat which haunt the presence of the Moon Goddess, or the ass which eats the rank vegetable growth. The monstrous character of the ass is not entirely due to a desire to add to the 6o William Blake fantasy of the plate ; a similar ass is to be found in the Repose of the Holy Family. The drawing dates from 1806, and is remark- able for a lovely stretch of landscape back- ground, which recalls one of the ink drawings of old China. In both the Hecate and the Repose the shaggy, bristly coat of the ass is connected with its food of stubble and thistles, which, in Blake’s view, gave the beast its mundane character. The Elijah in his Chariot of Fire, with the nude Elisha watching his master’s departure, is another colour-print which haunts the memory. Four or more copies are known. The Nebuchadnezzar, the Newton, the House of Death and Elohim creating Adam are other colour-prints, in which it is difficult to say which is the richer in significance and interest — the original invention or the ingenuity of craft which gives the invention being and life. Always, the basic design on the millboard remained if a second copy was required, and the dapple of colour produced by pressing the blotch of wet distemper gave just that mysterious variety of tone which Blake required if the colour was to seem full of light, as all good colour should. Lastly, brushwork added the definite line and depth of tone which prevented a print from appearing weak and inconse- quential. Always, the colouring of the basic print was an intense satisfaction to Blake, “ The Ancient of Days ” 61 and he completed the print of the Ancient of Days, now in The Whitworth Institute, Manchester, on his death-bed. As he put it aside, Blake exclaimed : “ There, I have done all I can. It is the best I have ever finished. I hope Mr. Tatham will like it.” It is instruc- tive to compare the British Museum copy of the Ancient of Days with that at Man- chester, and again with the lovely version in Mr. Riches's Europe. Not only the colours but lines and the masses of light and shade have been changed in the finishing process. For Blake, each colour-print was not a copy, but a new picture. When producing the book-illustrations, such as the Songs of Innocence and Experience, or the illustrated Prophetic Book, Blake's method was different. As Gilchrist tells, the verses of poetry were written, and the designs and marginal embellishments out- lined, on a copper plate, by means of an impervious liquid, probably the ordinary stopping-out varnish of an engraver. Then all the white parts, or lights, that is to say the remainder of the plate, were eaten away with aquafortis or some other acid, so that the lettering and design were left prominent on the copper plate. From these plates Blake printed off in yellow, brown, blue, or black ink as he required, the basic matter for each page, which was, finally, coloured by hand in imitation of the original drawing. 62 William Blake with more or less variety of detail, as the fancy took the copyist. In the later Prophetic Books Blake also used a method which he described as ‘ woodcuts on copper.' In this case the plate was smoked and the lines of the design were scraped away with a pointed instrument, instead of the varnish brush used in the alternative method. The space required for the text was then cleared, and, with the aid of a mirror, the reversed writing was added in varnish, the whole plate being finally treated with acid. When the ‘ woodcut ' method was used the design stood out in white from a dark ground, as in the forty-sixth plate of Jerusalem, picturing the Poet and his Inspiration in the chariot of flame, drawn by the human-headed Bulls of Luvah. No black and white reproduction can give more than a hint of the charm of this ‘ illuminated printing.' As D. G. Rossetti said, ‘ much which seems unaccountably rugged and incomplete is softened by the sweet, liquid rainbow tints of the coloured copies into mysterious brilliancy.’ Each page is a poem with an illustrative bordering of design which, in very truth, illuminates the text, adding significance as well as glowing colour. Naturally the copies vary, if only because some are the handiwork of the poet-painter and some the work of the wife. A very beautiful copy of the combined " The Gates of Paradise ” 63 Songs of Innocence and Experience, with the rare ornamental colophon, in the possession of Miss Carey, is coloured by Blake himself, as is shewn by the touches of black which emphasise, here and there, the yellow or purple of the basic print. Very different, but no less beautiful, is a later copy which came to Mr. Riches from the Linnell collection. Various as are the methods already mentioned — the ' frescoes/ the water-colour drawings and the colour-prints from the millboard block or the etched plate — they do not exhaust Blake’s capacity for technical experiment. The sixteen engravings for The Gates of Paradise are no less characteristic. In the publication of The Gates of Para- dise Blake associated himself with the pub- lisher, Johnson, the book being placed on the market in 1793 as a work ' For Children,’ the eighteen plates costing 3s. Years later, Blake converted the little volume into a moral treatise for adults by adding a prologue and altering the title to For the Sexes : The Gates of Paradise. Evidently, what Blake had in mind was the issue of two books embodying the contrast be- tween innocence and experience, which he had already expounded in the volumes of illuminated Songs. By ‘ children,’ Blake meant mortals who were nearer to Heaven than their brethren, just because they had preserved the child-like insight which Blake 64 William Blake judged to be the richest endowment of humanity. In the frontispiece of The Gates of Paradise, a chrysalis, resembling a swaddled baby, lies on a leaf, and a caterpillar on a spray near by watches it with motherly care. Beneath is the inscription ‘ What is Man ? ’ The engraving I want, I want ! shews some pigmies who have reared a ladder against the moon. All the eighteen plates are instinct with poetry, but their merit as pictures is the happy way in which they illustrate the directness of Blake’s vision, when he allows his imagination to range freely, unhampered by an over-elaborate technique. At those moments Blake came in contact with elemental things and linked them with the experience of man. Fire is one of the elemental forces which obsessed Blake’s imagination throughout life, and in the fifth engraving for The Gates of Paradise he links up the swirl of the destructive and creative flame with all human experience, by a sketch of an armed man amid the flames, hasty, but expressing all that Blake judged to be significant. It is worth while comparing this embodiment of the thing fire with other works in which Blake treated fire as an element in design, such as the Elijah in The Fiery Chariot, the wonderful colour-print* picturing the prophet ‘ enthroned in flame, * See illustration facing page 106. Wood-blocks 65 upborne by flame and clothed with flame as with a garment.’ Other engravings of the series, Earth, Air, and Water, are no less suggestive. The human creature in Earth, who is struggling into being within the bowels of the world, is to Blake an emblem of the eternal melancholy of the earth - ridden man. Water, picturing a nude man seated in a waste of water, is the folly of self-jealous doubt. In Air, the man turns his back upon the stars, great seas of heavenly light which illumine the darkness. Design and technique could not be simpler, yet a philosophic commentary upon the reasoning faculty in human life is suggested. The eighteen plates in the Gates of Paradise require to be ‘ read,’ until their power to arouse a dream- world of thought and emotion is realised. Different again was the achievement of Blake when he cut his only wood-blocks for Phillip’s Imitation of Virgil’s Pastorals. He was sixty-four years old, yet he re-captured the first fine careless rapture of his early songs in those rough and dark cuts. First- state impressions of the woodcuts may be seen in the Print Room at the British Museum, but, even in reproduction, the bold massing of the lights and shades tells with fine effect. Again, it is not the painter of the ‘ frescoes ’ and the elaborate water- colour drawings alone who added things of 66 William Blake worth of English art, but the craftsman who tested every medium which gave promise of holding the fleeting visions which came and went through sixty years of life — from boyhood, when the God looked in at the window upon him at his first home in Golden Square, to the last days when an angelic visitation inspired the songs with which he went to meet his Creator. Only the necessity for completing an argument persuades me to return to Blake’s illustrations for poems other than his own. These were episodes in a life of work, not the things that matter to a Blake-lover to-day. The designs for Young’s Night Thoughts date from 1796 and were commissioned by Edwards of 142 Bond Street, apparently on the advice of Fuseli, who supplied the preface. Blake made five hundred and thirty-seven water-colour drawings, and was paid a guinea for draw- ing and engraving each of the forty-three designs which Edwards chose for his publica- tion. The illustrations for Night Thoughts meant a year’s work, Edwards paying twenty guineas more for the forty-three original drawings. Excellently printed in folio on thick paper, the edition deserved more success than it achieved, especially as Stothard’s octavo of the Night Thoughts did well in 1802. Blake sought to make each page a picture, but the allegorical figures and Blair’s “ Grave ” 67 other elements in the design did not combine very happily with printed matter, very much less happily, for example, than his own written verses combined with the decorated margins in the Songs and the Prophetic Books. A folio page may have been too large for Blake’s designs to have full effect. As Gilchrist says, the colossal forms of Death and Time, sprawling across the pages, become monotonous with repetition. One copy of the Night Thoughts was specially coloured for Captain Butts. Four years later Blake produced the designs for the poems of Gray, reproduced from the Duke of Hamilton’s collection in a splendid folio, issued at fifteen guineas by the Oxford Press, with an introduction by Mr. Grierson. These designs were made for Flaxman, and the unfortunate influence of the sculptor can be traced in some of the drawings. Gray’s poetry did not interest Blake, and, in any case, Blake was at his best when he allowed his sense of rhythmic design free play, and not when he emulated the neo-classic methods of the late eighteenth century. At their worst, the illustrations to Gray’s poems are comic ; at their best, they provide nothing that Blake did not give in a better form elsewhere. The illustrations to Blair’s Grave were more successful because the artist was content to provide a series of pictured commentaries 68 William Blake upon the poem, rather than interpretations of the literal passages. R. H. Cromek (1770-1812), the publisher, had been a pupil of Bartolozzi, and his sympathies were with the light and airy engravings of the new school, rather than with the solid craftsman- ship of the old school represented by James Basire. Being in poor health, Cromek abandoned the desk of an engraver for the more profitable trade of print-seller and publisher. He had little capital and a quick and certain success was essential. Coming into Blake’s working room at South Molton Street in 1804, he saw a series of twelve drawings for Blair’s popular poem The Grave , which, at any rate, seemed worth the twenty guineas which Blake asked. Cromek justified his bargain to himself and the artist by promising that Blake should engrave the plates. There is no doubt regarding the commission to engrave the plates. In November 1805, before the quarrel developed, Blake wrote to Hayley giving the facts and mentioning that he had produced twenty designs at Cromek’ s own request which so pleased the publisher that ‘ with the same liberality with which he set me about the drawings he has now set me to engrave them.’ On this understanding a prospectus was issued to the book-buying public, with a preface by the friendly Fuseli. Flaxman, Cromek and Schiavonetti 69 Cosway, Lawrence, Nollekens, Stothard and West, the President of the Royal Academy, added their support. Later, Cromek came to the conclusion that engravings of the Basire school were less desirable than pretty transmutations of the Blake drawings by the Venetian Schiavonetti, whose bold line and tender finish offered the qualities which Cromek required to make his proposition commercially successful. It cannot be denied that Schiavonetti was a gifted engraver, and any quarrel which Blake lovers have with his memory is not due to the manner in which he carried out his task. Schiavonetti was too successful. At the best, his pleasant craft introduced Blake’s designs to a public which might never have known his name. At the worst, Schiavonetti persuaded the public to appreciate his own handicraft, when they should have been studying Blake’s musings upon themes suggested by Blair. Nevertheless, The King, the Counsellor and the Warrior in the Vault, a design which recalls the years when the boy Blake spent long days in Westminster Abbey, the Death of the Strong Wicked Man, the Tomb of the Good Old Man, and Death’s Door are docu- ments which students of the life of Blake would be sorry to lose. Death’s Door was a favourite with the poet-painter and appears in many forms, from the first sketches for the two figures, the old man and the 70 William Blake rejuvenated Soul, to the designs which both Schiavonetti and Blake engraved. The door of the Sepulchre is half open, so that the couch within can be seen. To the door comes a Lear-like figure, driven to seek its shelter by the blasts of mortal existence. Leaning heavily upon his crutch, the man totters over the threshold, while above is the re-born Spirit in ecstasy at the warmth and light of the Sun in its radiant and eternal glory. The best elaborated design, though not the most significant and telling, is the Vision of the Last Judgment, picturing Christ enthroned with the Book of Life upon His knees and the four and twenty Elders grouped about the Throne. The Angel of Divine Justice draws his sword and Satan falls into the abyss, while to right and left, the Saved and the Damned pass to their eternal fates. The Cromek edition of The Grave sold at 2 1 guineas a copy. As has been said, of the £1,800 realised, Schiavonetti received £525 and Blake twenty guineas. Blake would have been less than human — and he was human to the point of sharp temper — if he had not complained bitterly, especially as the matter of Blair’s Grave was not Blake’s only quarrel with Cromek. At this time, tfie print dealer was continually visiting the South Molton Street studio and, on one occasion, noticed a pencil drawing of Chaucer’s " The Canterbury Pilgrims ” 7i Canterbury Pilgrims. Cromek was struck by the originality of the design, a procession of pilgrims, and tried to induce Blake to pre- pare a finished drawing, so that it could be engraved by another man. Blake preferred to engrave the plate himself. Finding he could not get his way, Cromek went to Blake’s friend, the popular Stothard, and suggested he should paint a Procession of Canterbury Pilgrims, offering Stothard sixty guineas for the picture. When Blake heard that Stothard was at work upon his stolen idea he found it hard to forgive, especially as Stothard’s picture proved a great public success when it was exhibited. Blake saw the Canterbury Pilgrims as types of humanity, and so he painted them. The Knight, a hero ; the Pardoner, a knave ; the Monk, a leader of men ; the Wife of Bath, ‘ a scourger and a blight ’ ; the Clerk of Oxford, a type of con- templative philosophy ; Chaucer as the emblem of ‘ poetic genius.’ Stothard, on the contrary, saw only individuals, gracious to the eye, but without any real significance for those who looked deeply into Chaucer’s poem. Blake shewed his own Canterbury Pilgrim- age in May 1809, on the first floor of James Blake’s shop at the corner of Broad Street, together with eight ‘ frescoes,’ and seven draw- ings, making sixteen f poetical and historical ’ inventions. The catalogue did not omit 72 William Blake references to his quarrel with Stothard. In the Catalogue Blake also attacked the Vene- tian and Flemish demons, ‘ and their infernal machine Chiaro Oscuro,’ and so fell foul of practically all his fellow workers in the art world. The years which followed the Broad Street exhibition and the issue of the Descriptive Catalogue were lean years for Blake, and little or nothing is known of his professional activities until about 1818 when the Jerusalem was issued, 14 years after the engraving of the first plate. The attempt to interest a big public had failed. He could not compete with the scholarly Reynolds, the sociable Gainsborough, the businesslike Raeburn, or the charming Lawrence. Blake, as a professional man, belonged rather to the class of master- craftsmen, whose careers we can follow in the Book of Cennino Cennini, ‘ who learnt his art from Agnolo, son of Taddeo, who, in turn, was the god-son of Giotto of Florence. Linnell tells that the first copy of Cennino Cennini’s book seen in England was the one he obtained from Italy and gave to Blake, who soon made it out and was gratified to find that he had been using the same materials and methods in painting as Cennino described, particularly the use of carpenter’s glue. But there were other resemblances. For Cennino and Blake, picture-making was “No, it is not mine ” 73 not one craft — painting — but a score of crafts. Says the old Italian master : In the first place you must study drawing, for at least one year on tablets : then you must remain with a master at the workshop, who understands working in all parts of the art : you must begin with grinding colours and learn to boil down glues, to acquire the practice of laying grounds on panels, to work in relief upon them, and to rub them smooth and to gild : to engrave well : and this for six years : afterwards to practise colouring, to adorn with mordants, to make cloths of gold, and to be ac- customed to paint on walls, for six more years — always drawing without intermission either on holidays or workdays. And so, through long habit, good practice becomes a second nature. Adopting other habits, do not hope ever to attain great perfection. Early in life Blake had the advantage of a thorough training, and the instincts of a master-craftsman were developed during the years at Broad Street and Hercules Buildings. Unfortunately, he only drew upon his indi- vidual experience and experiment, instead of upon the knowledge of a score of artists, as would have been the case had he worked in an early Renaissance bottega, or had been in touch with the mediaeval gild organisation of Italy or Flanders. But if Blake had something in common with Cennino in respect of craft, he had even more in common with the Italian on the spiritual plane. Blake, who knelt in prayer when artistic F 74 William Blake inspiration was denied him, was a kindred spirit to Cennino, who commenced his book upon the craft of painting with this invo- cation : First, the high omnipotent God — that is to say, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit : secondly, that most delightful advocate of all sinners, the Virgin Mary, and St. Luke the Evangelist, the first Christian painter, and my advocate St. Eustachius, and, generally, all the saints, male and female, of Paradise. This chapter upon the technique of Blake indeed leads to the conclusion suggested by the life of the man. Of his technique, as well as the symbols which embodied his themes, Blake might well have cried, “ My beloved, it is not mine. No, it is not mine.” The tireless ingenuity belonged to the mundane shell of the man Blake, but the appeal made by the best of the temperas, the water- colours, the engravings, the woodcuts, and the illuminated prints is explained only by vision linked with handicraft. CHAPTER III. Blake, the Seer : Style and Subject- Matter. I N the life of Blake there is always the abiding contradiction that ne was a crafts- man, even to the belief that art existed for art's sake, but that at the same time he was no less convinced that every art effort should serve a utilitarian purpose. He felt that in the divine faculty of insight and ex- pression with which he was endowed lay the possibility of a new and perfect world, if not here and now, then hereafter. So when he strove to reconcile the eternal things of the spirit with the sensuous experience of passing time, he was driven to create a sys- tem of poetic imagery, as he had been driven to invent a technique suited to his peculiar requirements. As he said : “I must create a System or be enslaved to another man’s.” Inasmuch as a chapter has been devoted to the technical methods by which Blake conveyed his message to the world, what follows will primarily be concerned with Blake’s philosophy, which is no less necessary 75 76 William Blake to the full understanding of his pictures. There have been painters, even great painters, who selected some aspect of a theme be- cause it afforded a coherent arrangement of line, colour, or light and shade, but were careless of the idea embodied. Not so Blake. What is individual in his craftsmanship is inextricably commingled with what is indi- vidual in his system of thought. Those who judge Blake’s pictures by their technical qualities alone must be content to move on the borderland of the poet-painter’s achievement. They may be attracted by the graces which embellish the Songs of Innocence ; they may appreciate the skill with which Blake decorates an engraved page in one of the Prophetic Books, but the full man will escape them. Even when Blake is illustrating a contemporary poet, his design continually soars so high above the original thought that all connection seems lost. When Young wrote the trite line, ' Woes cluster ; rare are solitary woes,’ he had no conception that an illustrator of Night Thoughts would be moved to the vision of a drear night scene, in which visible Woes are knotted into wailing groups. Again and again, where the original poet used a verbal illustration, Blake’s imagination 1 evolved concrete forms of rare originality and signi- ficance. Indeed, the greatness of Blake as an illustrator depends upon this very power Problems of Interpretation 77 to find a vivid representation for things which most of us refuse to visualise. When Blake’s pictures are entirely original and must be linked up with his whole scheme of knowledge, the difficulty of interpretation is necessarily increased. Mention has already been made of the early design, Glad Day. It was quite satisfactorily interpreted as the Coming of the Spirit of Day. It may equally be an illustration of a line in Romeo and Juliet. But linked up with Blake’s system Glad Day is quite another thing. The Youth is not another Apollo, but an embodiment of humanity, passing through life to eternity and finding once again the light he had enjoyed in youth. Albion arose from where he laboured at the Mill with slaves : Giving himself for the Nations, he danced the dance of Eternal Death. Those who desire to do so, may rest content with Glad Day as a variation upon the Greek sun myth, but there are sure rewards for those who care to search farther, and for them this chapter is written. It is concerned with Blake the painter and will take no account of aspects of Blake’s philosophy which found expression in poetry alone. Blake’s mind, however, was so sensitive to form and colour, and his thought tended so naturally to imagery, that the 78 William Blake temperas, colour-prints, water-colours, and the decorations in the engraved books alone afford an excellent introduction to his symbolic philosophy, and in some ways do more justice to Blake the thinker than the complete poems themselves. In his engraved plates, Blake was not tempted to the hasty expression of half -formed thoughts, and made a better selection of the significant and essential than he did in the written word. His basic ideas are relatively few and he repeated them again and again. In any case, Blake was a poet and not a professional thinker, so the value of his thought does not lie in its completeness, but in the flashes of insight which it affords, and the energy with which it sums up an unexpected point of view. This insight and energy of thought can be found in rich plenty in the pictures, and they well merit analysis from this standpoint. In the terminology of to-day, Blake came to the conclusion that the personality of man has become differentiated into two phases, the one adapted to material conditions, and the other to the things of the Spirit. He regarded the former, the phase adapted to conscious thought on the material plane, as relatively evil, and of small importance in comparison with the all-important prompt- ings from beyond the threshold of conscious- ness, where dwells the spiritual essence of Melbourne Art Gallery DANTE ENTERING THE FLAME WATER-COLOUR (face p. 78 ) Asceticism 79 man. As Blake viewed the Human Comedy, error and sorrow arise from over-emphasising the laws which are adapted to material conditions alone, and chief among the sorrows of man is the ever-present conflict between the dictates of material reason and man’s natural desires, which Blake chose to regard as essentially spiritual in origin. He hated asceticism in all its forms. Looking upon the human body and its desires, Blake might have echoed the cry of Richard Jeffries in The Story of My Heart : I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest blasphemy — blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe in the flesh and the body which is worthy of worship — to see a perfect human body unveiled is a cause of worship. The ascetics are the only persons who are impure. Increase of physical beauty is attended by increase of soul beauty. The soul is the higher even by gazing on beauty. Let me be fleshly perfect. These beliefs of Blake may seem icono- clastic and even dangerous until we under- stand that they meant little more than what deeply religious people have in mind when they proclaim that Society, in the twentieth century, is destroying what is spiritual by forcing men and women to become wheels in a vast social machine, instead of shewing them how they may become perfect human beings, as they were before they exchanged 80 William Blake Eternity for Time. Above all, we must rid ourselves of the belief that Blake practised what he seemed to preach. Mention has been made of his relations with Catherine, the perfect wife. More than enough folly has been written of this beautiful union by connecting passages in the ultimate philoso- phy of Blake with his actual life in Hercules Buildings or South Molton Street. For Blake, the dictates of reasoned thought were shackles upon human effort, whereas obedience to the promptings of desire afforded spiritual freedom. For Blake, the reasoning man is a fool and he ‘ sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.’ But there the matter ended, so far as his own life on the mortal plane was concerned. Whatever the nineteenth century may have thought, the early twentieth century can understand Blake’s point of view when he urged that the spiritual element in man has contracted until humanity has come to fear the joys of Love and honours a false chastity. Fired by this conviction Blake wrote the Vision of the Daughters of Albion, in which he represented loveless marriage by the symbol of the nymph, Oothoon, the virgin Joy, and the Titan, Bromion, chained back to back ; the Titan in a torment of jealous rage, the maiden in despair, while near by the loved Theotormon sits in his sea-cave in stony grief. Yet another colour-print represents V “ The Daughters of Albion “ 81 Oothoon chained by the ankle in the deep green flame of unsatisfied passion, soaring above the despairing Theotormon (Desire), who broods in sullen silence over his own grief, regardless of the supplications of his lover. In addition to the copy of the Daughters of Albion in the Print Room at the British Museum, these two colour-prints hang in the Blake Room at the Tate Gallery, where Blake’s thoughts upon loveless marriage can be studied apart from the eleven-paged quarto, etched in 1793, of which they are really a part. The poem has told how Oothoon, a child of freedom and therefore with rebellion in her heart, plucked the marigold of love in the Vales of Desire, and then found herself wedded to Bromion, instead of her real lover, Theotor- mon. A charming page of The Vision pictures the naked nymph conversing with the marigold in the first innocence of her love. But the state of innocence only interested Blake momentarily and he passed on to his real message. It is not virginity, but passion, which purifies marriage, and the virgin who gives herself from a sense of duty prostitutes the union of man with woman. Accordingly the title page of The Daughters of Albion shews the consequences of Oothoon’s mistake. Society, in the form of the Titan of Reason, Urizen, pursues Oothoon through Time and Space, engulfing 82 William Blake her in a flood of materialism, wherein every joy is threatened with destruction, and only a rainbow gleaming through the storm offers hope of redemption. The climax of the tragedy is reached with the coming of the true lover, Theotormon (Natural Desire). Theotormon binds the girl and her Titan husband back to back, and sets them in a cave by the dread Sea of Reason and Materialism. In the colour-print already mentioned, the figure of Bromion, wild with unsatisfied passion, is contrasted with the virginal graces of the unhappy Oothoon. Bromion is within his rights in remaining bound to his loveless wife, but he gains nothing thereby. Theotormon, too, remains in everlasting torment, because he submits to the conventions of Society which forbid him to satisfy his desires. The three, as Blake sees the problem of the loveless marriage, alike are sacrificed to reason. The teaching of Blake upon such matters sharply distinguished him from a poet-seer with whom he had certain affinities. Whereas Wordsworth urged men to cease from striving and to open their hearts in love and thankfulness to the sweet influences of Nature, Blake called upon his fellbws to strive to the uttermost, until the shackles of materialism were broken and experience led once more, not, perhaps, to original State of Innocence 83 innocence, but to a state in which innocence and experience were unified into a new and more perfect whole. For Blake, energy was the perfect life and the eternal delight. He gave these ideas pictorial form in the title page which he engraved for the Songs of In- nocence and Experience, when he determined to issue the separate works as a single book. The Print Room at the British Museum has recently been enriched by a large copy of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, presented by Mrs. MacGeorge. It is an early copy, and lacks the title-page of the combined books and other plates added in later issues, but happily supplements the other version of the Songs in the Print Room, which was made up from two or three incomplete sets. In his final conception, innocence and experi- ence were regarded as contrary states of the human soul, symbolised by two energetic figures, the one male and the other female, around whom bum the flames of desire and endeavour. In his first book of engraved poems, Blake was concerned with Innocence alone, and was content to reveal God’s love for the weakest of his children — the little Black Boy, the Charity School Children, the Chimney Sweeper and Infant Joy, who was but two days old. Blake pictured Joy seated with its mother in the heart of a lily and attended by an angel of the 8 4 William Blake Infinite, ever near to the young, if Words- worth and Blake are to be trusted. The lines which follow in comment upon Infant Joy are not by Blake or Wordsworth, but come from the poem of Thomas Traherne : How like an Angel came I down ! How bright were all things here ! When first among His works I did appear O how their Glory me did crown I The world resembled His Eternity, In which my soul did walk ; And everything that I did see Did with me talk. . . . In The Song of Los, the conception of original innocence and joy takes yet another form, being symbolised by the lilies of Havilah, in which rest the King and the Queen of the Fairies, the embodiments of the Natural Joys. Yet again, in the 28th plate of Jerusalem, the fairy Joys are seen embracing in the Realm of Innocence, symbolised by the lilies of Havilah, while below seethe the Oceans of Time and Space. Blake developed his vision of the state of Innocence in the Book of Thel, a small quarto, 6 inches by 4^, costing 3s. In Thel Blake was concerned to emphasise the brotherhood which ' unites all forms of being, from the earthworm and the clod of clay in which the worm dwells, to Thel herself, The engraved " The Book of Thel ” 85 and painted designs for Thel have the lyric grace of the decorations to the Songs of Innocence, and even more interconnection the one with the other. Thel is the youngest of the Seraphim and, in a dream, leaves her Eden, and comes to Earth. Her senses are not yet closed by experience, and she can see the spiritual forms in every earthly entity, even in the matter which ordinary mortals call ‘ dead.’ For Blake, the world was alive with a spiritual population. Every flower and insect had its familiar spirit with a secret message. But Thel’s joy in all these beauties of the natural world is threatened by the thought that she must die — as the briar sheds its petals at night, or the cirrus cloud melts in the sunshine. The Lily of the Valley seeks to comfort Thel by telling her that death makes for the truest immortality and that she will flourish in eternal vales, but Thel is not convinced. The lily, in truth, may nourish the innocent lambs, but Thel’s own fate may be that of the cloud. So the Cloud comes and tells how she is mated with the Dew, and how together they bear food to the flowers. Still Thel doubts, and asks if she may not be destined to become the food of worms. So the helpless worm is called to bear its witness. Desiring to re-express these delightful fancies with the brush of the artist, as well 86 William Blake as the pen of the writer, Blake prepared five etched plates, on which the verse and the illustrative design were printed in a faint brown ink, ready for colouring. On the title page Thel watches the courtship of the Cloud and the Dew, a fairy-male in pursuit of a fairy-female, who issues from the heart of a great plant blossoming at Thel's side. The first page of the text is decorated with representations of the Joys of Universal Life. In the next design the Lily, standing beneath a birch tree, is seen bowing her modest head as she answers Thel's complaints. The sixth page of the little book shews Baby Worm, pictured as an infant lying in a cradle formed from a lily leaf ; while, in the seventh, Thel, sitting in the shadow of a plant, watches the Worm playing with her mother, the matron Clay. Lastly, three naked children harness a serpent in their play, this being Blake’s representation of the Serpent of Sex guided by Innocence. So we return to the state of Experience, so nearly allied with Innocence in Blake's philosophy. In the Songs of Experience, the poet’s purpose was to tell how beauty is blighted and man’s life made joyless by obedience to reason-made conventions. But it must not be thought that Blake regarded the state of experience as one to be avoided. Experience has its evil aspects, but these State of Experience 8 7 are only preliminary to the renewal of innocence. Without misery, there could be no joy; without sin, no goodness. Experi- ence is worthy of being purchased at the cost of all that mortal man possesses. On the title page of the Songs of Experience a young girl faces the death of father and mother, and the frontispiece shews a youth bearing a cherub on his back. They are followed by the Introduction which is simply and ingeniously decorated with a conven- tional cloud, set in a starry night, the cloud being no more than the white paper which bears the imprint of the poem, ‘ Hear the Voice of the Bard.' The Tiger, a symbol of God’s wrath ; a picture of the reconcilement of God and the Devil, the Devil being repre- sented by a nude youth who has left the oak-groves of error; the leafless Poison Tree, and the Blake-ian vision of education in The School Boy are other designs in the volume in which significance is blended in wonderful fashion with beauty. Blake's purpose in the Songs of Experience is to shew this beauty ; Joy and woe are woven fine, A clothing for the soul divine : Under every grief and pine Runs a joy with silken twine. It is right it should be so : Man was made for joy and woe ; And when this we rightly know Safely through the world we go. 88 William Blake In a motto which he proposed for the Songs of Innocence and Experience Blake described experience as a process of sifting good from evil. His standard of values differed widely from that of his contem- poraries, but in all his art may be traced a determination to insist upon the importance of the creative energies which modem thought attaches to the idea of God — Goodness, Truth and Beauty. In this sense Blake’s purpose as an artist was essentially religious. Blake, like Bunyan, was ever ‘ at home in Zion,’ but he quickly convinced himself that to accept the Bible literally was to misunderstand it. For Blake, the Bible had a double meaning ; a Bible story was a symbol of what will befall man in eternity. At one time he intended to re- write the Bible with this in mind. These chapter headings occur in his version of the book Genesis : Creation of the Natural Man. Natural Man divided into male and female. Of the Sexual Nature, and its fall into Generation and Death. How Generation and Death took possession of the Natural Man. Before he had been long upon his task, Blake came to the conclusion that it would be more satisfactory to embody his sense of Blake, the Mystic 89 the eternal values in a mythology of his own creation, and thus arose the Prophetic Books. They were frankly imaginative, but, for Blake, this merely implied their basic accuracy, imagination being not a faculty or a state of mind, but human exis- tence itself. Not reason, but imagination, brought conviction to Blake. Closely con- nected with this faith in the insight given by imagination was Blake’s belief that the visible world was an error of the senses. There was no originality in this. William Law had translated the writings of the Ger- man shoemaker, Jacob Boehme, and, from Boehme, Blake derived the doctrine that the act of Creation was the introduction of time and space into the universe of the Spirit. So man was separated from God, though time remained as an instrument of regeneration, inasmuch as God, in time, will reveal Himself to fallen humanity. With the beliefs derived from Boehme, Blake connected Swedenborg’s teaching that natural appearances body forth unseen spiritual existences, Nature being an imper- fect copy of something which is perfect in the world of imagination, known to the Spirit. Blake cried in The Last Judgment : I do not behold the outward creation, to me it is hindrance and not action. It is as the dirt upon my feet — not part of me. G 90 William Blake Such beliefs are common among professed philosophers and theologians, but it is strange to find a painter who regards the material as non-existent, or rather as a more or less opaque window through which the true is revealed. For Blake, those who only saw material things had ' single vision ’ ; ‘ double vision ' led him into the strange twilight lands, pictured in the vast chaos of the Prophetic Books. Here he found the Titans who haunt the human soul, and influence the instincts, passions and thoughts which decide action. Four of these Mighty Ones are in every man, Urizen (cold scientific reason), Luvah (pitying love), Tharmas (the sullen ‘ vegetative ’ power) and Urthona (the spirit of art and prophecy). Naturally enough, in a world arising from Time and Space, the creative energy is not the all- good God of the Bible ; rather he is a Titan who encloses the universal soul within separate bodies, divides the human race into sexes, and lays down the laws of ‘ re- striction and forbidding/ And as Urizen imprisoned humanity, so he is himself imprisoned, only to be released when Christ, the perfect man, rises in the human heart at the Last Judgment, and reaches once more to the perfection of the Spirit. Of Christ, Blake said, ‘ He is the only God, but then, so am I, and so are you/ There are no more moving inventions in Urizen 91 art than the pictures of the creator-Titan in the First Book of Urizen, etched in 1794 and printed at Lambeth, with a title page, a Preludium, ten full page illustrations, in all twenty-eight folios, each about six inches by four. Urizen, the maker of laws, who holds mankind in the shackles of reason, indeed, haunts all the Prophetic Books. It is one of the basic conceptions which must be understood by every student of the poet- painter. There is no more ready means to understanding than the pictures of the Titanic world-being, gradually taking form to himself until he stands in the shackles of his fallen nature. On the title-page of the Book of Urizen, the creator-Titan crouches before the stones of the Decalogue and beneath the barren Tree of Mystery. With both hands he writes the books of the Iron Law, while the horrid plant, bending its boughs, grows to roots wherever it feels the earth, a labyrinth of woe. The rough brushwork of the print is perfectly fitted to the mood of the conception, as is the technique of the tenth plate, shewing the world-monster slowly taking form. Here is pictured a vast spine in torment, with ribs like some prehistoric beast and monstrous thigh and hip bones, the horror of which is only mitigated by the more awful spectacle of the bony hand which clasps the eyeless skull. Misery, barren and hopeless, 92 William Blake yet Blake’s imagination was equal to a conception even more terrible to man the twenty -second plate, And he wept and he called it Pity. The embryonic form has grown to manhood now. Urizen is in fetters , tears pour from the closed eyes, ‘ frozen doors to mock the world,’ as Blake pencilled upon a sketch for this very picture. The abject horror of existence apart from hope and fellowship has never been pictured by the brush, the pencil or the graver with a deeper significance and, therefore, with a richer poetry. Urizen, the first * I,’ separated himself from the Infinite Unity, which Blake saw as the Spirit of Universal Man. And from Urizen came Los (a transmutation of Sol, the Sun). Los it was who bound the first- born of Eternity in the shackles of the Days and Years, thereby giving Urizen the human form which means pain and death, but also, in the beautiful philosophy of Blake, the capacity for pity. Los is yet another basic conception which occurs again and again in the Prophetic Books. Whereas Los forged the chains which bind, the pity in the heart of Urizen took form as Enitharmon, the wife of Los. So troubled were the Eternals with this creation that they hid this new thing, Pity, in the Tents of Science^ where Los (Time) and Enitharmon (Pity) gave birth to Ore, the Deliverer. Time, Pity and the The Titan, Los 93 Spirit of Revolt are seen together in a plate of wonderful beauty in the Book of Urizen (No. 21). Here Los, hammer in hand, is resting from his work to gaze in jealous fear upon Ore, his child, embracing its mother, Enitharmon. Jealousy counted for much in the experience of Blake and he pictures the chain of jealousy hanging about the father. Yet again, Los is pictured on the title-page of The Book of Los. With his back to the spectator, the Titan crouches in the Cave of Eternity, which for Blake was the symbol of Flesh. The eye requires to accustom itself to the main masses of the design before it can separate the form of the Titan from the masses of rock in which it has its being, a means whereby Blake suggested the age- long imprisonment which preceded mortal life. At last the Titan could no longer bear the bondage, and falling, fallin g, falling, Los came to the dread work of creation. Thus the terrible race of Los and Enitharmon gave Laws and Religions to the Sons of Har, binding them more And more to Earth, closing and restraining ; Till a philosophy of the Five Senses was complete. Urizen wept and gave it into the hands of Newton and Locke. Fourteen years after Rousseau had dazzled Europe with the flash of his ‘ Man is born 94 William Blake free and everywhere he is in chains/ the Declaration of American Independence laid it down : ‘ We hold these truths to be self- evident ; that all men are created equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ; that to secure these rights governments are constituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ As the Bible had a double significance, and its character and stories were really symbols of the lot of humanity on the spiritual plane, so, for Blake, international history and national heroes were symbols which he wove into his written and pictured philosophy. When, in time, the colonies of Britain revolted, Blake’s interpretation was that, in eternity, Ore, grown to manhood, had broken the chains put about him by his father, Los. The revolutionary movements in eighteenth century Europe, in like manner, were really the gradual awakening of the children of Enitharmon (Pity), and of Los. Not only such temperas as Pitt guiding Behemoth or Nelson guiding Leviathan need to be read in the light of the politics of the Napoleonic Age, but the illuminated prints in such books as America and Europe. Those who would turn their pages with The Spirit of Revolt 95 understanding must remember that Blake regarded Europe as a system of out-worn states, obsessed by inherited faiths and conventions which had long lost their power for good, whereas America represented a new national life which refused to be encum- bered by the intellectual impediments which had hampered the Old World for two thousand years. When they were ruled by British governors the Thirteen States, as Blake read history, were ' shut up in darkness and in sighing ’ ; with the Revolution came Liberty, in the form of the Titan, Ore. So it came about that America served as a symbol for the soul of man and that the real theme of the book, America, was the re-birth of bodily, mental and spiritual liberty in humanity. For Blake, America was that part of the human soul which had escaped the worst ills of Law and Reason, and the eighteen plates represent stages in the regeneration of the human soul by means of revolution. First, the New World is shewn suffering the tyranny of Ore, the Spirit of Unrestrained Passion. But, in time, the very license and unrestraint bring freedom, for, as Blake saw life, all Law is evil, inasmuch as it restrains human desires and crushes human joys. The ideas under- lying the Vision of the Daughters of Albion and Thel were thus repeated in new forms in 96 William Blake the late Prophetic Books. These frequent repetitions of basic ideas are fortunate ; otherwise much of Blake’s life work would necessarily be left to the expert. Just because the basic ideas recur so often, one can turn over a copy of America, Europe, Milton or Jerusalem and be assured that, though much may be beyond comprehen- sion, the general drift of idea is plain enough. Enjoy the craft and the abounding vitality of the invention and, in due time, the connected meaning of the Prophetic Books will emerge. Blake printed the eighteen plates of America in a dull blue or green ink, but the famous copy from the Crewe collection was specially coloured and is of great beauty. Blake’s hope was to colour every copy of these ‘ illuminated ’ books. That would have been ‘ full publication.’ His powers of work, however, were not equal to the effort. But even in the uncoloured copies, Blake’s genius for design makes each sheet a thing of joy. The very roughness of some of the cuts emphasises the Gothic character of thought and craft, and this without destroy- ing detail which is an element in the greater art efforts, assuming that elaboration does not destroy an even more valuable quality — clear-cut and definite design. In th'e America, for the first time, Blake was successful in creating a consecutive series of pictures “ America ” 97 which give delight apart from the written poetry associated with them. Each plate helps to develop the conception of a shackled human soul in the throes of revolt, from the hour when the new-born seeks momentary shelter in the rich cornfields of life (Plate n) to the time when, as an old man, he finds peace in the grave and the regenerated soul is raised incorruptible (Plates 8 and 14). Be not troubled if your conception differs from those of the authorities. Much so-called interpretation of Blake is merely verbal and, as in all poetry, meaning differs in time and place. What is tragedy at twenty may seem comedy at forty. A consecutive and ordered philosophy is not to be found in Blake, any more than it is to be found in a Gothic Cathedral. Logic there is in plenty in both, but Blake’s logic tends to lose itself in the impression of pulsing emotion and vibrant thought, finding expression in symbols of astonishing power, variety and significance. Blake’s delight was primarily in the intensity of his imaginative grip and the fullness of his imaginative vision. If we enjoy, we have the best he can give us, and the more because enjoyment is nearly akin to understanding. Blake was a Dionysiac, not a follower of Apollo. Spiritual rapture, rather than a bracing of the mind, is what his art gives in fullest measure. This dualism is to be found 9 8 William Blake in all art and there is no more fruitful source of misunderstanding than to judge the artist who is by nature a Dionysiac by Apolline standards. Space will not permit of a detailed analysis of the illustrations of the longer Prophetic Books. The student must make his own selection from the commentaries of Messrs. Yeats and Ellis, Mr. Foster Damon, M. Paul Berger, and others. Still better he can work out the meaning for himself with the aid of the revised text of Blake’s writings, due to the scholarly care of Mr. Geoffrey Keynes and the enterprise of the Nonesuch Press, three volumes which make understanding of many difficulties possible for the first time. A short study can do no more than call attention to a few outstanding designs. Turning over the plates of America in some public library, we may come upon the frontispiece and question its meaning. A winged Titan, with head bowed to his knees, sits chained on the ram- parts of some dark city ; behind loom heavy clouds and, at his side, is a woman, with two children. The Titan is red Ore, the Deliverer, who will shatter the world woven by Urizen, helped by the Spirit of Pity (Enitharmon) and the tiny Joys, who cower beside her. Other interpretations are possible, but this will suffice. Pass on to the title page. A young woman and an older man sit back to " America ” 99 back, poring over the Books of the Law. Recall the page in the