Blake's color is unearthly, and is used for the most part rather as a symbol of emotion than as a representation of fact. It is at one time prismatic, and radiates in broad bands of pure color; at another, and more often, is as inextricable as the veins in mineral, and seems more like a natural growth of the earth than the creation of a painter. In the smaller Book of Designs in the Print Room of the British Museum the colors have moldered away, and blotted themselves together in a sort of putrefaction which seems to carry the suggestions of poisonous decay further than Blake carried them. This will be seen by a comparison of the minutely drawn leviathan of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with the colored print in the Book of Designs, in which the outline of the folds melts and crumbles into a mere chaos of horror. Color in Blake is never shaded, or, as he would have said, blotted and blurred; it is always pure energy. In the faint coloring of the Book of Thel there is the very essence of gentleness; the color is a faultless interpretation of the faint and lovely monotony of the verse, and of its exquisite detail. Several of the plates recur in the Book of Designs, colored at a different and, no doubt, much later time; and while every line is the same the whole atmosphere and mood of the designs is changed. Bright rich color is built up in all the vacant spaces; and with the color there comes a new intensity; each design is seen over again, in a new way. Here, the mood is a wholly different mood, and this seeing by contraries is easier to understand than when, as in the splendid design on the fourth page of The Book of Urizen, repeated in the Book of Designs, we see a parallel, yet different, vision, a new, yet not contrary, aspect. In the one, the colors of the open book are like corroded iron or rusty minerals; in the other, sharp blues, like the wings of strange butterflies, glitter stormily under the red flashes of a sunset. The vision is the same, but every color of the thing seen is different.
To Blake, color is the soul rather than the body of his figures, and seems to clothe them like an emanation. What Behmen says of the world itself might be said of Blake's rendering of the aspects of the world and men. 'The whole outward visible World,' he tells us, 'with all its Being is a Signature, or Figure of the inward spiritual World; whatever is internally, and however its Operation is, so likewise it has its Character externally; like as the Spirit of each Creature sets forth and manifests the internal Form of its Birth, by its Body, so does the Eternal Being also.' Just as he gives us a naked Apollo for the 'spiritual form of Pitt' in the picture in the National Gallery, where Pitt is seen guiding Behemoth, or the hosts of evil, in a hell of glowing and obscure tumult, so he sees the soul of a thing or being with no relation to its normal earthly color. The colors of fire and of blood, an extra-lunar gold, putrescent vegetable colors, and the stains in rocks and sunsets, he sees everywhere, and renders with an ecstasy that no painter to whom color was valuable for its own sake has ever attained. It is difficult not to believe that he does not often use color with a definitely musical sense of its harmonies, and that colour did not literally sing to him, as it seems, at least in a permissible figure, to sing to us out of his pages.
VII
At the end of September 1800 Blake left Lambeth, and took a cottage at Felpham, near Bognor, at the suggestion of William Hayley, the feeblest poet of his period, who imagined, with foolish kindness, that he could become the patron of one whom he called 'my gentle visionary Blake.' Hayley was a rich man, and, as the author of The Triumphs of Temper, was looked upon as a person of literary importance. He did his best to give Blake opportunities of making money, by doing engraving and by painting miniatures of the neighbors. He read Greek with him and Klopstock. 'Blake is just become a Grecian, and literally learning the language,' he says in one letter, and in another: 'Read Klopstock into English to Blake.' The effect of Klopstock on Blake is to be seen in a poem of ribald magnificence, which no one has yet ventured to print in full. The effect of Blake on Hayley, and of Hayley on Blake, can be realized from a few passages in the letters. At first we read: 'Mr. Hayley acts like a prince.' Then: '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.' Last: 'Mr. H. is as much averse to my poetry as he is to a chapter in the Bible. He knows that I have writ it, for I have shown it to him' (this is apparently the Milton or the Jerusalem), and he has read part by his own desire, and has looked with sufficient contempt to enhance my opinion of it.... But Mr. H. approves of my designs as little as he does of my poems, and I have been forced to insist on his leaving me, in both, to my own self-will; for I am determined to be no longer pestered with his genteel ignorance and polite disapprobation. I know myself both poet and painter, and it is not his affected contempt that can move to anything but a more assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness I have brought down his affected loftiness, and he begins to think that I have some genius: as if genius and assurance were the same thing! But his imbecile attempts to depress me only deserve laughter.' What laughter they produced, while Blake was still suffering under them, can be seen by any one who turns to the epigrams on H. in the note-book. But the letter goes on, with indignant seriousness: 'But I was commanded by my spiritual friends to bear all and be silent, and to go through all without murmuring, and, in fine, hope till my three years shall be accomplished; at which time I was set at liberty to remonstrate against former conduct, and to demand justice and truth; which I have done in so effectual a manner that my antagonist is silenced completely, and I have compelled what should have been of freedom—my just right as an artist and as a man.'
In Blake's behavior towards Hayley, which has been criticized, we can test his sincerity to himself under all circumstances: his impeccable outward courtesy, his concessions, 'bearing insulting benevolence' meekly, his careful kindness towards Hayley and hard labour on his behalf, until the conviction was forced upon him from within that 'corporeal friends were spiritual enemies,' and that Hayley must be given up.
'Remembering the verses that Hayley sung
When my heart knocked against the roof of my tongue.'
Blake wrote down bitter epigrams, which were written down for mere relief of mind, and certainly never intended for publication; and I can see no contradiction between these inner revolts and an outer politeness which had in it its due measure of gratitude. Both were strictly true, and only in a weak and foolish nature can the consciousness of kindness received distract or blot out the consciousness of the intellectual imbecility which may lurk behind it. Blake said:
'I never made friends but by spiritual gifts,
By severe contentions of friendship and the burning
fire of thought.'
What least 'contention of friendship' would not have been too much for the 'triumphs of temper' of 'Felpham's eldest son'? what 'fire of thought' could ever have enlightened his comfortable darkness? And is it surprising that Blake should have written in final desperation:
'Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache:
Do be my enemy—for friendship's sake'?