William Blake

by Arthur Symons

VIII

Blake had already decided to leave Felpham, 'with the full approbation of Mr. Hayley,' as early as April 1803.'But alas!' he writes to Butts, 'now I may say to you—what perhaps I should not dare to say to any one else—that I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoyed, and that I may converse with my friends in eternity, see visions, dream dreams, and prophesy, and speak parables unobserved, and at liberty from the doubts of other mortals.' 'There is no medium or middle state,' he adds, 'and if a man is the enemy of my spiritual life while he pretends to be the friend of my corporeal, he is a real enemy.' Hayley, once fully realized, had to be shaken off, and we find Blake taking rooms on the first-floor at 17 South Molton Street, and preparing to move to London, when an incident occurs which leaves him, as he put it in a letter to Butts, 'in a bustle to defend myself against a very unwarrantable warrant from a justice of the peace in Chichester, which was taken out against me by a private in Captain Leathes' troop of 1st or Royal Dragoon Guards, for an assault and seditious words.' This was a soldier whom Blake had turned out of his garden, 'perhaps foolishly and perhaps not,' as he said, but with unquestionable vigor. 'It is certain,' he commented, 'that a too passive manner, inconsistent with my active physiognomy, had done me much mischief.' The 'contemptible business' was tried at Chichester on January 11, 1804, at the Quarter Sessions, and Blake was acquitted of the charge of high treason; 'which so gratified the auditory,' says the Sussex Advertiser of the date, 'that the court was, in defiance of all decency, thrown into an uproar by their noisy exultations.'

London, on his return to it, seemed to Blake as desirable as Felpham had seemed after London; and he writes to Hayley: 'The shops in London improve; everything is elegant, clean, and neat; the streets are widened where they were narrow; even Snow Hill is become almost level and is a very handsome street, and the narrow part of the Strand near St. Clement's is widened and become very elegant.' But there were other reasons for satisfaction. In a letter written before he left Felpham, Blake said: 'What is very pleasant, every one who hears of my going to London applauds it as the only course for the interest of all concerned in my works; observing that I ought not to be away from the opportunities London affords of seeing fine pictures, and the various improvements in works of art going on in London.' In October 1804 he writes to Hayley, in the most ecstatic of his letters, recording the miracle or crisis that has suddenly opened his eyes, vitalizing the meditations of Felpham. 'Suddenly,' says the famous letter, 'on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures, I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters.... Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm, or rather madness, for 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, and as I have not been for twenty dark, but very profitable years.' Some of this new radiance may be seen in the water-color of 'The River of Life,' which has been assigned by Mr. Russell to this year; and in those 'Inventions' in illustration of Blair's Grave, by which Blake was to make his one appeal to the public of his time.

That appeal he made through the treacherous services of a sharper named Cromek, an engraver and publisher of prints, who bought the twelve drawings for the price of twenty pounds, on the understanding that they were to be engraved by their designer; and thereupon handed them over to the fashionable Schiavonetti, telling Blake 'your drawings have had the good fortune to be engraved by one of the first artists in Europe.' He further caused a difference between Blake and Stothard which destroyed a friendship of nearly thirty years, never made up in the lifetime of either, though Blake made two efforts to be reconciled. The story of the double commission given by Cromek for a picture of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, and of the twofold accusation of plagiarism, is told clearly enough in the narrative of J. T. Smith (p. 368 below), while Cunningham does his best to confuse the facts in the interests of Cromek. It has been finally summed up by Mr. Swinburne, who comes to this reasonable conclusion: 'It is probable that Stothard believed himself to be not in the wrong; it is certain that Blake was in the right.' As for Cromek, he has written himself down for all time in his true character, naked and not ashamed, in a letter to Blake of May 1807, where the false bargainer asserts: 'Herein I have been gratified; for I was determined to bring you food as well as reputation, though, from your late conduct, I have some reason to embrace your wild opinion, that to manage genius, and to cause it to produce good things, it is absolutely necessary to starve it; indeed, the opinion is considerably heightened by the recollection that your best work, the illustrations of The Grave, was produced when you and Mrs. Blake were reduced so low as to be obliged to live on half a guinea a week.' Cromek published the book by subscription in August 1808, with an 'advertisement' invoking the approval of the drawings as 'a high and original effort of genius' by eleven Royal Academicians, including Benjamin West, Flaxman, Lawrence, and Stothard. 'To the elegant and classical taste of Mr. Fuseli,' he tells us further, 'he is indebted for the excellent remarks on the moral worth and picturesque dignity of the Designs that accompany this Poem.' Fuseli praises pompously the 'genuine and unaffected attitudes,' the 'simple graces which nature and the heart alone can dictate, and only an eye inspired by both, discover,' though finding the artist 'playing on the very verge of legitimate invention.'

