Here again is the strange mythical figure, half-swan, half-woman, floating on the stream; or the gigantic Cyclopean gate of piled stones, with the wistful crowd about it, and the crescent moon seen through the huge orifice; or that mysterious design of the little bewildered figure, with arms outspread in agony and despair, stumbling between the huge firmly set feet of a gigantic being, to whose ankle-bone he hardly reaches.
Yet with all this subservience of accessories to form, Blake's anatomy is far from perfect. He had a trick of attenuating and elongating the thigh, as in one of the cases we mentioned above, where the young figure in the rising light kneels on the top of the mound into which the old bent man is being urged; or in the three melancholy beings represented on p. 51 of the Jerusalem—Vala, Hyle, and Skofeld, the anatomy of the second figure being of the stiffest kind—the attitude aimed at being that of prostration or abandonment, the head between the knees, as in the story of Elijah.
Neither is it universally true that he spends no pains on backgrounds or distances. Occasionally there is some salient and distant point flashed in with a delicacy that reminds you of Albert Dürer, as in one of the coarsely engraved woodcuts, done in 1820 to illustrate Philips's pastorals, where in a background between two heavily outlined hills appears a distant town on the hillside, with spires and roofs lying in its own circle of sunlight, divinely delicate and airy.
Or those rude swathes of newly cut corn that lie beside the wrinkled oak, whose diminished top bows in the tempest that fills the sky with a flickering rain, half-lighted by the crescent moon. In such pictures it is the feeling for nature, in many of them strangely resembling Bewick, which rises above the obvious coarseness of the drawing, and is indeed rather concealed than suggested, as a great artist might cover a superb and glowing work with a filthy cloth of service, and replace it almost fretfully while still the gazer looked. And this quality one is never surprised at others for not recognising, as it depends for its effect upon no technical excellence, but simply on the fact that there was poetical inspiration behind it which demands poetical sympathy. But the most brilliant lesson of Blake's suggestiveness is to be drawn from the rude designs of Gates of Paradise: the spirits of the elements are among the rudest and yet the most poetical of these. "Air" looks from his perch in clouds, drawn as hardly as boulder stones, and clasps his dizzy brow. "Water" sits brooding complacently with outspread hands, in a universal dissolution (the face, be it noted, bears a strange resemblance to that of Mr. Gladstone). Blake was a prophet, and it is impossible to say at what moments, present and to come, his visions may not be found illuminating our history.
But it is in the region of pure fancy—fancy, it must be confessed, which, though sometimes of the essence of the purest poetry, is often on the border line of insanity, that Blake is at his best. Such a design as that from the Daughters of Albion, of God measuring the world with a pair of golden compasses, which contrives to give an impression of vastness and mystery in spite of the precise delineation of hands and hair; the original sketch of this is in the British Museum, and it is interesting to note how much it is altered in the finished design—the position of the chief figure being improved, and the details carefully worked out.
Again in "America" there is a notable design, a drowned man lying at the bottom of an unfathomed sea, still undecayed, though the sunken ribs and stiffening limbs show that he has been long dead, and is suffering a sea change: the worms crawl round him and beneath him, and the fish with large eyes poise in the gloom—notable because, though harshly and literally drawn, and crudely coloured, nothing hinted save what is actually seen, there is a dark suggestiveness about it which fairly takes captive the sense. In "Los" again there is a design of little figures, male and female, of a fairy kind (such perhaps as at the roseleaf burial, of which Blake in a waking vision was the spectator), seated among the petals of a huge lily, with a background of night and stars. This, in the British Museum collection, is coarsely coloured, the night having no aerial quality, no distance, and the lily itself and the vestures of the pigmies being disagreeably strained in tint. But there is a latent spirit which many a more delicately painted study lacks.
But it is as the delineator of immensity and secret horror that Blake by his temperament was pre-eminent. Most people know, and none can describe, a certain nightmare sense of vastness and weight, which is neither near nor far, but of ambiguous horror. This, which is a mental effect of some disordered brain cell, is suggested instinctively by certain of Blake's pictures. Horror is a quality difficult to produce deliberately; it tends to become instantly grotesque, and to provoke mere laughter unless it is based on some secret dismay. Look, for instance, at the work of Henry Fuseli, a contemporary of Blake's, and obviously indebted to him for such a picture as his Nightmare, which aims at producing, and fails to produce, the very impression which Blake awakens, so easily, that it is by no means certain that he always intended it. It is easy to multiply instances of this, but we will take only two. One is the terrible picture in the Job series, where Satan with a look of hard fury turns with his hand the nozzle of an inky cloud, which, swelling into bigness, fills all the sky behind and above, on the body of the prostrate saint. And again in the well-known design for Hamlet's Ghost, the drawing of which is in the British Museum, the stiff arms and hanging hands are lit with a difficult light, that seems to strike upwards from some unknown source. The background is a waste line of sea; on the young man's head, as he kneels, the hair appears to knot itself in terror, while the agony of the woeful eyes of the spirit, which seem to claim pity and revenge, and yet to be too distraught for either, can never be forgotten.
The noble designs of the Book of Job, given by Gilchrist in full, contain the summary of Blake's best qualities: it would be out of place to discuss them here, but a student of Blake's art must make them his first and last study.
It is strange to find that, as a critic, one drifts unconsciously into making the very excuse for his art that one cannot permit to be made for his poetry. The luminous soul shines through, the critic says. But is not much right in art that is not right in literature? Through plastic art we appeal directly to the sensibilities of many untutored souls, that we could not touch through literature. Granted that primarily the object of both art and literature is to gladden and refine, art of the two has the wider scope, and reaps a larger harvest, out of spirits that have never been touched and never can be touched, for want of culture, by anything worth calling literature at all.
Blake's republicanism in art was such that he chose his masters by a theory of his own: Raphael, Michael Angelo, Albert Dürer and Giulio Romano were his idols; Titian, Rubens, Correggio and Rembrandt he abhorred and despised. The selection on the whole did him credit, at the time when it was made. At the same time the attitude which he adopts towards the profanum vulgus is almost sacerdotal in its claims. It never for a moment conceals that the artist must please his audience first; but his eye, as he chides, is on the beast. He flouts the verdict of his contemporaries on himself, while he holds the verdict of posterity over the head of his enemies. The attitude is neither dignified nor even rational. "To imitate," he wrote, "I abhor. I obstinately adhere to the true style of art, such as Michael Angelo, Giulio Romano, Raphael and Albert Dürer left it. I demand therefore of the amateurs of art the encouragement which is my due. If they continue to refuse, theirs is the loss, not mine, and theirs is the contempt of posterity. I have enough in the appreciation of fellow-labourers; this is my glory and my exceeding great reward: I go on and nothing can hinder my course."