13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,
August 23, 1799.
Blake tells Cumberland the whole story quite cheerfully, and ends with these significant words, full of patience, courtesy, and sad humour: 'As to Myself, about whom you are so kindly Interested, I live by Miracle. I am Painting small Pictures from the Bible. For as to Engraving, in which art I cannot reproach myself with any neglect, yet I am laid by in a corner as if I did not exist, and since my Youngs Night Thoughts have been published, even Johnson and Fuseli have discarded my Graver. But as I know that He who works and has his health cannot starve, I laugh at Fortune and Go on and on. I think I foresee better Things than I have ever seen. My Work pleases my employer, and I have an order for Fifty small Pictures at One Guinea each, which is something better than mere copying after another artist. But above all I feel myself happy and contented, let what will come. Having passed now near twenty years in ups and downs, I am used to them, and perhaps a little practice in them may turn out to benefit. It is now exactly Twenty years since I was upon the ocean of business, and tho I laugh at Fortune, I am persuaded that She Alone is the Governor of Worldly Riches, and when it is Fit She will call on me. Till then I wait with Patience, in hopes that She is busied among my Friends.'
The employer is, no doubt, Mr. Butts, for whom Blake had already begun to work: we know some of the 'frescoes' and color-prints which belong to this time; among them, or only just after, the incomparable 'Crucifixion,' in which the soldiers cast lots in the foreground and the crosses are seen from the back, against a stormy sky and lances like Tintoretto's. But it was also the time of all but the latest Prophetic Books (or of all but the latest of those left to us), and we may pause here for a moment to consider some of the qualities that Blake was by this time fully displaying in his linear and colored inventions and 'Visions of Eternity.'
It is by his energy and nobility of creation that Blake takes rank among great artists, in a place apart from those who have been content to study, to observe, and to copy. His invention of living form is like nature's, unintermittent, but without the measure and order of nature, and without complete command over the material out of which it creates. In his youth he had sought after prints of such inventive work as especially appealed to him, Michelangelo, Raphael, Dürer; it is possible that, having had 'very early in life the ordinary opportunities,' as Dr. Malkin puts it, 'of seeing pictures in the houses of noblemen and gentlemen, and in the king's palaces,' he had seen either pictures, or prints after pictures, of the Italian Primitives, whose attitudes and composition he at times suggests; and, to the end, he worked with Dürer's 'Melancholia' on his work-table and Michelangelo's designs on his walls. It not infrequently happened that a memory of form created by one of these great draughtsmen presented itself as a sort of short cut to the statement of the form which he was seeing or creating in his own imagination. A Devil's Advocate has pointed out 'plagiarisms' in Blake's design, and would dismiss in consequence his reputation for originality. Blake had not sufficient mastery of technique to be always wholly original in design; and it is to his dependence on a technique not as flexible as his imagination was intense that we must attribute what is unsatisfying in such remarkable inventions as 'The House of Death' (Milton's lazar-house) in the Print Doom of the British Museum. Its appeal to the imagination is partly in spite of what is 'organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.' Death is a version of the Ancient of Days and of Urizen, only his eyes are turned to blind terror and his beard to forked flame; Despair, a statue of greenish bronze, is the Scofield of Jerusalem; the limbs and faces rigid with agony are types of strength and symbols of pain. Yet even here there is creation, there is the energy of life, there is a spiritual awe. And wherever Blake works freely, as in the regions of the Prophetic Books, wholly outside time and space, appropriate form multiplies under his creating hand, as it weaves a new creation of worlds and of spirits, monstrous and angelical.
Blake distinguished, as all great imaginative artists have distinguished, between allegory, which is but realism's excuse for existence, and symbol, which is none of the 'daughters of Memory,' but itself vision or inspiration. He wrote in the MS. book: 'Vision or imagination is a representation of what actually exists, really and unchangeably. Fable or allegory is formed by the daughters of Memory.' And thus in the designs which accompany the text of his Prophetic Books there is rarely the mere illustration of those pages. He does not copy in line what he has said in words, or explain in words what he has rendered in line; a creation probably contemporary is going on, and words and lines render between them, the one to the eyes, the other to the mind, the same image of spiritual things, apprehended by different organs of perception.