It is by the designs to Blair's Grave that Blake is still perhaps chiefly known, outside his own public; nor was he ever so clear, or, in a literal way, so convincing in his rendering of imaginative reality. Something formal tempers and makes the ecstasy explicit; the drawing is inflexibly elegant; all the Gothic secrets that had been learnt among the tombs in Westminster Abbey find their way into these stony and yet strangely living death-beds and monuments of death. No more vehement movement was ever perpetrated than that leap together of the soul and body meeting as the grave opens. If ever the soul was made credible to the mind through the eyes, it is in these designs carved out of abstract form, and planned according to a logic which is partly literal faith in imagination and partly the curtailment of scholastic drawing.

The book contains the names of more than five hundred subscribers, but only one contemporary notice has been found, a notice of two columns, mere drivel and mere raving, signed by the happily undiscovered initials R. H., in the thirty-second number of Leigh Hunt's paper, The Examiner (August 7, 1808, pp. 509, 510). It is under the heading 'Fine Arts,' and is called 'Blake's edition of Blair's Grave.' The notice is rendered specially grotesque by its serious air of arguing with what it takes to be absurdity coupled with 'an appearance of libidinousness' which 'intrudes itself upon the holiness of our thoughts and counteracts their impression.' Like most moralists of the press, this critic's meaning is hard to get at. Here, however, is a specimen: 'But a more serious censure attaches to two of these most heterogeneous and serio-fantastic designs. At the awful day of judgment, before the throne of God himself, a male and female figure are described in most indecent attitudes. It is the same with the salutation of a man and his wife meeting in the pure mansions of Heaven.' Thus sanctified a voice was it that first croaked at Blake out of the 'nest of villains' which he imagined that he was afterwards to 'root out' of The Examiner.

A quite different view of him is to be found in a book which was published before the Grave actually came out, though it contains a reference to the designs and to the 'ardent and encomiastic applause' of 'some of the first artists in the country.' The book, which contained an emblematic frontispiece designed by Blake and engraved by Cromek, was A Father's Memoirs of his Child, written by Benjamin Heath Malkin, then headmaster of Bury Grammar School, in which the father gives a minute and ingenuous account of his child, a prodigy of precocious intellect, who died at the age of nearly seven years. The child was accustomed to do little drawings, some of which are reproduced in the book in facsimile, and the father, after giving his own opinion of them, adds: 'Yet, as my panegyric on such a subject can carry with it no recommendation, I subjoin the testimony of Mr. Blake to this instance of peculiar ingenuity, who has given me his opinion of these various performances in the following terms:—

'"They are all firm, determinate outlines, or identical form. Had the hand which executed these little ideas been that of a plagiary, who works only from the memory, we should have seen blots, called masses; blots without form, and therefore without meaning. These blots of light and dark, as being the result of labour, are always clumsy and indefinite; the effect of rubbing out and putting in, like the progress of a blind man, or of one in the dark, who feels his way, but does not see it. These are not so. Even the copy of Raphael's cartoon of St. Paul preaching is a firm, determinate outline, struck at once, as Protogenes struck his line, when he meant to make himself known to Apelles. The map of Allestone has the same character of the firm and determinate. All his efforts prove this little boy to have had that greatest of all blessings, a strong imagination, a clear idea, and a determinate vision of things in his own mind.'" It is in the lengthy dedication of the book to Thomas Johnes, the translator of Froissart, that Dr. Malkin gives the very interesting personal account of Blake which is reprinted on p. 307 below.