Daughters of Albion in which the Virgin Joy, Oothoon, was chained to Bromion, and note that the man and maid in America alike are regardless of the Joys who strive to arouse them from their deadening study of the Law. Below, Blake pictures the Waste of Reason, in which Imagination bends over a dead or dying man, and seeks to revive any spark of the eternal vitality which may still linger in the stricken creature. The Preludium — a page which arouses abiding wonder — shews Los and Enitharmon coming upon Ore, the Spirit of Revolution, chained upon the rock of Jealousy or Doubt. Above and below Ore is the Tree of Reason, gripping humanity in its fell clutch, as is shewn by the poor mortal who cowers under the deep-set roots. The seventh plate of America, a Last Judgment, is followed by a Resurrection, interesting because of the nude youth awakening to life, which also occurs above the tomb in the Death’s Door illustration for Blair’s The Grave. The aged man on crutches appears in the fourteenth plate of America. The Resurrection page is followed by a lovely picture of Poetry and Painting asleep on the ram, under a birch tree. These are the Har and Heva, the Adam and Eve, of Tiriel, and they recall that poetry and the arts are to be the redeeming agents of 100 William Blake fallen humanity. Equally lovely and signi- ficant is the page (No. 15) picturing the eagle of Theotormon tearing Oothoon (Joy), who has escaped from the wild waste of Time and Space below by giving free play to her passions, only to fall a victim to jealousy. The woman on the ocean floor below is the symbol of Love, dead among the sea-snakes of frustrated desire. An earlier plate (No. 13) is yet another variant upon a familiar idea, as well as a masterpiece of decorative design. Blake illustrates the beautiful speech of Boston by symbols which recall the state of Innocence. In this page a youth, soaring above the darkness of prohibition and reason, rides upon a swan, while, below, in the black night of unregenerated nature and humanity, the Joys have harnessed the Serpent of natural desires and guide it through the darkness. As the Last Judgment plate was followed by a Resurrection plate, so these symbols of the Age of Innocence suggest the complimentary state of Experience (Plate 14), symbolised by the old man on crutches who finds relief from the barren wilderness of life in the open door of the tomb. Lastly, the sixteenth plate in America depicts Nature as a Titanic figure sitting beneath the sterile ‘ Tree of Mystery ’ and teaching materialism to a youth who lifts his hands in prayer to her, while he rests his arms upon the book of the Law. Blake always Thoughts on Nature IOI feared Nature, and his fears were the cause of the doubts he expressed regarding the worth of Wordsworth’s poetry. ‘ I fear Wordsworth loves Nature — and Nature is the work of the Devil.’ In Blake’s view, natural objects deaden the imagination, for natural impressions come through the five senses and not through the inspiration of the Soul. Blake gave verbal expression to this general idea, which recurs again and again in the illustrations of the Prophetic Books, in these memorable lines : Ah ! weak and wide astray ; ah, shut in narrow doleful form ! Creeping in reptile flesh upon the bosom of the ground ! The eye of Man, a little narrow orb, clos’d up and dark, Scarcely beholding the great light, conversing with the Void, The ear, a little shell, in small volutions shutting out All melodies and comprehending only discord and harmony ; The tongue, a little moisture fills, a little food it cloys, A little sound it utters, and its cries are faintly heard. Then brings forth Moral Virtue . . . America was followed by another Prophecy, Europe, dated 1794, and also issued from Hercules Buildings, Lambeth. It is a quarto, 9i by inches, about the same size as the 102 William Blake America, and consists of eighteen plates, of which two are full-page illustrations without text, representing Plague and Fire. In Europe, Blake was concerned with ideas which first found expression in the Book of the French Revolution, which had been set up by the bookseller, Johnson, in 1791, and was not actually published. A proof was found in the Linnell collection. Blake’s ideas upon revolution made the transition from America to Europe natural enough. As Blake wrote : Terrors appeared in the Heavens above ; The American War began ; all its dark horrors passed before my face Across the Atlantic to France ; then the French Revolution commenced in thick clouds. Europe was a sequel to America, and like its predecessor its inner theme was the struggle of the human spirit against tradition, con- ventional religion, science and authority. Again Ore is the instrument of regeneration, and again Blake draws upon ideas and symbols which recur throughout the Pro- phetic Books. The frontispiece is the memor- able Ancient of Days, a copy of which Blake was colouring for Tatham on his death-bed. Half a dozen interpretations can be attached to the design. It may be regarded as a picture of God centring the golden compasses which will circumscribe the universe and all “ Europe ” 103 created things, as Blake read in Raphael’s story of the Creation in the Seventh Book of Paradise Lost. Again, it may be regarded as the Jehovah of the Book of Genesis, or an illustration of a passage in the eighth chapter of Proverbs. When he established the heavens I was there ; When he set a circle upon the face of the deep • When he made firm the skies above : . But more accurately the Ancient of Days is not the Creator of Bible story, but the Unzen of Blake’s philosophy, whose laws no man can keep because they are death to every energy and forbid the springs of life. In the Prophecy Europe, Blake sets out to describe . the growth of civilisation and Christianity during 1,800 years, until human reason finds its final embodiment in the science of Bacon, Newton, Locke and Voltaire. For eighteen hundred years Fmtharmon, the Spirit of Pity, has slept and the Serpent of Materialism has had full power. As Urizen was bound in the shackles of law and custom, so he was fettered by an erroneous belief in the ultimate truth of Science and, with Urizen, humanity itself, the sons and daughters of Urizen and Los! First, Blake pictures Urizen measuring the abysses of space, the figure of the Titan, leaning from the sphere of the Sun, his hair 104 William Blake and beard streaming out in the rush of the star through space, being a symbol of the fall of Nature and Humanity from eternity into time and space. ‘ Nollekens ’ Smith tells that the figure was inspired by a vision which Blake saw, leaning from the top of the stair- way at Hercules Buildings. The painter said more than once that this vision made a more powerful impression on his mind then any which had come to him. He used it as a symbol of the idea that, through Urizen’s fall into time and space, man has lost contact with the eternal satisfactions of the imagina- tion. Instead of a universe, the sons of Urizen and Los are in contact with the space which a man can view from his dwelling- place, twenty-five cubits in height, on the verge of which the Sun rises and sets and the clouds bow to meet the flat earth and the seas. Compared with the full knowledge of the abiding realities which man might have, what is revealed from this standpoint is ‘ Doubt,’ and doubt Blake abhorred. Turn the eighteen plates of Europe and see how the twin arts of poetry and design are used to illuminate a unified body of ideas. The title-page shews the Serpent of Mate- rialism, which has arisen from the Creation of Urizen. Any question as to the signi- ficance of this splendid creature, splendid among the many serpents of Blake’s inven- tion, is dispelled by the ink-sketch in the “ Europe ” io5 J. Pierpont Morgan collection, shewing Urizen, with the Book of the Law, riding upon the serpent, as on a chariot. This was an alternative title-page to Europe. A water-colour sketch reproduced in Mr. Geof- frey Keynes’s catalogue shews a nude youth struggling with the same serpent, yet another variation. The basic idea of the book is developed in the sixth plate, A Prophecy, in which is shewn the agony of creation during the long sleep of Enitharmon, the Spirit of Pity. A comet-maiden floating over the earth shakes from her hair the evils which oppress fallen humanity, dooming the Joys of Innocence to death and the spiritual side of man to decay. The lovely design in the eleventh plate has a similar significance. The Mildews, pictured as two nude women, pass amid the arching wheat stalks, and blow from their horns the deathly blight which kills the living corn. There are few more ingenious compositions in decorative art, and, in a coloured copy of Europe, the flesh tones of the flying figures stand out in telling contrast to the golden green of the corn. Then Enitharmon, Pity or Imagination — the terms are interchangeable for Blake — awakes her son, the Spirit of Revolt, and the redemption of the Old World begins. War, the Son of Hell, is seen as a scale- covered demon attended by the angels of compassion, and with War comes Famine. H io6 William Blake In the last plate, the fire of Revolt overwhelms the structure which 1,800 years of Greco- Roman and Christian civilisation had built up. A single vestige remains, the base of a classic pillar. The remaining Prophetic Books, Milton and Jerusalem, were produced many years after America and Europe. They owed their main inspiration to the years at Felpham, and Blake’s stem struggle for recognition after his return to London. Milton was issued from South Molton Street, and consists of forty-five plates, with twenty illustrations. The title page shows Milton as a nude figure entering into the flames of poetic inspiration. Blake was neither a philhellene nor a scholar, and there was little in common between his genius and that of the writer of Paradise Lost. What made Blake accept Milton as the embodiment of the poetic-spirit was Milton’s choice of Satan as the hero of his epic. Satan as an embodiment of restless energy and passionate desire possessed characteristics which Blake sought in human character. Satan was a revolutionary as Ore was a revolutionary. In any case Milton was only an episodic character in the book which bears his name, the forty-five pages of text and pictures being really an .impassioned appeal for the exaltation of the imagination, with Satan as the dark angel who sets the bar* riers of reason across the path of Imagination, ELIJAH IN THE CHARIOT OF FIRE " Milton ” 107 though also a symbol of human energy and desire enslaved by Jehovah. Albion (Britain), is the hero of Milton and in a well- known plate (No. 38), is pictured on a rocky coast above the seas of time and space. Here he lies in the arms of Imagination, awaiting the eagle of poetic inspiration. Milton was a trumpet-call to the artists of his age, that they should cease from being the hirelings of convention-ridden society and take their part in the struggle for spiritual regeneration. ‘ Painters ! ’ cries Blake in the preface, ‘ on you I call. Sculptors ! Architects ! suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works. . . . We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever, in Jesus our Lord.’ Four copies of Milton are known. A noble copy was sold by auction in December 1923 for £3,400, and an equally desirable copy (once in the possession of Captain Butts) passed into the Henry Huntingdon collection in 1911 for $9,000. The title-pages of the five copies are dated 1804, but the whole series of plates was not etched and printed before 1808, this being the date on the What- man paper in three copies. A fourth copy is printed on paper watermarked 1815, which, io8 William Blake as Mr. Keynes has pointed out, falls between 1810-1818, when Blake was living in poverty and obscurity. The 1815 copy of Milton, which has five additional plates, is printed in a warm brown ink and is enriched with gilding, as well as colour of rich beauty, being in every respect an effort of craft which justified the call to arms Blake addressed to his brother painters in the opening page. Very interesting is the plate picturing the spiritual form of Robert Blake, who, though long dead, still inspired his brother to imaginative design. The plate is the more noteworthy as Robert Blake is not mentioned in the text of the poem. The picture is a full page reversal of an earlier plate inscribed ‘ William,' representing Blake himself. The colours of the picture of the dead man, however, are cold blues, instead of the reds and yellows of mortal life. The Prophetic Books were completed by the great quarto, Jerusalem, consisting of a hundred engraved pages. The preface took the form of an Address to the public, which opened in this unconventional style : Sheep. Goats. To the Public. After my three years slumber on the banks of Ocean I again display my Giant forms to the Public, “ Jerusalem ” 109 None of the Engraved Books shows a finer craft, and Blake himself was assured that none of his works had a larger measure of direct inspiration. In designing and etching the hundred plates, he described himself as ‘ a secretary.’ ‘ The Authors are in eternity.’ When Blake died in 1827 he had only one coloured copy of Jerusalem, which was later acquired by Tatham and now belongs to General Stirling. It is among the supreme achievements in art, page after page testifying to the boldness and sponta- neity of Blake’s invention. But Jerusalem makes an appeal only less intense in the ‘ uncoloured ’ copies, printed in black and green, such as that in the Print Room at the British Museum, some of the pages of which, however, are finished with a brush and light washes of water-colour. In the poem, the maiden, Jerusalem, is an emanation of Albion and represents spiritual beauty, as opposed to Vala, material beauty. Earlier, Jerusalem had lived in Havilah, the land of love and lilies, and the book pursues a thought which echoes and re-echoes in Blake’s art — the fall from innocence and the redemption by experience. In the ninth plate of Jerusalem, the three states are shewn together, Innocence being represented by a piping shepherd, The Fall by Eve receiving the apple from the Serpent, while Experience is embodied in the Titan Albion and the five no William Blake Senses. The plot of the poem is concerned with the awakening of Albion from the sleep of the five Senses, the 99th plate shewing God and the Soul of Man in the ecstacy of reunion, amid the fusing flames of Experience. So Blake fulfilled his purpose, To teach the Sons Of Eden, that however great and glorious ; however loving And merciful the Individuality ; however high Our palaces and cities, and however fruitful our fields, In Selfhood, we are nothing ; but fade away in morning breath. It is fitting that Blake’s last book should be concerned with the relations between art and life. No painter has shewn himself more absorbed in these ultimate problems. In Jerusalem we read of Golgonooza, the beautiful city of Spiritual Art, which is built in a land beset by despair and misery. Every act done on Earth is to be seen in the Bright Sculptures of Golgonooza ; every story of love and hatred. No thought or effort of craft is out of place in such a scheme and in Jerusalem accordingly Blake gives the best mintage of his heart and brain. There is also a fairy quality in the, last of the Prophetic Books which recalls the mood of The Tempest and suggests that Blake, like Shakespeare, found intellectual satisfaction “The Crucifixion ” hi at the last in relegating the final problems of human existence to a plane of enchantment which defies the logic of reason. No design in English art sings with more lyric fervour than the Love in the third chapter, seated winged and crowned upon the sunflower of Desire, her throne high above the wastes of Time and Space, which no longer obscure the light which radiates from the maiden mystery : I see thy Form, O lovely, mild Jerusalem I Winged with Six Wings In the opacous Bosom of the Sleeper, lovely, threefold In Head, and Heart and Reins, three Universes of love and beauty Thy forehead bright, Holiness to the Lord I The twenty-eighth plate, picturing the King and Queen of the Fairies in the Lily of Havilah, has already been mentioned. A corresponding design, picturing the natural joys in the throes of experience, occurs on page eight, in which a fairy is pictured dragging the bleeding Moon of Love through the Wilderness of Reason. But the highest degree of craft, significant design and poetic meaning is reached in The Crucifixion (Plate 76). Instead of the design being drawn on the plate and printed with a dark ink on white paper, Blake has reversed the process and made his design with white lines 1 12 William, Blake which stand out from a black background. The Crucifixion may be regarded as an illustration of the darkness which came over the whole land with the passing of Jesus, and, thus, may be compared with one of The Passion prints of Durer. More accurately, Blake sought to represent the Dark Night of the Soul. The man with outstretched arms below is Albion (Britain), who sees in the Crucified One