And so in his pictures, what he gives us is not a picture after a mental idea; it is the literal delineation of an imaginative vision, of a conception of the imagination. He wrote: 'If you have not nature before you for every touch, you cannot paint portrait; and if you have nature before you at all, you cannot paint history.' There is a water-color of Christ in the carpenter's shop: Christ, a child, sets to the floor that compass which Blake saw more often in the hands of God the Father, stooping out of heaven; his mother and Joseph stand on each side of him, leaning towards him with the stiff elegance of guardian angels on a tomb. That is how Blake sees it, and not with the minute detail and the aim at local color with which the Pre-Raphaelites have seen it; it is not Holman Hunt's 'Bethlehem' nor the little Italian town of Giotto; it is rendered carefully after the visual imagination which the verses of the Bible awakened in his brain. In one of those variations which he did on the 'Flight into Egypt' (the 'Riposo,' as he called it), we have a lovely and surprising invention of landscape, minute and impossible, with a tree built up like a huge vegetable, and flowers growing out of the bare rock, and a red and flattened sun going down behind the hills; Joseph stands under the tree, nearly of the same height, but grave and kindly, and the Mother and Child are mild eighteenth-century types of innocence; the browsing donkey has an engaging rough homeliness of hide and aspect. It is all as unreal as you like, made up of elements not combined into any faultless pattern; art has gone back further than Giotto, and is careless of human individuality; but it is seen as it were with faith, and it conveys to you precisely what the painter meant to convey. So, in a lovely water-color of the creation of Eve, this blue-haired doll of obviously rounded flesh has in her something which is more as well as less than the appeal of bodily beauty, some suggestion to the imagination which the actual technical skill of Blake has put there. With less delicacy of color, and with drawing in parts actually misleading, there is a strange intensity of appeal, of realization not so much to the eyes as through them to the imagination, in another water-color of the raising of Lazarus, where the corpse swathed in grave-clothes floats sidelong upward from the grave, the weight of mortality as if taken off, and an unearthly lightness in its disimprisoned limbs, that have forgotten the laws of mortal gravity.
Yet, even in these renderings of what is certainly not meant for reality, how abundantly nature comes into the design: mere bright parrot-like birds in the branches of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the donkey of the 'Riposo,' the sheep's heads woven into the almost decorative border. Blake was constantly on his guard against the deceits of nature, the temptation of a 'facsimile representation of merely mortal and perishing substances.' His dread of nature was partly the recoil of his love; he feared to be entangled in the 'veils of Vala,' the seductive sights of the world of the senses; and his love of natural things is evident on every page of even the latest of the Prophetic Books. It is the natural world, the idols of Satan, that creep in at every corner and border, setting flowers to grow, and birds to fly, and snakes to glide harmlessly around the edges of these hard and impenetrable pages. The minute life of this 'vegetable world' is awake and in subtle motion in the midst of these cold abstractions. 'The Vegetable World opens like a flower from the Earth's centre, in which is Eternity,' and it is this outward flowering of eternity in the delicate living forms of time that goes on incessantly, as if by the mere accident of the creative impulse, as Blake or Los builds Golgonooza or the City of God out of the 'abstract void' and the 'indefiniteness of unimaginative existence.' It is, on every page, the visible outer part of what, in the words, can hut speak a language not even meant to be the language of the 'natural man.'