It is not certain whether Blake had ever known little Thomas Malkin, and it would be interesting to know whether it was through any actual influence of his that the child had come to his curious invention of an imaginary country. He drew the map of this country, peopled with names (Nobblede and Bobblobb, Punchpeach and Closetha) scarcely more preposterous than the names which Blake was just then discovering for his own spiritual regions, wrote its chronicles, and even made music for it. The child was born in 1795 and died in 1802, and Blake had been at Felpham since September 1800; but, if they had met before that date, there was quite time for Blake's influence to have shown itself. In 1799 the astonishing child 'could read, without hesitation, any English book. He could spell any words.... He knew the Greek alphabet'; and on his fourth birthday, in that year, he writes to his mother saying that he has got a Latin grammar and English prints. In October 1800 he says: 'I know a deal of Latin,' and in December he is reading Burns's poems, 'which I am very fond of.' Influence or accident, the coincidence is singular, and at least shows us something in Blake's brain working like the brain of a precocious child.

In 1806 Blake wrote a generous and vigorous letter to the editor of the Monthly Review (July 1, 1806) in reply to a criticism which had appeared in Bell's Weekly Messenger on Fuseli's picture of Count Ugolino in the Royal Academy. In 1808 he had himself, and for the fifth and last time, two pictures in the Academy, and in that year he wrote the letter to Ozias Humphrey, describing one of his many 'Last Judgments,' which is given, with a few verbal errors, by J. T. Smith. In December he wrote to George Cumberland, who had written to order for a friend 'a complete set of all you have published in the way of books colored as mine are,' that 'new varieties, or rather new pleasures, occupy my thoughts; new profits seem to arise before me so tempting that I have already involved myself in engagements that preclude all possibility of promising anything.' Does this refer to the success of Blair's Grave, which had just been published? He goes on: 'I have, however, the satisfaction to inform you that I have myself begun to print an account of my various inventions in Art, for which I have procured a publisher, and am determined to pursue the plan of publishing, that I may get printed without disarranging my time, which in future must alone be designing and painting.' To this project, which was never carried out, he refers again in the prospectus printed in anticipation of his exhibition, a copy of which, given to Ozias Humphreys, exists with the date May 15, 1809. A second prospectus is given by Gilchrist as follows:—

'Blake's Chaucer, the Canterbury Pilgrims. This Fresco Picture, representing Chaucer's Characters, painted by William Blake, as it is now submitted to the public.

'The designer proposes to engrave in a correct and finished line manner of engraving, similar to those original copper-plates of Albert Dürer, Lucas Van Leyden, Aldegrave, and the old original engravers, who were great masters in painting and designing; whose methods alone can delineate Character as it is in this Picture, where all the lineaments are distinct.

'It is hoped that the Painter will be allowed by the public (notwithstanding artfully disseminated insinuations to the contrary) to be better able than any other to keep his own characters and expressions; having had sufficient evidence in the works of our own Hogarth, that no other artist can reach the original spirit so well as the Painter himself, especially as Mr. B. is an old, well-known, and acknowledged graver.

'The size of the engraving will be three feet one inch long by one foot high. The artist engages to deliver it, finished, in one year from September next. No work of art can take longer than a year: it may be worked backwards and forwards without end, and last a man's whole life; but he will, at length, only be forced to bring it back to what it was, and it will be worse than it was at the end of the first twelve months. The value of this artist's year is the criterion of Society; and as it is valued, so does Society flourish or decay.

'The price to Subscribers, Four Guineas; two to be paid at the time of subscribing, the other two, on delivery of the print.

'Subscriptions received at No. 28, corner of Broad Street, Golden Square, where the Picture is now exhibiting, among other works, by the same artist.

'The price will be considerably raised to non-subscribers.'