the torture of his highest faculties. For Albion, Christ is the Eternal Imagination, nailed by human circumstances to the Cross of the Natural World, in which every spiritual faculty tends to be killed by the dullness of the senses. In the Crucifixion — the final embodi- ment of Experience — Blake found a sublime symbol of his faith in redemption for suffering humanity. His vision was not bound to the Gospel story, but rose to a deeper and richer conception of Christ’s death — that in which man by sin and error slays the Saviour daily, here and now. Such are the moments of vision which justify the time and trouble which a student of Blake must give if he is to get the best that the seer can offer. Some lovers of art may grudge the price, but assuredly no lover of Blake. Those who have once come under his spell will not relinquish the search for fresh gleams while eyes are made for seeing. What if the best in Blake must be Blake’s Message ii3 sought ? Is not search a necessary condition for the enjoyment of all good things ? The comforting truth is that few artists offer good things in greater abundance than this painter-engraver. The haphazard, even care- less, presentation of high thought and deep insight may be admitted. Nevertheless, if Blake reveals his insight with the impetuous enthusiasm of youth rather than the cautious discrimination of middle age, the fact in no way destroys the unity of purpose which characterises what is best in his art. Blake was essentially a man of principle and will be misunderstood by those who fail to see that the Songs of Innocence, the Milton and the Jerusalem are of the same stuff. Always the style is the man, and the unity of message and presentation is due to the fact that, from early youth to old age, one Blake was speaking. CHAPTER IV. The Quality of the Artist. C ONSIDERATION of the craft of William Blake and onr survey of the ideas he sought to embody in tempera paintings, colour-prints and etchings, have made one truth plain — the craft cannot be understood apart from the thoughts which obsessed him throughout his working life. It is by the significance of what he did that Blake is numbered among the truly great Englishmen. He was an iconoclast in the age of George III, but he is a builder whose influence makes for a fuller life in these days of George V. There were contradictions which the nineteenth century did not realise until Blake brought the dilemma arising from them into clear intellectual presentment. In the twentieth century there are thoughts which Blake has vitalised for those who understand him, and these justify what is best in the Blake cult to-day. Seer is a word which readily associates itself with his memory, and rightly. To Blake, the inspired engraver, as to Bunyan, the inspired tinker, there came 114 Spiritual Vision 115 in a flash the sense of full knowledge. ' I must go to God,’ sounded in Blake’s heart too, and with the words, darkness fled and an innumerable company of angels about the Mount of Sion were set before his eyes. With joy he cried, “ Now I know ; I know.” In that moment was added the special quality which differentiates Blake from other painters and engravers in British art history. It is told of St. Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi that the Lord appeared to her and shewed His Heart. Ever after, when the memory came to the Florentine Saint, she was driven to unfasten her habit, and burst into torrents of words like songs, to lessen the heat of the interior fire which consumed her. Blake found relief from the hre of the spirit by taking up the pencil, the brush or the graver. As he wrote to Hayley in 1804 : ‘ Excuse my enthusiasm, or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision when- ever I take a pencil or graver into my hand, even as I used to be in my youth, and as I have not been for twenty dark, but very profitable, years.’ There are those who apologise for this mystical element in the art work of Blake. I rejoice in it, as I rejoice in the stoic sermons of George Frederick Watts. I do not want all craftsmen consciously to preach and teach. But not so many British craftsmen have been ‘ possessed by a god ’ that we need grudge n6 William Blake the land of Hogarth, Reynolds, Gains- borough, Raeburn, and Orpen, its Blake, its Turner and its Watts. At a time when commercialism tends to debase much art effort, it may even be that faith is needed to add full power to the best our painters, gravers and sculptors can give. Of Blake, as of Watts, it may be said that his endeavour to make art and religion a unity gives his life-story a special interest in this science- ridden age. This endeavour of Blake and Watts alone will not create genius, but, following in their steps, certain artists of talent will reach a higher level of achieve- ment, inasmuch as their work will be directed to proving that the spiritual is not the exception, but the rule, in art as in life. Faithful portraiture and transcriptions of nature may give hints of the truth and beauty in the world and humanity, but real insight comes when the picture, engraving or sculpture also affords the satisfaction of moving side by side with a strong, honest, and an independent man of vision. Such a man was Blake. He said, “ You have only to work up the imagination to the state of vision and the thing is done.” It is not necessary to claim that Blake’s methods for developing vision , gave a greater measure of truth, beauty and good- ness than his powerful mind might have reached by following more conventional Spiritual Vision ii 7 methods. What is certain is that Blake’s methods gave character to the work of his hands. . When he formulated the belief, Man is a fallen God who remembers Heaven/ he fortunately found a truth which a painter can vivify. If the imagination of an artist is to find due expression for its visions, it must have a body on earth as well as an imagination which soars to Heaven. Of deliberate intent I have refrained from emphasising the occult side of Blake’s life, interesting though it is. It is more impor- tant to know the fine sanity of the man than to be forced to the recollection of eccentri- cities which hide rather than reveal the real craftsman and thinker. What was definitely occult in Blake’s experience comes to us from the diaries and reminiscences of the circle of friends which gathered around William and Catherine at Fountain Court, between 1818 and 1827. It was in these years that Blake knew John Varley, for whom he drew the Visionary Heads, a series of historical figures which Blake produced in what might be described as waking trances. Varley was interested in astrology and had heard of Blake’s spiritual visitants. He asked the old artist to “ draw Moses,” Edward the Third,” or, may be, “ Corinna, the Theban.” Blake’s answer was, “Here he is, or There she is,” and forthwith he began to draw with the greatest composure, n8 William Blake looking up from time to time as though a real sitter were before him. Varley, who took Blake’s visions literally, made constant efforts to see the visions himself. Sitting by Blake’s side, he looked hither and thither continually, as Blake’s gaze moved in this or that direction. Poor Varley, he had the credulity of a man, rather than the faith of a child, and he did not understand Blake to the end. The Visionary Heads are interesting docu- ments from the standpoint of the study of the occult, but afford no proof of any strain of madness in the painter. When Blake was drawing Corinna of Thebes, we are told that the courtesan obtruded herself upon Blake’s imagination and insisted upon being drawn. “ I was obliged to paint her to get her away,” Blake explained. Many artists, with no strain of mysticism in their nature, have been obsessed with two themes at one and the same time, and this was the case with Blake. When he was drawing his Ghost of a Flea for Varley, the thing opened its mouth. Being profoundly interested in his own visions, Blake could not proceed with his first sketch until he had drawn a special study of the mouth. Varley adds that he was convinced from Blake’s mode of pro- ceeding that he had a real vision before him, for he left off and began on another part of the paper to make a separate drawing of the Mystical Experiences 119 mouth of the flea. As he was finishing the drawing, Blake mentioned that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of men, as they were by nature bloodthirsty to excess, and were, therefore, providentially confined to the size and form of insects. In Blake s case there was no conscious and regular training in mystical exercises such as the Indian ‘ yoga,’ in which diets, posture, breathing and mental concentration are utilised to produce the mystical experi- ence. But, in a measure, Blake could induce the state of illumination, and at such times the revelations of his imagination had special power. For many years after the death of Robert, Blake was in imaginative com- munion with his brother. Writing toHayley, Blake said, ‘ Thirteen years ago I lost my brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly, and see him in remembrance m the regions of my imagination. I hear his advice and even now write to his dictate.' It is not necessary to drag in the miraculous to explain such mystical experiences, and the. use Blake made of them in imaginative design. . Professor Loewy has suggested that all primitive artists constructed their pictures from a limited number of memory pictures, and that the apparent failure of artists at times may. be due to the failure to fuse these memory pictures into a unity which carries conviction. Realising the limited number 120 William Blake of memory-pictures which his craftsman s hand could reproduce, Blake developed his capacity for making pictures, not. from memories, but from actual visions which his imagination learnt to evoke. This was what Blake was doing when he was found, pencil in hand, before a non-existent sitter, drawing and looking into space, and then drawing again. (l T “ Disturb me not, whispered Blake, l have someone sitting to me.” “ Where ? ” exclaimed the astonished visitor. , “ There, his name is Lot, you may read of him in the Scriptures. He is sitting for his portrait.” ' Of course, like V arley s flea, yet another example of Blake s whimsical humour, roused to activity by the pleasant credulity of an over-simple friend. Nevertheless, though he could smile at them and with them, the visions were a source of inspiration to Blake and were in a very real sense religious experiences, inasmuch as they created the faith which was necessary to full achievement. What more there was. in Blake’s visions every reader must determine for him or herself. But surely for those who believe in deity, God-given is not an unmean- ing term. Mr. Richmond, father of Sir William Richmond, once went to Fountain Court and asked Blake what he should do as 121 The Book of Job he found his artistic invention flagging The old artist turned to Catherine : “ It is just so with us, is it not, for weeks when the vlsi ons forsake us? What do we do then, Kate ? ” “We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake.” hor the better understanding of these high problems, a concrete example is all- important. To know more of a painter we want, not generalities, but an introduction to his best work. Let us then examine this conception of a Christian mystic, born at the end of the Age of Reason, as we turn over the twenty-one plates in the Illustra- °f the Book of Job, ‘ invented and engraved by William Blake, and published as the Act directs, March 8, 1825 from No a Fountain Court, Strand/ Not only was the poetry of Job congenial to Blake the Seer but the twenty-one places are in the forefront of his work as a craftsman. The interest he eld m them was abiding enough to carry him past the first heat of conception to the stage where touch upon touch of insight was added with ever-growing effect. As we become familiar with the Job. we find that the drawings and engravings are more than illustrations, and can only be regarded as a restatement of the Job story L terms 0 f Blake s own religious beliefs. He felt that an all-wise and all-good God would not surrender a faithful servant to affliction 122 William Blake without cause, and he met the difficulty by depicting a deity who shares in human sorrow. The patriarch, too, is characterised with insight. Of Job’s piety there can be no doubt, but Blake suggests that his motives were not free from selfishness. By insisting upon God's inherent quality of sharing pain with his creatures and upon Job’s pride in the forms of worship and charity, Blake resolves the prime difficulty in the Bible story. The first illustration shews the prosperous and pious patriarch amid his sons and daugh- ters, surrounded by rich accumulations of sheep and cattle, and even by the comforts of art, symbolised in the musical instruments hanging on the tree above. But Job is God-fearing rather than God-knowing. Note the tent-like form of the sky which separates him from his Father in Heaven and which will appear again and again in the Job illustrations. Just four nervous lines with pen or graver. The soul-story of the patriarch, as Blake saw it, was the rending of that sky-built tent. The inscription upon the earthly altar suggests this dominant thought : ‘ The letter killeth. The Spirit giveth Life.’ In the second plate, the spiritual life of this just, but God-fearing rather than God- loving, man is revealed by an invention of amazing ingenuity and subtlety. It is as The Book of Job 123 if the Almighty had determined to accept Blake's conception of the contrary states of Innocence and Experience and called for the soul-record of the man, in which the truths of all hearts are opened. The clouds are parted and the Heaven of Heavens is revealed. _ Before the Throne, Satan is making his claim for the soul of Job. He advances his own interpretation of the actions of the patriarch and his wife, and the angels who watch over human conduct add their testimony. Below, on the plane of earth, two angels bear the records of human conduct which are even then in the making. Floating unseen, they are sharing day by day the life of the patriarchal family. And the Judge in this strange trial is Job himself, not in his earthly form, but as he lives eternally in the state which unifies innocence and experience. The enthroned deity is not only made in the image of Job, he is Job, so far as a painter-graver can suggest such a thought. For Blake, ‘ God only acts and is in existing men/ Do not be hasty in judgment. This is not blasphemy or paradox. Give the painter-poet time ; turn over the illustrations of Job until the last is reached, then judge the worth of his message. In Blake’s conception of deity God is the perfect man, not a blinding brilliance set in the highest heavens. The most devout believer may ask, ‘ Hast thou seen the 124 William Blake Christ ? ’ and follow up the question with the assertion, ‘ If so, thou hast seen a Man, thy Brother Man/ This is what Blake meant when he wrote : God appears and God is light To those poor souls who dwell in night ; But doth a human form display To those who dwell in realms of day. When Blake passed to the world beyond the senses, he brought back impressions as sure as the faith of childhood. His angels are more actual than anything mortal and perishing nature can produce. As he said : ‘ He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all. The painter of this work asserts that all his imaginations appear to him infinitely more perfect and more minutely organised than anything seen by his mortal eye.. Spirits are organised men.' Blake derived his conception of deity from Swedenborg s Angelic Wisdom, where it was written : ‘ In all heavens there is no other idea of God than the idea of a man. The reason is that heaven, as a whole, and in every part, is in form as a man, and the Divine which is with the angels constitutes heaven/ Blake justi- fied the thought by explaining that ‘ Mari The Book of Job 125 can have no idea of anything greater than man, as a cup cannot contain more than its capaciousness. . . . Think of a white cloud as being holy, you cannot love it : but think of a holy man within the cloud, love springs up in your thoughts.' Turn to the third plate. The judgment of Blake’s God has been against Job. Something is lacking in the man’s faith and conduct. The happy household of the patriarch is shattered, and his seven sons, with their seven wives (not three daughters as in the Bible), are crushed. A demoniac Satan opens the vials of his envy, so that the fires descend upon the house. In the first plate we saw the family of Job as it seemed to be ; here we see it as it really was. It is not Satan who is crushing the young Hercules who strives to save wife and child, but the youth himself. As God is Job, so this eldest son is the devil-haunted Satan. In the margins of the third plate, scaly serpents and scorpions, flame and smoke, rising from earth and falling from Heaven, complete the divine catastrophe which erring man has brought upon himself and his home. So the first fruits of experience are