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.'