The exhibition thus announced was held at the house of James Blake, and contained sixteen pictures, of which the first nine are described as 'Frescoes' or 'experiment pictures,' and the remaining seven as drawings,' that is, drawings in water-color. The Catalogue (which was included in the entrance fee of half a crown) is Blake's most coherent work in prose, and can be read in Gilchrist, ii. 139-163. It is called 'A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions, painted by William Blake, in Water-Colors, being the ancient Method of Fresco Painting Restored; and Drawings, for Public Inspection, and for Sale by Private Contract.' Crabb Robinson, from whom we have the only detailed account of the exhibition, says that the pictures filled 'several rooms of an ordinary dwelling-house' (see p. "From Crabb Robinson's Reminiscences," below.) He mentions Lamb's delight in the Catalogue,[5] and his declaring 'that Blake's description was the finest criticism he had ever read of Chaucer's poem.' In that letter to Bernard Barton (May 15, 1824), which is full of vivid admiration for Blake ('I must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age'), Lamb speaks of the criticism as 'most spirited, but mystical and full of vision,' and says: 'His pictures—one in particular, the "Canterbury Pilgrims," (far above Stothard's)—have great merit, but hard, dry, yet with grace.' Southey, we know from a sneer in The Doctor at 'that painter of great but insane genius, William Blake,' also went to the exhibition, and found, he tells us, the picture of 'The Ancient Britons,' 'one of the worst pictures, which is saying much.' A note to Mr. Swinburne's William Blake tells us that in the competent opinion of Mr. Seymour Kirkup this picture was 'the very noblest of all Blake's works.' It is now lost; it was probably Blake's largest work, the figures, Blake asserts, being 'full as large as life.' Of the other pictures the seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and sixteenth are lost; the ninth exists in a replica in 'fresco,' and the sixteenth in what is probably a first sketch.

Blake's reason for giving this exhibition was undoubtedly indignation at what he took to be Stothard's treachery in the matter of the 'Canterbury Pilgrims.' This picture (now in the National Gallery, No. 1163) had been exhibited by Cromek throughout the kingdom, and he had announced effusively, in a seven page advertisement at the end of Blair's Grave, the issue of 'a print executed in the line manner of engraving, and in the same excellent style as the portrait of Mr. William Blake, prefixed to this work, by Louis Schiavonetti, Esq., V. A., the gentleman who has etched the prints that at once illustrate and embellish the present volume.' The Descriptive Catalogue is full of angry scorn of 'my rival,' as Blake calls Stothard, and of the 'dumb dollies' whom he has 'jumbled together' in his design, and of Hoppner for praising them in the letter quoted in the advertisement. 'If Mr. B.'s "Canterbury Pilgrims" had been done by any other power than that of the poetic visionary, it would have been as dull as his adversary's,' Blake assures us, and, no doubt, justly. The general feeling of Blake's friends, I doubt not, is summed up in an ill-spelled letter from young George Cumberland to his father, written from the Pay Office, Whitehall, October 14, 1809, which I copy in all its literal slovenliness from the letter preserved in the Cumberland Papers: 'Blakes has published a Catalogue of Pictures being the ancient method of Frescoe Painting Restored you should tell Mr. Barry to get it, it may be the means of serving your friend. It sells for 2/6 and may be had of J. Blake, 28 Broad St., Golden Square, at his Brothers—the Book is a great curiosity. He as given Stothard a complete set down.'

The Catalogue is badly printed on poor paper in the form of a small octavo hook of 66 pages. It is full of fierce, exuberant wisdom, which plunges from time to time into a bright, demonstrative folly; it is a confession, a criticism, and a kind of gospel of sanctity and honesty and imagination in art. The whole thing is a thinking aloud. One hears an impetuous voice as if saying: 'I have been scorned long enough by these fellows, who owe to me all that they possess; it shall be so no longer.' As he thinks, his pen follows; he argues with foes actually visible to him; never does he realize the indifferent public that may glance at what he has written, and how best to interest or convince it if it does. He throws down a challenge, and awaits an answer.

What answer came is rememberable among the infamies of journalism. Only one newspaper noticed the exhibition, and this was again The Examiner. The notice appeared under the title 'Mr. Blake's Exhibition' in No. 90, September 17, 1809, pp. 605-6, where it fills two columns. It is unsigned, but there can be no doubt that it was written by the R. H. of the former article. The main part of it is taken up by extracts from the Descriptive Catalogue, italicized and put into small capitals 'to amuse the reader, and satisfy him of the truth of the foregoing remarks.' This is all that need be quoted of the foregoing remarks:

'But when the ebullitions of a distempered brain are mistaken for the sallies of genius by those whose works have exhibited the soundest thinking in art, the malady has indeed attained a pernicious height, and it becomes a duty to endeavor to arrest its progress. Such is the case with the productions and admirers of William Blake, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement, and, consequently, of whom no public notice would have been taken, if he was not forced on the notice and animadversion of The Examiner, in having been held up to public admiration by many esteemed amateurs and professors as a genius in some respect original and legitimate. The praises which these gentlemen bestowed last year on this unfortunate man's illustrations to Blair's Grave have, in feeding his vanity, stimulated him to publish his madness more largely, and thus again exposed him, if not to the derision, at least to the pity of the public.