In these symbolic notations of nature, or double language of words and signs, these little figures of men and beasts that so strangely and incalculably decorate so many of Blake's pages, there is something Egyptian, which reminds me of those lovely riddles on papyri and funeral tablets, where the images of real things are used so decoratively, in the midst of a language itself all pictures, with colours never seen in the things themselves, but given to them for ornament. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is filled with what seem like the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian tomb or obelisk, little images which might well mean things as definite as the images of Egyptian writing. They are still visible, sometimes mere curves or twines, in the latest of the engraved work, and might exist equally for some symbolic life which they contain, or for that decorative life of design which makes them as expressive mosaics of pattern as the hieroglyphics. I cannot hut think that it was partly from what he had seen, in actual basalt, or in engravings after ancient monuments which must have been about him at Basire the engraver's, that Blake found the suggestion of his picture-writing in the Prophetic Books. He believed that all Greek art was but a pale copy of a lost art of Egypt, 'the greater works of the Asiatic Patriarchs,' Apotheoses of Persian, Hindu, and Egyptian antiquity.' In such pictures as 'The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth,' he professed to be but 'applying to modern heroes, on a smaller scale,' what he had seen in vision of these 'stupendous originals now lost, or perhaps buried till some happier age.' Is it not likely therefore that in his attempt to create the religious books of a new religion, 'the Everlasting Gospel' of 'the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord,' he should have turned to the then unintelligible forms in which the oldest of the religions had written itself down in a visible pictorial message?
But, whatever suggestions may have come to him from elsewhere, Blake's genius was essentially Gothic, and took form, I doubt not, during those six years of youth when he drew the monuments in Westminster Abbey, and in the old churches about London. He might have learned much from the tombs in the Abbey, and from the brasses, and from the carved angels in the chapels, and from the naïve groups on the screen in the chapel of Edward the Confessor, and from the draped figures round the sarcophagus of Aymer de Valence. There is often, in Blake's figures, something of the monumental stiffness of Gothic stone, as there is in the minute yet formal characterization of the faces. His rendering of terrible and evil things, the animal beings who typify the passions and fierce distortions of the soul, have the same childlike detail, content to be ludicrous if it can only be faithful to a distinct conception, of the carvers of gargoyles and of Last Judgments. Blake has, too, the same love of pattern for its own sake, the same exuberance of ornament, always living and organic, growing out of the structure of the design or out of the form of the page, not added to it from without. Gothic art taught him his hatred of vacant space, his love of twining and trailing foliage and flame and water; and his invention of ornament is as unlimited as theirs. A page of one of his illuminated books is like the carving on a Gothic capital. Lines uncoil from a hidden centre and spread like branches or burst into vast vegetation, emanating from leaf to limb, and growing upward into images of human and celestial existence. The snake is in all his designs; whether, in Jerusalem, rolled into chariot-wheels and into the harness of a chariot drawn by hoofed lions, and into the curled horns of the lions, and into the pointing fingers of the horns; or, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a leviathan of the sea with open jaws, eyed and scaled with poisonous jewels of purple and blood-red and corroded gold, swelling visibly out of a dark sea that foams aside from its passage; or, curved above the limbs and wound about the head of a falling figure in lovely diminishing coils like a corkscrew which is a note of interrogation; or, in mere unterrifying beauty, trailed like a branch of a bending tree across the tops of pages; or, bitted and bridled and a thing of blithe gaiety, ridden by little, naked, long-legged girls and boys in the new paradise of an America of the future. The Gothic carvers loved snakes, but hardly with the strange passion of Blake. They carved the flames of hell and of earthly punishment with delight in the beauty of their soaring and twisting lines; but no one has ever made of fire such a plaything and ecstasy as Blake has made of it. In his paintings he invents new colors to show forth the very soul of fire, a soul angrier and more variable than opals; and in his drawings he shows us lines and nooses of fire rushing upward out of the ground, and fire drifting across the air like vapor, and fire consuming the world in the last chaos. And everywhere there are gentle and caressing tongues and trails of fire, hardly to be distinguished from branches of trees and blades of grass and stems and petals of flowers. Water, which the Gothic carvers represented in curving lines, as the Japanese do, is in Blake a not less frequent method of decoration; wrapping frail human figures in wet caverns under the depths of the sea, and destroying and creating worlds.