A year later Blake advertised and opened his exhibition; which he was about as qualified to manage as little Malkin might have been. Between anger, innocence, want of funds and sense of merit, he would assuredly have ruined a better chance than he ever had. With the exception of his Canterbury Pilgrims, the choice of pictures and designs for exhibition seems to have been somewhat unhappy.[7] The admirable power and high dramatic quality of that singular but noble picture, the latent or superincumbent beauty which corrects and redeems its partial ugliness, the strong imagination and the fanciful justice of the entire work, were invisible to all but such spectators as Charles Lamb; if indeed there were ever another capable of seeing them to such purpose. Whatever portion of the like merit there may have been in the other works exhibited was still more utterly lost upon the few who saw them at all; for of these we have scarcely any record beyond Blake’s own. One journal alone appears to have noticed the exhibition. An angry allusion of Blake’s to some assault of the Examiner newspaper upon his works and character has been hitherto left unexplained, presumably through a not irrational contempt. That Blake may be cleared from any charge of perversity, a brief account of the quarrel is here appended. Contemptible as are both the journeyman writer and his poor day’s work, they have been found worth tracking down on account of the game flown at.
In the thirtieth number of the Examiner (August 7th, 1808) there is a review (signed R. H.) of the Blair’s Grave, sufficiently impudent in manner and incapable in matter to have provoked a milder spirit than Blake’s. Fuseli’s prefatory note is cited with a tone of dissentient patronage not lightly to be endured; “none but such a visionary as Mr. Blake or such a frantic (sic) as Mr. Fuseli could possibly fancy,” and so forth; then follows some chatter about the failures of great poets, “utter impossibility of representing Spirit to the eye” (except by means of italic type), “insipid,” “absurd,” “all the wise men of the East would not possibly divine,” “small assistance of the title” (italics again), “how are we to find out?” (might not one reply with Thersites, “Make that demand of thy Maker?”), “how absurd,” “more serious censure,” “most heterogeneous and serio-fantastic,” “most indecent,” “appearance of libidinousness,” “much to admire, but more to censure,” and all the common-places of that pestilent old style which, propped on italics and points of exclamation, halts at every sentence between a titter, a shrug, and a snarl. Schiavonetti also “has done more than justice” to Blake, and Blair and his engraver are finally bidden to divide the real palm. Who this reviewer was, no man need either know or care; but all may now understand the point of Blake’s allusion. Next year however the real batteries were opened. It is but loathsome labour to shovel out this decomposed rubbish from the catacombs of liberal journalism; but if thus only we can explain an apparently aimless or misplaced reference on the great artist’s part, it may be worth while to throw up a few spadefuls.
This second article bears date September 17th, 1809, No. 90 of the Examiner, and is labelled “Mr. Blake’s Exhibition.” The contributor has already lapsed from simple fatuity into fatuity compound with scurrility. Blake here figures as “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” (the man’s grammar here goes mad on its own account, but what then?) “forced on the notice and animadversion of the Examiner in having been held up” (the case by this time is fairly desperate) “to public admiration;” such is the eccentricity of human error. The Blair of last year “was a futile endeavour by bad drawings to represent immateriality by bodily personifications,” and so forth; once again, “the tasteful hand of Schiavonetti,” one regrets to remember, was employed to bestow “an exterior charm on deformity and nonsense. Thus encouraged, the poor man” (to wit, Blake) “fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are”—any one may finish that for the critic. The catalogue is “a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness (sic), and egregious vanity.” Stothard and the irrepressible Schiavonetti are of course held up in contrast to the “distempered brain” which produced Blake’s Pilgrims. The picture of The Ancient Britons “is a complete caricature; the colour of the flesh is exactly like hung beef.” Here we will pull the man up short and have done with him. He shirks a signature this time; and whether or no he were the same as last year’s critic, those may find out who care.
“Arcadiæ pecuaria rudere dicas;” would not one say that this mingling bray and howl had issued through the throat and nostril of some one among the roving or browsing cattle of our own daily or weekly literature, startled at smelling some incongruous rose in his half-eaten thistle-heap? Such feeders were always one in voice and one in palate: it were waste of wood and iron to cudgel or to prod them. Even when their clamour becomes too intolerably dissonant we may get out of hearing and solace our vexed ears and spirits with reflection on that axiom of Blake’s, which, though savouring in such a case of excessive optimism, we will strive to hope is true:
“The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,
Are waves that beat on Heaven’s shore.”
This was not Blake’s only connexion or collision with the journals of his day. An adverse notice of Fuseli had excited him to more direct reprisals than the attack upon himself now did. The Monthly Magazine for July 1st, 1806 (vol. xxi. pp. 520, 521), contains the following letter, which is now first unearthed and seems worth saving. It is not without perversities; neither is it wanting in vigour and fervour of thought.
“To the Editor of the ‘Monthly Magazine.’
“Sir,—My indignation was exceedingly moved at reading a criticism in Bell’s Weekly Messenger (25th May) on the picture of Count Ugolino, by Mr. Fuseli, in the Royal Academy Exhibition; and your magazine being as extensive in its circulation as that paper, and as it also must from its nature be more permanent, I take the advantageous opportunity to counteract the widely-diffused malice which has for many years, under the pretence of admiration of the arts, been assiduously sown and planted among the English public against true art, such as it existed in the days of Michael Angelo and Raphael. Under pretence of fair criticism and candour, the most wretched taste ever produced has been upheld for many, very many years; but now, I say, now its end has come. Such an artist as Fuseli is invulnerable, he needs not my defence; but I should be ashamed not to set my hand and shoulder, and whole strength, against those wretches who, under pretence of criticism, use the dagger and the poison.
“My criticism on this picture is as follows: ‘Mr. Fuseli’s Count Ugolino is the father of sons of feeling and dignity, who would not sit looking in their parent’s face in the moments of his agony, but would rather retire and die in secret while they suffer him to indulge his passionate and innocent grief, his innocent and venerable madness, and insanity, and fury, and whatever paltry cold-hearted critics cannot, because they dare not, look upon. Fuseli’s Count Ugolino is a man of wonder and admiration, of resentment against man and devil, and of humiliation before God: prayer and parental affection fills the figure from head to foot. The child in his arms, whether boy or girl signifies not (but the critic must be a fool who has not read Dante, and who does not know a boy from a girl); I say, the child is as beautifully drawn as it is coloured—in both, inimitable; and the effect of the whole is truly sublime, on account of that very colouring which our critic calls black and heavy. The German-flute colour, which was used by the Flemings (they call it burnt bone), has [? so] possessed the eye of certain connoisseurs, that they cannot see appropriate colouring, and are blind to the gloom of a real terror.
“The taste of English amateurs has been too much formed upon pictures imported from Flanders and Holland, consequently our countrymen are easily brow-beat on the subject of painting; and hence it is so common to hear a man say, ‘I am no judge of pictures;’ but, O Englishmen! know that every man ought to be a judge of pictures, and every man is so who has not been connoisseured out of his senses.