borne in upon Job and his wife. The Gothic Cathedral, symbolising the comforts of earthly religion, seems more distant now, but a simpler faith, suggested by the Druid temple, remains to the unhappy father and 126 William Blake mother. Of their former prosperity, the thatched barns are gone and only a few sheep remain. The tale of disaster is continued in the margin where the dead sons and daughters are recalled in two tiny figures. And so Blake carries us in imagination once more to the Heaven of Heavens. (Plate 5.) Satan’s victory has shaken more than the foundations of Job’s earthly home ; the sorrowing figure of God and the affrighted angels suggest that Job’s Heaven is shaken too. On earth, Job and his wife divide their last loaf with a beggar. The Gothic Church has vanished and the Druid temple of duty no longer overshadows Job, though it is still in the background and suggests that the gift of the loaf is due to a self-righteous sense of duty rather than pure love. Then comes the smiting of Job with the boils, emblems of the catastrophe which has come upon his spiritual being. The Stonehenge- like temple of duty is in ruins now, and the broken crook and shard in the marginal decoration suggest the final passing of the state of innocence. Henceforward Job is naked to the darts and the flames of doubt, shame and fear. The sorrow-laden wife buries her face in her hands in anguish, but her fidelity— unlike that of Job’s wife in the story — is never shaken. By patience in suffering Job was redeemed, and Blake suggests the first step in the process . The Book of Job 12 7 of redemption in his seventh plate. In the margin, seated where the dead son and daughter lay in the fourth illustration, are two sorrowing angels, simple but delightful products of the graver-craft. On earth, the Sun is rising behind the dark hills. The three affrighted ‘ friends ’ on the corporeal plane (foes on the spiritual plane, as the busy Hayley had been at Felpham), do not destroy the suggestion of renewed hope, though their words of comfort drive Job to his final surrender. And Blake shews us why when the God of Eliphaz appears in the ninth illustration. The deity who fashions the Law and frames the ideals of duty passes before Eliphaz in a dream in the upper part of the design, while Eliphaz utters his rebuke, the vision having its counterpart in the seventeenth illustration, in which Blake brings Christ to earth to put his bodily friends to shame. The margin is decorated with heavy clouds and comfortless trees, recalling that the harsh spirit of eternal Justice is in the ascendant. Goaded to desperation by the words of Eliphaz, Blake invokes his own vision of God and is answered out of the Whirlwind. But first Job is to experience the full bitterness of separation from his God. The demons of doubt would drag him to fires of Hell (Plate n) and, even more horrible, Satan appears in the likeness of an Angel of Light, an angel whose ideal is 128 William Blake punishment, ‘ rather than the liberation of man’s passions for love and beauty.’ Blake’s insight into the problem of human suffering tells him that this vision of horror is not an arch-fiend apart from the tortured man ; rather it is an aspect of the dreamer’s own soul. The most righteous among men is only an incarnation of the Devil, until he finds his real being once again in Christ and Jerusalem, through suffering. Blake makes Elihu’s speech (Plate 12) bring out the possibility of redemption, by furnishing Job with proof of his self-righteousness. The wonderful marginal designs shew how the conception wrought vitalising changes in Job’s soul. His thoughts pass from Self into the world of All Things, until they bring Job to the very Gate of Paradise. The one stream, soaring direct from the head of the sleeper, are borne to Heaven at once ; the other stream of thoughts, emanating from the feet, are aroused by angelic helpers until they too can rise to the Throne of Deity. It is at this moment that Blake chooses to bring the reader of Job to the Vision of the Whirlwind, which will lift not only Job from the pit of doubt, but his long-suffering wife, who must also find redemption through experience of the joys and sorrows of all created things. The fact of redemption is symbolised by the fourteenth plate, in which The Book of Job 129 the Morning Stars sing together and the Sons of God shont for joy. In this illustra- tion Blake allows the Sun-decked clouds to divide the design into four parts, which are re-united by the figure of the Godhead — the Divine Imagination. His almighty arms are outspread above the world of space and time and, as Mr. Wicksteed has shewn, the right foot of the Spirit is revealed, in contrast with the left foot of God’s counterpart on earth, Job himself. To the right and left of God are the planes of ideal creation ; on the one side that in which the sun of the intellect shines, and, on the other, that in which the moon of love guides the dragons of passion, as the intellect guides the horses of knowledge. Nowhere is Blake’s sense of rhythmic design more apparent than in this picture of the Sons of God. The banks and trails of smoke-like cloud, the flame-like draperies and the uplifted arms have the beat of celestial music. For Blake, as for Plato, the soul of man is filled with the principle which pervades the Universe and makes it God-like. In splendid contrast with these Sons of God are the Behemoth and the Leviathan of the following plate, the monstrous symbols of animal and vegetable life, unrelieved by the throbbing music of the sphere which the imagination alone can reveal. And so, Job and his wife see Satan hurled into the abyss, 130 William Blake bearing with him their errors of judgment and doubt — symbolised by the falling man and woman in the flames with which Satan himself is commingled. At last the clouds which separate Earth from Heaven are sundered and God is revealed surrounded by the emblems of the divine humanity which radiates from the Throne of Heaven. Christ can come to Earth at last (Plate 17). In the marginal decoration of the design, Jerusalem, the bride of the Lamb, unfolds the gospel message. Blake’s mission is accomplished. He has shewn how Jerusalem can be brought again to Britain’s pleasant land, for Britain too once had its age of innocence, and must find redemption in experience. And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills ? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic Mills ? Bring me my bow of burning gold 1 Bring me my arrows of desire 1 Bring me my spear ! O clouds, unfold I Bring me my chariot of fire ! I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand. Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant land. The noble scene of sacrifice (Plate 18) pictures the Lord’s acceptance of Job, or is it the acceptance of Blake, whose palette, !THE SACRIFICE OF JOB ENGRAVING ( face p . 130 ) The Book of Job 131 brushes and scroll figure in the marginal decoration ? No longer is the sheep or the ox slaughtered for an offering. That belonged to the dispensation in which ' the letter killeth/ whereas the thought enshrined in the Sacrifice of Job is that the spirit of man, once purged from the dross of reason and of law, can rise from the stony altar to the very Bosom of the Poetic Genius, whom Blake knew as God. As the scene of sacrifice echoes the first plate of Job, so the nineteenth echoes the fifth illustration, in which Job shared his loaf with the needy beggar. Everyone also gave him a piece of money is the title of the design, and its message is that there may be true charity in the due accept- ance of the offerings of friends. The last plate but one in the series is that in which the fair daughters of Job listen to his Song of Experience and, from the carved panels of his hall in Golgonooza, learn how catas- trophe may reveal the Almighty even more fully than prosperity. The twenty-first illustration is an echo of the lovely Morning Stars design, but the melody of the design is in the key of Earth, instead of in the key of Heaven. No longer are the instruments of art hung on the oak while the praise of God is going on. Instead, the conventions of ceremony give place to the freedom of spiritual worship in which the arts have, perhaps, the first place. 132 William Blake Giordano Brnno has described the Soul of the World as an inner Artist giving form to all things from within the mass of Chaos, creative at once of the material, and of the infinitely diversified forms imposed upon it. Such a conception is nearer to the final philosophy of Blake than that of the mystics, who strip the Deity of so many attributes that little more than bare unity is left at the last. It is within humanity that the final authority of art will be found, but within a humanity informed by the deepest experiences known to the soul of man, for art surely implies a conquest of material things by the spirit. Conceiving God as a creative energy which can descend to any depths of being required by the weakness of man, Blake found a source of artistic inspiration which sustained his life-long endeavour To open the eternal worlds ; to open the immortal eyes Of man inwards : into the worlds of thought : into eternity : Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human imagination . It was his obsession with the visions given by the imagination which determined Blake’s professional failure, while it set him among the leaders of the Revolutionary age. To Blake, as to Wordsworth and Coleridge, the The Artist’s Purpose 133 French Revolution opened up possibilities of infinite promise. He belonged to the age of Rousseau, but when the Frenchman cried " Follow Nature/’ Blake whispered “ Follow impulse.” As for the inventions of the Industrial Revolution, they moved Blake to anger and misery, not to admiration. What he remembered of a coal mine were women and children, each with a chain about the waist, crawling on hands and feet, and dragging a wagon through underground tunnels to the surface. He shuddered when he saw the factory children under the rattans of over- seers, who beat their small charges to keep them awake at the end of a long day. Is it to be wondered that Blake had no wash to become a popular portrait painter and spend his hours perpetuating the features of the men and women who were profiting by the Industrial Revolution ? Just because he refused popularity his professional habits and methods were very different from those of the methodical Romney, with his 9,000 sittings in twenty years. Mr. Pitt at 12, Lady Betty Compton at J to 2. Or from those of Gainsborough, on whose account Thick- nesse obligingly proposed that his own head ‘ should be held up as a decoy-duck for customers.’ It is difficult to imagine Blake regarding Hayley as preferable to the Rider of the Pale Horse as a decoy-duck for customers. Be under no misapprehension. 134 William Blake This does not mean that Blake was greater or less than Gainsborough. Rather, he was different. The beauty and meaning which Gainsborough and Reynolds found in English womanhood, Blake sought in the things which are revealed to the imagination alone. Compared with Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Raeburn, Blake’s career was a failure. He was financially unsuccessful because he could not develop any facility in meeting the demands of his age, but he was not ill-paid for what he did. When Gains- borough went to Bath, his charge for a portrait head was five guineas, an amount which is comparable with what Blake would have received if he had had a fair deal from Cromek in connection with the engravings for Blair’s Grave. The early portraits of Reynolds were painted for 70s. each. After his Mediterranean trip Reynolds charged twelve guineas for a portrait head, but only when he became a social light did he receive £30 to £50 for a ' kitkat,’ or £70 to £100 for a full-length. When we consider the professional mis- fortune of Blake we must rid our minds of twentieth century analogies. At the end of the eighteenth century, a portrait by an established artist was not a luxury which only the wealthy could afford. Photo- graphy had not been invented, and painted Professional Failure 135 portraits were a necessity in a well-to-do home. Etonians will remember the collec- tion of about 200 portraits in the Provost’s Lodge. Seven of them are by Reynolds, five by Hoppner, ten by Romney, and others by Gainsborough, Beechey and Law- rence. Yet they were all deposited by boys leaving school, in lieu of a leaving fee. Probably, none of the portraits cost fifty pounds. Judge what a similar collection would cost to-day — with pictures by Orpen, by John, and by Sargent. In Blake’s time, most artists were paid at rates suitable for a superior artisan to-day, but there was a constant demand for competent work. If Blake failed to earn enough to keep himself and Catherine in comfort, it was because he spent ‘ in Heaven,’ the hours which Romney, during twenty years, devoted to the 9,000 sittings. Let there be no mistake. With open eyes Blake chose failure rather than success. He grumbled about failure but was never willing to pay the price of success. Design- ing a leaving portrait for Eton College, or picturing the wife of a profiteer in the Revolutionary wars, would have seemed to Blake like painting ‘ dirty Rags and old Shoes where I ought to place Naked Beauty.’ This his guardian angels would not allow. Of the threats of these angels, Blake wrote to Captain Butts : 136 William Blake If we fear to do the dictates of our angels and tremble at the tasks set before us . . . who can describe the dismal torments of such a state ? I too well remember the threats I heard ! ‘‘If you, who are organised by Divine Providence for spiritual communion refuse and bury your talent in the earth, even though you should want actual bread, sorrow and desperation pursue you through life, and after death, shame and confusion of face, to eternity.” With an outlook so unprofessional Blake could not found a School as certain painters have done. A master-craftsman like Rubens can gather a body of workers around him and even pass on a tradition to a later generation, but not the man whose primary endowment is imaginative vision. He can only offer an example. There is no School of Blake, in the sense of a body of artists bound to- gether b}^ similarity of outlook and by the acceptance of common methods of craft. Edward Calvert (1799-1883) had the best natural gifts among the young men who worshipped at the altar of The Interpreter- - The Interpreter was their name for Blake — during the last years at Fountain Court. Following upon his friendship with Blake, Calvert produced some woodcuts of remark- able beauty, among them Christian ploughing the last Furrow of Life, the Return Home and the lovely Cider Press. The' very title of the woodcuts, Ten Spiritual Designs, suggests Calvert’s affinity with the old artist who offered such insight into the wonders of the Edward Calvert 137 natural world and was so generous in dis- cussing points and possibilities of craft practice with the young sailor. There is the story of Blake's visit to Calvert’s home at Brixton and the accident to the pot of etching ground, owing to the pipkin reakmg over the fire. Characteristically enough, Blake s chief anxiety was not for t f the material, but lest Mrs. Calvert should be awakened from her beauty sleep by tmmioil due to putting out the fire caused by the burning varnish. It was the example of Blake which made Calvert engrave upon copper, wood and stone, instead of becoming an etcher as would have been more natural. In youth, Calvert had served as a midshipman in the Napoleonic Wars ; he was twenty-four when he left the INavy to become an artist. Coming to London with a letter of introduction to buseh, Calvert met Blake. He had a full life to live and had all to learn in matters of craft and so was the very man to absorb and carry on an artistic tradition, if the tradition of Blake could have been carried on. As a fact there was not sufficient likeness of chamcter to make full receptivity possible. Whereas Calvert was serene, Blake was passionate ; compared with the Gothic mood of Blake, Calvert's mood was Arcadian. His best engravings date from about the time of Blake’s death and all were done K 138 William Blake before he was thirty. Afterwards his private fortune proved his undoing. Instead of creating as Blake’s habit had been, Calvert s delicate taste led him to destroy, and little now remains of the eighty years devoted to art. Only by extending the meaning of the phrase unduly can Calvert be said to belong to the School of Blake. Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) is an artist whose achievement has been underrated, though his fame is growing, and there have been some welcome additions to the Tate Gallery in the last two or three years, which represent his charming sense of pastoral design and colour. The delightful Harvest Moon, with its jewel-like pigment, does not recall Blake in any special manner, but the half dozen ink and wash drawings mani- festly derive from Blake’s woodcuts for the Pastorals of Virgil. The impression which the woodcuts made upon such men as Calvert and Palmer can be judged from a note in Palmer’s sketch book, written in 1823 or 1824. I sat down with Mr. Blake’s Thornton’s Virgil woodcuts before me, thinking to give to their merits my feeble testimony. I happened first to think of their sentiment. They are visions of little dells and nooks and corners of Paradise ; models of the exquisite pitch of intense poetry . I thought of their light and shade, and looking upon them I found no word to describe it. Intense depth, solemnity Samuel Palmer 139 and vivid brilliance only coldly and partially de- scribe them. There is in all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the in- most soul and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They are like all that wonderful artist’s work, the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain. Palmer’s mood was pastoral and romantic and though the influence of Blake’s wood- cuts upon his art was direct, he more rightly belongs to the main line of classical landscape painters, which derived from Claude, through Richard Wilson. Sir George Richmond, R.A., also knew Blake as a boy and, recalling a walk with him, said, ‘ It was as though I had been with the prophet Isaiah.’ Richmond’s early art owed much more to the pre-Raphaelites, and later he came under the classical influence which determined the careers of such men as Leighton and Poynter. He was not of the school of Blake. John Varley (1778-1842) was an accom- plished drawing master, with a genius for friendship, but his connection with Blake was personal, rather than that of pupil and master. Blake amused and interested Varley. Frederick Tatham, another friend of Blake in the last years at Fountain Court, was also a painter of sorts, but his connection with the Blake family was rather that of a careless executor than a devoted student 140 William Blake of a master of craft. Blake manuscripts and drawings, to the number of two hundred, were given by Mrs. Blake to Frederick Tatham. Some of the manuscripts seem to have been destroyed because their teaching conflicted with the morality accepted by the Church of Edward Irving to which Tatham attached himself, while the drawings seem to have been sold from time to time. Francis Oliver Finch, Henry Walter and Sherman were other artists in the group. There were the elements of a School, if only the peculiar quality of Blake could have been transmitted, but it could not. The intangible something which it was necessary to pass on is recalled in two dicta of Edward Calvert. The first relates to the sense of spiritual significance which was, perhaps, Blake’s choicest endowment. Said Calvert, * A good poem, whether painted or written, whether large or small, should represent the simplicity of a beautiful life.’ What is best in Blake’s work most certainly represents the simplicity of his beautiful life. It is no less true that Blake was almost alone in British art in translating physical facts into the music of the Spheres. Knowing Blake as man and artist, Calvert could affirm : I know that there is a mastery and a music that shall command truth itself to look as we would have it, and to echo the pulses of the heart ; physical truth being translated into musical truth. ! The Influence of Blake 141 Forty years passed before the simple beauty of Blake’s life and the eternal music singing through his best designs began to be understood. His influence upon British art became direct only when Rossetti and Swinburne revealed the wonderful unity of poetry and craft that characterised his work, whether in poetry or painting. Every age has its own imaginative attitude towards Nature — an impulse to her bosom, or a reaction against her encircling arms. Renais- sance artists rejoiced in natural joys, whereas Puritanism and, later, the Age of Reason, moved men away from Nature. Blake, Puritan in upbringing though he was, proved a leader in the movement back to Nature. He would have rejected the terminology for the same reason that he doubted the rightness of Wordsworth’s philosophy, but he might have accepted the phrase ‘ the Renascence of Wonder,’ by which Mr. Watts Dunton characterised the artistic reaction against the eighteenth century outlook. Blake disliked certain associations of the word ‘ Nature,’ but he never passed through the stage in which he regarded Nature as indifferent. The sea, the sky, the beasts and the trees might be beneficent or malign but they were always ready to link their lives with his own. So when he reached his conception of a Natural God, he found Spirit pervading all things and discovered 142 William Blake that this Spirit was the very one which fired him with enthusiasm whenever he took pencil or graver in hand. As the implica- tions of the French Revolution were under- stood and accepted there came a distrust of the chilly formalism of the Age of Reason. When Romanticism in poetry established itself with Coleridge, Scott, Shelley, Keats and Byron, Blake’s opportunity came as painter and engraver. Painters were relatively slow to follow the lead given by the philosophers and poets, but they cast aside the conventions of the eighteenth century in the end. While Geri- cault and Delacroix were attacking pseudo- classicism in France, Blake in England was showing the potency of the imaginative outlook in painting. If there were poets who anticipated Blake in seeking to under- stand humanity through natural beauties, and natural beauties through the human spirit, there was no painter. Blake as a formative influence came to his own when the pre-Raphaelites established themselves as a definite movement in British art. It is no mere chance that Blake’s fame owes much to another poet-painter. Rossetti, like Blake, found that mediaevalism did not represent certain centuries in time but a definite attitude of mind. Above all he saw that Blake’s struggle had been to justify the combination of poet and painter. Growing Fame 143 Rossetti once told Bume- Jones that if a man had any poetry in him he should paint. Compared with painting, verse was a spent force. Poetry on canvas was only at its beginning. Later, Rossetti changed his mind and the verses which had been a recreation in the intervals of water-colour or oil paint- ing became a deliberate medium for self- expression. ‘ I wish one could live by writing poetry,’ wrote Rossetti to Ford Madox Brown in 1871. ‘ I think I would see painting damned if I could.’ Both senti- ments represented no more than a mood. Line and colour are not inferior to the printed word as a means of expression, and the artist-thinker who employs them in no way squanders his talent. Blake and Rossetti alike are witness to the truth that a poet-painter can speak with as much cer- tainty through the painted picture as he can through the words of the lyric or the ode. Both methods can make manifest a personality. Isaac D’ Israeli was an early admirer of Blake and owned 160 of his designs, but it was Alexander Gilchrist who led the Blake revival. When Gilchrist died in 1861, the standard Life of Blake was completed by his widow, with the aid of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Swinburne’s lyrical appreciation followed and, for the first time, gave the countrymen of Blake an opportunity of 144 William Blake. understanding his social and philosophical doctrines. Following Rossetti and Swin- burne, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their adherents regarded Blake as the apostle of the imaginative subject in painting. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats continued the effort to popularise Blake by publishing the pictures and text of the Prophetic Books. Mr. Arthur Symons (1907) removed many biographical misunderstandings by pub- lishing the impressions of Blake formed by his friends and. acquaintances, among them extracts from Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary and records by Varley, J. T. Smith and Allan Cunningham (Blake’s first biographer). The necessary biographical material was completed when Mr. A. G. B. Russell published his Letters of Blake. Lastly, Mr. Sampson’s edition of the poems, Mr. Russell’s Catalogue of the Engraved Works of Blake (1912) and Mr. Geoffrey Keynes’s Bibliography (1921) made it possible to connect the widely- scattered pictures and engravings with the ideas they were manifestly intended to illustrate and elucidate. Few men of genius have been better served by their biographers and commentators. Among the latter class Blake students are in debt to M. Paul Berger, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. Richard Garnett, Mr. T. Sturge Moore, Mr. Basil de Selincourt (an unsympathetic critic), Mr. Laurence Binyon and Mr. Joseph Wicksteed, Blake’s Biographers 145 who revealed the underlying meaning of the Illustrations of the Book of Job for the first time. An invaluable book this of Mr. Wicksteed, alike for the text and the admir- able reproductions of the twenty-one en- gravings. Equally necessary for study is the volume of reproductions of the Dante drawings prepared by the National Art Collections Fund. There is also Mr. Foster Damon’s systematic analysis of the thought and art of Blake to which the student will turn for a fuller description of many pictures or engravings than is possible in this book. Charming and useful, too, are the repro- ductions in colour by Mr. Fredk. Hollyer, among them the best of the colour prints, the Songs of Innocence and the Book of Thel. Lastly, Blake’s fame owes much to the generosity of his collectors, who are not only most liberal in their loans to public picture- galleries and loan collections, but in permit- ting the reproduction of pictures in books. Mr. Binyon’s beautiful folio issued by the Studio Press, the most handy collection of Blake reproductions available to students, owes very much to the generosity of such collectors as Mr. Graham Robertson, Mr. Riches and Mr. William Bateson. For several years Mr. Graham Robertson has left a generous selection from his Blake treasures on loan at the Tate Gallery, Condon, and two illustrations for this book 146 William Blake are reproduced by bis permission — the Hecate and the Elijah. The ample opportunities for comparative study afforded by recent criticism and by public galleries justify a final effort to define the quality of our artist’s genius. > The phrase ‘ mystic ’ or ‘ inspired craftsman ’ gives some light, but, perhaps, Blake’s best con- tribution to twentieth century achievement is found in the success of. his endeavour to mingle poetry and painting, arts which recent criticism has tended to separate to the great detriment of painting. A long series of colour-prints and water-colour drawings illustrating the Old and New Testament furnish many examples of Blake’s fine faculty for utilising pictorial elements to add significance to a story or idea. The great colour-print, Satan Exulting over Eve, in Mr. Bateson’s collection, with its swirl of flaming background, the sweep of the green- winged devil, and the lovely nude Eve in the coils of the serpent. Is this literary inven- tion ? Only less memorable is the Elohim Creating Adam, in which the fire of creation mingles with the green and brown of the newly made Earth and is held in one vision by the power of the winged Creator. The six uplifted hands which ston6 Achan : are they literary or pictorial ? The lyrical colour scheme in the Ruth and Naomi, which Mr. Graham Robertson has placed on loan Fitzwillicim Museum DEATH ON THE PALE HORSE WATERCOLOUR (face p. 140) Bible Illustrations 147 at the Tate Gallery : the white-robed Elijah on the chariot of flame in the 1795 colour-print is superb illustration, but its quality is pictorial, not literary : the colour- scheme and the single onward movement of the Wise Virgins in the water-colours of Mr. Riches and Miss Carthew : the backs of the retreating Jews in the Woman Taken in Adultery : why, a score of instances could be given. It must suffice to recall the wonderful Death on the Pale Horse, in which every line is alive with what Mr. Symons de- scribed as ‘ the implacable and eternal joy of destruction.' The old man with the sword of destruction and the plunging horse, the angel above and the demon beneath, are fused by the artist’s craft into unforgettable unity. There are those who hate this picture, but their hatred is a measure of Blake’s success as sure as the admiration of those who are only interested in the display of craft. The mingling of two arts is a basic fact in the study of Blake, and, to the end, there will be those who refuse to accept the union of poetry and painting as desirable or justifi- able. But there will also be at least as many who are unable to accept the extraordinary phrase, ' pure art ’ as signifying anything except a faulty analysis of the purpose and end of art effort. Pure art would seem to be 148 William Blake ‘ meaningless art,’ and impure art that which is ' sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’ It is certain that Shakespeare had not art in mind when he penned the phrase, and few real artists or art lovers will accept the separation of art and poetic thought when once they understand the consequences of divorcing the products of craft from the pro- ducts of imaginative vision. Those who seek ingenious and telling conjunctions of tone and colour, or the happy combination of lines and masses, will find much to enjoy in Blake, but they will do him an injustice if they dismiss some of his most telling designs as ‘ literary.’ As a fact the character of Blake’s vision was pictorial in a high degree, in the sense that it was definitely related to the media of expression which a picture- maker has at his command. Perhaps Blake’s splendid gifts for making painting poetical, and poetry pictorial, are best displayed in the Dante water-colours. If the Book of Job furnishes the most accessible and characteristic of Blake’s engravings, the illustrations for Dante s Divine Comedy include the most mature of his water-colour drawings and are the final embodiment of the experiments in colour, design and draughtsmanship which Blake passed on as a result of a long and arduous career. John Linnell gave Blake a folio book containing about a hundred pages Dante Drawings 149 and asked him to fill it with illustrations of Dante’s poem. Blake was engaged upon the work at his death. There are 102 designs in the series, many being little more than rough pencil drawings, with a thin wash of colour. Others are among the most finished work from Blake’s brush. Considered as a whole they have only one rival as illustrations of the Divine Comedy, the silver - point drawings by Botticelli, now in the Cabinet of Engravings at Berlin and in the Vatican Library. The Blake series remained in the possession of the Linnell family until 1918, when they were sold for £ 7660 . Thanks to the National Arts Collection Fund they were distributed among a number of galleries, all within the Empire. The generous purchases made by the Trustees of the Felton Bequest for the Melbourne National Gallery, Victoria, Australia, were specially welcome. In London, the Dante drawings secured for the Tate Gallery include the vivid repre- sentation of Hell’s Gate, which pictures Dante and Virgil passing into the Inferno, where Dante pauses to read the inscription above the lintel. The dark foliage of the creeper which forms the door is in telling contrast to the multicoloured flames mount- ing from the circles of Hell. Very different is the mood in the picture of Homer and the Ancient Poets in the oak grove, which gains 150 William Blake its beauty from the contrast of greenery with the broad band of blue cloud, which crosses the design. The Paolo and Francesca episode occurs as drawing and engraving, and is repre- sented by a vast spiral vortex in which whirl the imprisoned souls of those who loved not wisely but too well. Above is a vision of the lovers’ first kiss. The Plutus of the Fourth Circle, the Simoniac Pope, with the weighty figure of Virgil striding past with Dante in his arms, the Caiaphas, and the Pit of Disease, in which languish the Falsifiers, the Alberti Brothers in the Circle of Traitors, and the Dante ascending the Mount of Pur- gatory are other telling designs. Very characteristic are the great bands of cloud which stretch across many of the designs, as in The Flatterers of the 18th Canto of Hell. The most finished of the series in London galleries is the Beatrice addressing Dante from the Car. As Mr. Binyon has said, the rainbow tints of Blake’s colour scheme give just the sensation of unearthly radiance which the scene requires. The sweep of the heavenly stream and the charming frame of green leaves complete a picture of abiding charm, the very incom- pleteness of which helps the imagination to visualise Dante’s dream. In many ways Blake’s view of Eternity was very different from that of Dante. For the Florentine Dante Drawings 151 the utter transcendence of God was the primary fact. Blake could not conceive the Deity as removed by an infinity of distance from the material world. Dante’s imagina- tion, too, shewed its power in the accuracy and acuteness of his observation. When describing the Other World, he never lost touch with earth. Blake passed more readily from time to eternity and chose to people his imagined lands with creations of his own vision. Nevertheless, Blake triumphed over every disability by the virtue of his imagina- tion, and he makes scene after scene in the Divine Comedy live again as no other illus- trator of Dante has done. The twenty-one Illustrations of Job make up one of the best picture books in bookland. No less delight- ful would be an edition of the Divine Comedy, with reproductions of the 102 water-colour drawings in place before the passages they illuminate. Incidentally, the series of Dante water- colours emphasises the importance of clarity and simplicity as factors in the most telling of Blake’s designs. The visual image which ven the most difficult and complex passage aroused was never vague. Wherever the drawings are finished, the masses are bold and certain, and because of the boldness of the composition and the certainty of the drawing, we trust Blake’s vision. This is the test he would have chosen himself. 