...Thus encouraged, the poor man fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are unintelligible allegory, others an attempt at sober character by caricature representation, and the whole "blotted and blurred," and very badly drawn. These he calls an Exhibition, of which he has published a Catalogue, or rather a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain. One of the pictures represents Chaucer's Pilgrims, and is in every respect a striking contrast to the admirable picture of the same subject by Mr. Stothard, from which an exquisite print is forthcoming from the hand of Schiavonetti.'

The last great words of the Catalogue, 'If a man is master of his profession, he cannot be ignorant that he is so; and, if he is not employed by those who pretend to encourage art, he will employ himself, and laugh in secret at the pretenses of the ignorant, while he has every night dropped into his shoe, as soon as he puts it off, and puts out the candle, and gets into bed, a reward for the labours of the day such as the world cannot give, and patience and time await to give him all that the world can give': those noble, lovely, pathetic and prophetic words, are quoted at the end of the article without comment, as if to quote them was enough. It was.

In 1803 William Blake sold to Thomas Butts eleven drawings for fourteen guineas. In 1903 twelve water-color drawings in illustration of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso were sold for £1960, and the twenty-one water-color drawings for Job for £5600. These figures have their significance, but the significance must not be taken to mean any improvement in individual taste. When a selection from the pictures in the Butts collection was on view at Sotheby's I heard a vulgar person with a loud voice, a dealer or a dealer's assistant, say with a guffaw: 'It would make me sick to have these things round my room.' That vulgar person represents the eternal taste of the multitude; only, in the course of a hundred years, a few men of genius have repeated after one another that Blake was a man of genius, and their united voices have carried further than the guffaws of vulgar persons, repeated generation after generation. And so in due course, when Blake has been properly dead long enough, there is a little public which, bidding against itself, gambles cheerfully for the possession of the scraps of paper on which he sent in his account, against the taste of his age and the taste of all the ages.

Blake himself had never any doubt of his own greatness as an artist, and some of the proud or petulant things which he occasionally wrote (the only outbreaks of impatience in a life wholly given up to unceasing and apparently unrewarded labour) have been quoted against him as petty or unworthy, partly because they are so incalculated and so childlike. Blake 'bore witness,' as he might have said, that he had done his duty: 'for that I cannot live without doing my duty, to lay up treasures in heaven, is certain and determined,' he writes from Felpham. And he asserted the truth of his own genius, its truth in the spiritual sense, its divine origin, as directly and as emphatically as he asserted everything which he had apprehended as truth. He is merely stating what seems to him an obvious but overlooked fact when he says: 'In Mr. B.'s Britons the blood is seen to circulate in their limbs: he defies competition in coloring'; and again: 'I am, like other men, just equal in invention and execution of my work,' All art, he had realized, which is true art, is equal, as every diamond is a diamond. There is only true and false art. Thus when he says in his prospectus of 1793 that he has been 'enabled to bring before the Public works (he is not afraid to say) of equal magnitude and consequence with the productions of any age or country,' he means neither more nor less than when he says in the Descriptive Catalogue of 1809: 'He knows that what he does is not inferior to the grandest antiques. Superior it cannot be, for human power cannot go beyond either what he does or what they have done; it is the gift of God, it is inspiration and vision.

...The human mind cannot go beyond the gift of God, the Holy Ghost.' It is in humility rather than in pride that he equals himself with those who seemed to him the genuine artists, the humility of a belief that all art is only a portion of that 'Poetic Genius, which is the Lord,' offered up in homage by man, and returning, in mere gratitude, to its origin. When he says, 'I do not pretend to paint better than Rafael or Michael Angelo, or Julio Romano, or Albert Dürer, but I do pretend to paint finer than Rubens, or Rembrandt, or Titian, or Correggio,' he merely means, in that odd coupling and contrasting of names, to assert his belief in the supremacy of strong, clear, masculine execution over what seemed to him (to his limited knowledge, not false instinct) the heresy and deceit of 'soft and effeminate' execution, the 'broken lines, broken masses, and broken colors' of the art which 'loses form.' In standing up for his ideal of art, he stands up himself, like a champion. 'I am hid,' he writes on the flyleaf of Reynolds's Discourses, and, in the last sentence of that 'Public Address' which was never printed, he declares: 'Resentment for personal injuries has had some share in this public address, but love to my art, and zeal for my country, a much greater.' And in the last sentence of the Descriptive Catalogue, he sums up the whole matter, so far as it concerned him, finally, and with a 'sure and certain hope' which, now that it has been realized, so long afterwards, comes to us like a reproach.

'Shall Painting,' asks Blake in his Descriptive Catalogue, 'be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile representations of merely mortal and perishing substances, and not be, as poetry and music are, elevated into its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception? No, it shall not be so! Painting, as well as poetry and music, exists and exults in immortal thoughts.' It was to restore this conception of art to England that Blake devoted his life. 'The Enquiry in England,' he said, in his marginalia to Reynolds, 'is not whether a Man has Talents and Genius, but whether he is Passive and Polite and a Virtuous Ass.' He says there: 'Ages are all Equal, but Genius is always above the Age.' He looks on Bacon and Locke and Burke and Reynolds as men who 'mock Inspiration and Vision.' 'Inspiration and Vision,' he says, 'was then, and now is, and I hope will always Remain, my Element, my Eternal Dwelling-place.' 'The Ancients did not mean to Impose when they affirmed their belief in Vision and Revelation. Plato was in Earnest. Milton was in Earnest. They believed that God did visit Man Really and Truly.' Further, 'Knowledge of Ideal Beauty is not to be Acquired. It is born with us.... Man is Born Like a Garden ready Planted and Sown. This World is too poor to produce one Seed.'

What Blake meant by vision, how significantly yet cautiously he interchanged the words 'seen' and 'imagined,' has been already noted in that passage of the Descriptive Catalogue, where he answers his objectors: 'The connoisseurs and artists who have made objections to Mr. B.'s mode of representing spirits with real bodies would do well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, the Apollo, which they admire in Greek statues are, all of them, representations of spiritual existences, of Gods immortal, to the ordinary perishing organ of sight; and yet they are embodied and organized in solid marble. Mr. B. requires the same latitude, and all is well.' Then comes the great definition, which I will not repeat: 'He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments.'

'The world of imagination,' he says elsewhere, 'is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation or vegetation is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.' What is said here, transmuted by an instinct wholly an artist's into a great defense of the reality of imagination in art, is a form of the central doctrine of the mystics, formulated by Swedenborg in something very like Blake's language, though with errors or hesitations which is what Blake sets himself to point out in his marginalia to Swedenborg. As, in those marginalia, we see Blake altering every allusion to God into an allusion to 'the Poetic Genius,' so, always, we shall find him understanding every promise of Christ, or Old Testament prophecy, as equally translatable into terms of the imaginative life, into terms of painting, poetry, or music. In the rendering of vision he required above all things that fidelity which can only be obtained through 'minutely particular' execution. 'Invention depends Altogether upon Execution or Organisation; as that is right or wrong, so is the Invention perfect or imperfect. Whoever is set to Undermine the Execution of Art is set to destroy Art. Michael Angelo's Art depends on Michael Angelo's Execution Altogether.... He who admires Rafael Must admire Rafael's Execution. He who does not admire Rafael's Execution can not admire Rafael.' Finally, 'the great and golden rule of art as well as of life,' he says in the Descriptive Catalogue, 'is this: that the more distinct, sharp, and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imagination, plagiarism, and bungling.... What is it that distinguishes honesty from 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. All is chance again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it again, before man or beast can exist.'