152 William Blake ‘ How do we distinguish one face from another/ he asked, ‘ but by the bounding line and its infinite inflexions and movements . What is it that builds a house and plants a garden but the definite and determinate . What is it that distinguishes honesty and knavery, but the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty in the. actions and intentions ? Leave out this line and you leave out life itself.’ This insistence upon clearly defined line and mass is not characteristic of Blake alone but of almost all graphic and plastic art, in particular, of Greek sculpture. Doubt- less, the influence of the Greek . example would have been more potent . if Blake had not chanced to develop certain original notions regarding the ancient Greeks and Romans. Whereas, in 1799, he professed that the purpose for which alone he lived was to renew the lost arts of the Greeks, he was later to condemn them utterly on account of the canon of proportion for the human figure which he attributed to the great Greek sculptors. In the end Blake refused to credit the historic Greeks with their sculptures at all, and described them as copies of greater works by Asiatic Patriarchs, who lived in the ‘ highly cultivated States of Egypt, Moab, Edom, Aram, among the Rivers of Paradise/ Here were made the originals from which ‘ the Greeks and Influence of Greek Art 153 H et ru r ia ns copied Hercules Farnese, Venus of Medicis, Apollo Belvedere and all the grand works of ancient art.’ Modern scholarship has established the profound difference between original Greek work and the Greco-Roman copies mentioned by Blake and in this sense has justified his aesthetic taste. But even had he lived a century later, Blake would probably have allowed his anti-Hellenic antipathies to develop much as they did. His approach to art was not that of the Hellenes, and he would have found a richer virtue in men whom the great Greeks would have ranked among the barbaroi,’ such as the medieval sculptors of France and England, the Byzantine and Romanesque mosaic workers and such painters of the Far East as the masters of the Sung School, for whom art produces something beyond the form of things, even if its importance lies in preserving the form of things.’ , J he , infl uence of Michelangelo is more difficult to gauge. To the end Blake be- lieved that his method was akin to that of the great Christian painters of the Golden Age of the Renaissance. But was he right ? Whereas the imagination of Michelangelo was excited by the sight of the human body until he felt he could construct a vision of the Almighty upon canvas, or release it from the imprisoning stone, Blake saw the human 154 William Blake form as an actual revelation of Deity. With Blake, there was no conscious con- struction of a picture. He painted what he saw and so he endowed Elohim the Creator with a form and rhythm which he knew must belong to the act of creation which he be- lieved he had seen in progress Blake allowed his imagination to move untramellod until it endowed the shape of the primary object — whether man, or sea, or tree, or s y —with a rhythm which expressed his inmost feelings. This was the method of the best among the pre-Raphaelesque painters and sculptors, who felt the visible world as music, rather than as a beautiful and m genious construction. Both methods have their rightness, but they belong to opposite poles of art inspiration. The fact that Blake imposed upon natural form his own sense of rhythm accounts tor not a little of what his critics choose to call Blake’s bad drawing. It is true that Blake’s drawing suffers, at times, from imperfect observation and igmorance of anatomy, but in a deeper sense Blake is a profound draughtsman, m as much as. h s figures have the even greater merits of weight and movement. He deliberately soug to utilise the forms of the animate and inanimate world to express ideas that are outside Nature, and so tr J ns ^ g , U , red h ^!. w objects that they might the better bear his Poet and Painter 155 thought and emotion. The endeavour necessarily made Blake a rebel against the Renaissance imitation of Nature, and in this lies the secret of Blake's influence upon the younger painters of to-day. Among modern artists he was the first to divine the emotional possibilities of formal design and the prime importance of rhythm. Possessed by a keen sense of the emotional significance of his personal experience, he sought the simplifi- cations of line and mass which would make them manifest. But unlike the Post- impressionists of to-day he never allowed himself to be tempted into experiments in so-called ‘ pure ' design ; his simplifications were never so empty that they became meaningless. Above all, he did not strip his syntheses and simplifications of the beauty . which follows from the successful expression of personality. The influence of Blake upon the craft of the painter is all for good, but it is of secondary importance to his influence as a mystic who made his message plain in two arts. As the attraction between Blake and the members of the pre-Raphaelite movement was not accidental, so the growing under- standing and appreciation of Blake in our own day is not a matter of chance. We, too, have witnessed a revolt against the dominance of science, which was nearly akin to the dominance of the reasoning faculty in the i5 6 William Blake eighteenth century. Not a few lovers of art find in the best of Blake s work hints which may help painting once more to make the invisible visible. Blake’s life and work have shewn that there is more in art than representation— that it is a fusion of sight and thought into a vital unity, and that its happiest function is to furnish man with perhaps his only opportunity for knowing the many in the one, apart from the moments of mystical communion with cosmic things which come to the saints in moments of clairvoyant revelation. In Blake’s own words En- thusiastic admiration is the first principle of knowledge, and its last. The man who on examining his own mmd finds nothing of inspiration ought not to dare to be an artist he is a fool, and a cunning knave, suited t the purposes of evil demons. The man who never in his mind and thought travelled to heaven is no artist. It is not given to many men to live con- tinually upon this lofty plane of imaginative insight and Blake moved at times below the height of his endeavour. But judge him by the work which expresses his nature most fully and we must admit that thought, feeling and craft-invention combine into a symphonic whole. Apart from unity and power two qualities make themselves felt in any supreme art effort. One is the Blake's Achievement 157 transcendence of local and temporal elements and the other is a capacity for personal consolation. What lovers of Blake in our own day find is a rich capacity to create a world of experience freed from time and space, and because existent only in imagina- tion, more satisfying than any scheme of things revealed by the reasoning faculties. The best of his pictures assure them that imagination, at any rate, can link the beast in the temporal with the angel in eternity, or if you will, the beast in man with the angel in man. Whistler was wrong. Art is not merely a personal but is a social activity. Great art has not been made by dreamers who take no joy in the ways of their brethren and choose to fashion quaint patterns, satisfying to themselves alone. Pictures would rightly be relegated to the curiosity shop if this were so. On the contrary real works of art demand, not collectors, but an appreciative ‘ audience.’ It is the ‘ audience ’ which distinguishes the work of art from the day- dream, and what is vital in the art of Blake is what Blake shares with his fellow men. Under his guidance, men and women to-day are gaining fresh data for the understanding of life and renewed vitality to meet its difficulties. ‘ A life-enhancing power ’ is one proof of a great art effort, and the paintings and engravings of Blake answer to the test. 158 William Blake And yet, as I write, a doubt arises. Did Blake work for the good of other people, or for personal joy ? He was at all times an enthusiast, and in his enthusiasm lies the best explanation of his power to stir the sensibilities of his fellows. The innermost quality of William Blake will not be revealed to those who persist in searching for the decorative craftsman, or even the purposeful seer. Blake was craftsman and seer, but he was more. The beauty in the best of his designs comes from his creative . power. Creation did not end with Eden ; it is going on here and now. The work of the Shaper of Things, like the work of the earth-born artist, is eternal, since both are ever striving to body forth more of the life and the faith which are in the world. Bergson said in a moment of deep insight, that Nature does not hide from man the moments when his destiny is being accomplished. ‘ She has set up a sign which apprises us every time our activity is in full expansion. This sign is Joy. True joy is always a signal of the triumph of life. Wherever Joy is, creation licis been/ The unity, the vitalising quality, the power to transcend the temporal, and the capacity for personal consolation — in a word, the beauty of Blake’s pictures — are the out- ward and visible signs of their maker’s joy in the universe of created things. In a long life Blake’s Achievement 159 of practice he gained the skill of a master- craftsman, and he died with the joyful sense that his hands could still emit the life- giving spark. The work of such an one never grows old, and Blake, who had joy, will give joy while eyes are made for seeing and hearts for feeling. APPENDIX I List of Pictures by William Blake in British Galleries open to the Public. Tate Gallery, Millbank (National Gallery of British Art). Pitt guiding Behemoth. Tempera on canvas (1808). The Procession from Calvary. Tempera (1803). David delivered out of many waters. Water- colour. Meditations among the Tombs. Water-colour. Oberon and Titania. Water-colour. The Spirit of Nelson guiding Leviathan. Tempera on canvas. Bathsheba at the Bath Tempera on canvas. Satan smiting Job with boils. Tempera on wood. Dante Illustrations. Water-colours (1825-27). ‘ Tu Duca, Tu Signore, e Tu Maestro.’ Hell Gate. The Ancient Poets. Cerberus. Plutus. The Wood of the Self Murderers. 160 Appendix i6x The Simoniac Pope. Devils with Dante and Virgil. Hypocrites, with Caiaphas. The Passage along the Rocks. Donati and the Serpent. The Pit of Disease. Primaeval Giants. A Dantesque Sketch (unidentified). Dante and Virgil leave Hell. The Mountain of Purgatory. The Entrance to Purgatory. Recovery of the Ark. Beatrice addressing Dante from the Car. Dante and the River of Light. Seven Engravings of Dante Illustrations. Twenty-one Illustrations to the Book of Job (1826). The Daughters of Albion. Frontispiece. The Daughters of Albion, page 4. The Bard (from Gray). Tempera on canvas (1809). British Museum : Print Room and Library. i. Books. There is No Natural Religion (1788). Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789-94). The Book of Thel (1789). The Gates of Paradise for Children (1793). 162 William Blake The Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)* America. Uncoloured (1793)- Europe. Coloured (1794)- The First Book of Urizen. Coloured (1794)- The Song of Los. Coloured (1795)- The Book of Los. Coloured (1795)* Young’s Night Thoughts. Forty-three engrav- ings (1797) • Milton, painted with water-colour (1808). Blair’s Grave. Twelve engravings (1808). Jerusalem. Uncoloured (1818). Thornton’s Pastorals. Twenty woodcuts (1821). Illustrations of the Book of Job. Twenty-one engravings (1826). it. Prints and Engravings. Joseph of Arimathea. Line engraving (1773)- Joseph of Arimathea. Colour-print (i794)- Glad Day. Line engraving (1780). Glad Day. Colour-print (1794) • An Elegy. Line engraving (tinted) (1786). Tiriel. Indian ink (1789). The Fertilization of Egypt. Engraving and Indian ink drawing (1791)- Illustrations for Mary Woolstonecraft’s stories (i79i)- The Book of Thel. Relief etchings without text (1794)- Appendix 163 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Colour-prints without text (1794). Job and Ezekiel. Line engravings (1793), The Daughters of Albion. Colour-prints without text (1793). Urizen. Ten colour-prints without text (1794). America. Sheet of studies in pen and ink (1793). The House of Death. Monotype and water-colour ( I 795)- Little Tom the Sailor. Engraving on pewter (1800). Jerusalem. Pencil sketch and colour-print (1804). Blair’s Grave. Three pencil sketches (1808). The Canterbury Pilgrims. Line engravings (1809) . The Whore of Babylon. Indian ink (1809). Thornton’s Pastorals. Eight proofs (1821). The Hiding of Moses. Engraving (1825). George Cumberland’s ' message card.' Engraving (1827). Allegorical Design. Red chalk. Macbeth. Three illustrations in monotype. Nelson guiding Leviathan. Pencil. The Angel of the Dead. Pencil and sepia. Christ trampling upon Satan. Line engraving. The Dream of Thiralatha. Colour-print. Sweeping the Interpreter’s Parlour. Engraving on pewter. An Awestruck Group standing on a rock by the sea. Relief etching. Dante's Divine Comedy. Fifteen pen and ink and water-colour illustrations 164 William Blake Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensing- ton London. Water-colours. Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels (1808). Healing the Woman with an Issue of Blood. The Transfiguration. Naomi entreating Ruth (Fresco Print). St. Augustine and the British Captives. Moses and the Burning Bush. Christ in the House of Martha. Mercy and Truth are met together. Tiriel addressing his Daughters. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum. i. Water-colours. Joseph Ordering Simeon to be Bound (early). Joseph’s Brethren Bowing Before Him. Joseph making himself known. Queen Katharine’s Vision (1807). ii. Books. The Book of Thel. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. America. Uncoloured posthumous copy. Europe. Uncoloured posthumous copy. Jerusalem. Uncoloured posthumous copy. The Pastorals of Virgil. Four woodcuts (1821). Oxford, Bodleian Library. The Book of Thel. Coloured. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Uncoloured. Appendix 165 Oxford, The Ashmolean. Dante and Statius Sleeping. Water-colour. Beatrice and Dante in the Spheres of Flame. Water-colour. The Deity of the Nine Spheres. Birmingham Art Gallery. Designs for Dante’s Divine Comedy : The Mission of Virgil. The Circle of the Lustful. The Baffled Devils. Dante and Bocca degli Abbati. The Sin of Pride. The Recording Angel. Seven Engravings for Dante’s Poems. Robinson Crusoe. Indian ink. Christ Trampling down Satan. Line engraving. The Canterbury Pilgrims. Large engraving. Manchester Art Gallery. Heads of the Poets (Tempera). Spenser. Tasso. Euripides. Shakespeare Dry den. Blair. Homer. Milton. Otway. Camoens. Voltaire. Sidney. Chaucer. Pope. Lucan . Hay ley. Dante. Cowper. 1 66 William Blake Manchester, Whitworth Institute. Six Water-colours for the Hymn for the Nativity (1809) : The Annunciation. The Nativity. Typhon. The Overthrow of Paganism. The Slumber. Moloch. The Ancient of Days. Colour-print (1827). Edinburgh Art Gallery. Hecate. Colour-print. APPENDIX II. Bibliography. Gilchrist, Alexander : Life of Blake. 1863. Edition in one volume, edited by W. Graham Robertson, 1906. Swinburne, A. C. : William Blake. 1868. Ellis, E. J., and Yeats, W. B. : The Works of Blake (three vols.) 1893. Symons, Arthur : William Blake. 1907. Wicksteed, Joseph H. : The Book of, Job. 1910-24. Sampson, John : The Poetical Works of Blake. 1913- Berger, P. : Blake, Poet and Mystic. 1915. Appendix 1 67 Keynes, Geoffrey : A Bibliography of Blake. 1921. B inyon , Lauxence.: The Drawings and Engravings of Blake. 1922. Russell, A. G. B. : The Engravings of Blake. 1922. 102 Reproductions of Dante Drawings, National Art Collections Fund, 1922. Damon, S. F. : Blake, Philosophy and Symbols. 1924. Keynes, Geoffrey: Writings of William Blake . Three volumes. Nonesuch Press. 1925. : ■ ~ rn L (OZ.