In Blake's work a great fundamental conception is rarely lacking, and the conception is not, as it has often been asserted, a literary, but always a pictorial, one. At times imagination and execution are wholly untired, as in the splendid water-color of 'Death on the Pale Horse,' in which not only every line and color is alive with passionate idea, the implacable and eternal joy of destruction, but also with a realized beauty, a fully grasped invention. No detail has been slurred in vision, or in the setting down of the vision: the crowned old man with the sword, the galloping horse, the pestilential figure of putrid scales and flames below, and the wide-armed angel with the scroll-above. In the vision of 'Fire' there is grandeur and, along with it, something inadequately seen, inadequately rendered. Flame and smoke embrace, coil, spire, swell in bellying clouds, divide into lacerating tongues, tangle and whirl ecstatically upward and onward, like a venomous joy in action, painting the air with all the color of all the flowers of evil. But the figures in the foreground are partly academic studies, partly archaic dolls, in which only the intention is admirable. In 'Job Confessing his Presumption to God' one sees all that is great and all that is childish in Blake's genius. I have never seen so sufficing a suggestion of disembodied divine forces as in this whirling cloud of angels, cast out and swept round by the wind of God's speed, like a cascade of veined and tapering wings, out of which ecstatic and astonished heads leap forward. But in the midst of the wheel a fierce old man, with outstretched arms (who is an image of God certainly not corrected out of any authentic vision), and, below, the extinguished figure of Job's friends, and Job, himself one of Blake's gnome-like old men with a face of rigid awe and pointing fingers of inarticulate terror, remain no more than statements, literal statements, of the facts of the imagination. They are summarized remembrances of vision, not anything 'imagined in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than the perishing mortal eye can see.'

Or, might it not be said that it is precisely through this minute accuracy to the detail of imagination that this visionary reality comes to seem to us unreal? In Blake every detail is seen with intensity, and with equal intensity. No one detail is subordinated to another, every inch of his surface is equally important to him; and from this unslackening emphasis come alike his arresting power and the defect which leaves us, though arrested, often unconvinced. In his most splendid things, as in 'Satan exulting over Job' and 'Cain fleeing from the Grave of Abel,' which are painted on wood, as if carved or graved, with a tumult of decorative color, detail literally overpowers the sense of sight, like strong sunlight, and every outline seizes and enters into you simultaneously. At times, as in 'The Bard of Gray,' and 'The Spiritual Form of Pitt' in the National Gallery, he is mysteriously lyrical in his paint, and creates a vague emotion out of a kind of musical color, which is content to suggest. Still more rarely, as in the ripe and admirable 'Canterbury Pilgrims,' which is a picture in narrative, as like Chaucer as Chaucer himself, but unlike any other picture, he gives us a vision of worldly reality; but it was of this picture that he said: 'If Mr. B.'s "Canterbury Pilgrims" had been done by any other power than that of the poetic visionary, it would have been as dull as his adversary's.' Pure beauty and pure terror creep and flicker in and out of all his pictures, with a child's innocence; and he is unconscious of how far he is helped or hindered, as an artist, by that burden of a divine message which is continually upon him. He is unconscious that with one artist the imagination may overpower the technique, as awe overpowers the senses, while to another artist the imagination gives new life to the technique. Blake did not understand Rembrandt, and imagined that he hated him; but there are a few of his pictures in which Rembrandt is strangely suggested. In 'The Adoration of the Three Kings' and in 'The Angel appearing to Zacharias' there is a lovely depth of color, bright in dimness, which has something of the warmth and mystery of Rembrandt, and there are details in the design of 'The Three Kings' (the door open on the pointing star in the sky and on the shadowy multitude below) which are as fine in conception as anything in the Munich 'Adoration of the Shepherds.' But in these, or in the almost finer 'Christ in the Garden, sustained by an Angel' (fire flames about the descending angel, and the garden is a forest of the night), how fatal to our enjoyment is the thought of Rembrandt! To Rembrandt, too, all things were visions, but they were visions that he saw with unflinching eyes; he saw them with his hands; he saw them with the faces and forms of men, and with the lines of earthly habitations.

And, above all, Rembrandt, all the greatest painters, saw a picture as a whole, composed every picture consciously, giving it unity by his way of arranging what he saw. Blake was too humble towards vision to allow himself to compose or arrange what he saw, and he saw in detail, with an unparalleled fixity and clearness. Every picture of Blake, quite apart from its meaning to the intelligence, is built up in detail like a piece of decoration; and, widely remote as are both intention and result, I am inclined to think he composed as Japanese artists compose, bit by bit, as he saw his picture come piece by piece before him. In every picture there is a mental idea, and there is also a pictorial conception, working visually and apart from the mental idea. In the greatest pictures (in the tremendous invention, for instance, of the soldiers on Calvary casting lots for the garments of Christ), the two are fused, with overwhelming effect; but it happens frequently that the two fail to unite, and we see the picture, and also the idea, but not the idea embodied in the picture.

Blake's passion for detail, and his refusal to subordinate any detail for any purpose, is to be seen in all his figures, of which the bodies seem to be copied from living statues, and in which the faces are wrung into masks of moods which they are too urgent to interpret. A world of conventional patterns, in which all natural things are artificial and yet expressive, is peopled by giants and dolls, muscular and foolish, in whom strength becomes an insane gesture and beauty a formal prettiness. Not a flower or beast has reality, as our eyes see it, yet every flower and beast is informed by an almost human soul, not the mere vitality of animal or vegetable, but a consciousness of its own lovely or evil shape. His snakes are not only wonderful in their coils and colors, but each has his individual soul, visible in his eyes, and interpreting those coils and colors. And every leaf, unnatural yet alive, and always a piece of decoration, peers with some meaning of its own out of every corner, not content to be forgotten, and so uneasily alive that it draws the eye to follow it. 'As poetry,' he said, 'admits not a letter that is insignificant, so painting admits not a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant—much less an insignificant blur or mark.' The stones with which Achan has been martyred live each with a separate and evil life of its own, not less vivid and violent than the clenched hands raised to hurl other stones; there is menacing gesture in the cloud of dust that rises behind them. And these human beings and these angels, and God (sometimes an old bowed Jew, fitted into a square or lozenge of winged heads) are full of the energy of a life which is betrayed by their bodies. Sometimes they are mere child's toys, like a Lucifer of bright baubles, painted chromatically, with pink hair and blushing wings, hung with bursting stars that spill out animalculæ. Sometimes the whole man is a gesture and convulses the sky; or he runs, and the earth vanishes under him. But the gesture devours the man also; his force as a cipher annihilates his very being.

In greatness of conception Blake must be compared with the greatest among artists, but the difference between Blake and Michelangelo is the difference between the artist in whom imagination overpowers technique, as awe overpowers the senses, and the artist in whom imagination gives new life to technique. No one, as we have seen, was more conscious of the identity which exists in the work of the greatest artists between conception and execution. But in speaking of invention and execution as equal, he is assuming, as he came to do, the identity of art and inspiration, the sufficiency of first thoughts in art. 'Be assured,' he writes to Mr. Butts from Felpham, 'that there is not one touch in those drawings and pictures but what came from my head and heart in unison.... If I were to do them over again, they would lose as much as they gained, because they were done in the heat of my spirit.' He was an inexhaustible fountain of first thoughts, and to him first thoughts only were of importance. The one draughtsman of the soul, he drew, no doubt, what he saw as he saw it; but he lacked the patience which is a part of all supreme genius. Having seen his vision, he is in haste to record what he has seen hastily; and he leaves the first rough draft as it stands, not correcting it by a deliberate seeing over again from the beginning, and a scrupulous translation of the terms of eternity into the terms of time. I was once showing Rodin some facsimiles of Blake's drawings, and telling him about Blake, I said: 'He used to literally see these figures; they are not mere inventions.' 'Yes,' said Rodin, 'he saw them once; he should have seen them three or four times.' There, it seems to me, is the fundamental truth about the art of Blake: it is a record of vision which has not been thoroughly mastered even as vision. 'No man,' said Blake, 'can improve an original invention; nor can an original invention exist without execution organized, delineated, and articulated, either by God or man.' And he said also: '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.' But Blake's imagination is in rebellion, not only against the limits of reality, but against the only means by which he can make vision visible to others. And thus he allows himself to be mastered by that against which he rebels: that power of the hand by which art begins where vision leaves off.