Sir Joshua died February 23rd, 1792. His coffin was carried to St Paul’s followed by ninety coaches, and the most eloquent man of the day, Burke, was bidden to sing his praises. In 1808, when everyone was reading the collected Discourses of Reynolds, Blake too read, and as his custom was, made copious marginal notes. With the help of these we are able to relate Blake to Reynolds with a dispassionateness to which Blake could never attain.
What must strike any impartial reader of the Discourses is the extraordinary similarity of the aims of art there set forth with Blake’s own cherished views. Both give the supreme place to Michael Angelo and extol Raphael. Both depreciate the Venetian and Flemish Schools. Both reckon good drawing the foundation of great art. The difference between them is mainly one of emphasis. Blake believed in impulse and instinct, and Sir Joshua in theoretical and reasoned deliberation. Yet the reasonable man writes: “If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion, before we act, life would be at a stand, and art would be impracticable.” And again: “I mean to caution you against ... an unfounded distrust of the imagination and feeling in favour of narrow, partial, confined, argumentative theories.” Both extol the grand style—with a difference. Reynolds’s conception of the grand style is derived from the laborious study of the excellencies of many masters. When he attains to it, he is an epitome of those excellencies.
He reaches by this means his ideal, his heaven, and its contrary immediately bounds into view, which he is too urbane to call hell, and contents himself to designate as the real. Blake’s ideal came to him with overmastering force from his direct vision of the inward reality. Hence he had no need of the false antithesis of the ideal and the real. Reynolds extols Michael Angelo and degrades Hogarth. Blake loves both. In conclusion we say, with only the Discourses[5] before us, the differences between the two men are negligible in a world where two men can never quite see eye to eye. It is when we turn from the Discourses to Sir Joshua’s accomplished works that we begin to understand what was reasonable in Blake’s furious resentment and attack.
Sir Joshua preached one thing and practised another. He sang the praises of the Florentine, Roman, and Bolognese Schools, and painted for all the world as if Rembrandt were his chief master.
“Instead of ‘Michael Angelo’
Read ‘Rembrandt,’ for it is fit
To make mere common honesty
In all that he has writ.”
Sir Joshua, after years of toil, painted Nelly O’Brien’s petticoat, and we marvel at the consummate workmanship. Blake, in spite of his faulty technique and impatience of criticism, lifted the veil that hides the heavens, and inspires us. We thank those who make us wonder: we owe something deeper than thanks to those who inspire us. Blake was well aware that his art was of a loftier kind than that of the President of the Royal Academy. The one was reckoned the foremost painter of his age, the other was pitied as a madman. And Blake felt he did right to be angry.
Let us return to Cromek.
While Blake was at work on his designs for Blair’s Grave, he drew a pencil sketch of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims, which had always attracted him. Cromek, hopping in and out to see how the Blair designs were progressing, saw the sketch, and his brain immediately swarmed with fertile ideas. He proposed that Blake should engrave his design, and he would push it. But on second thoughts it occurred to him that the subject was admirably suited to Stothard’s genius. Leaving Blake with nothing but a verbal agreement, he went straight off to Stothard, and proposed that he should make a design on the subject, for which he would pay him sixty guineas. Cromek undertook to find an engraver. Blake, who had been a friend of Stothard for many years, went to visit him, and found him at work on the Canterbury Pilgrims. Unsuspecting, he praised the work. Afterwards he discovered the part that Cromek had played in the seeming coincidence. At once he concluded that Stothard was privy to the deceit, and he included him in his vehement indignation against Cromek, and the lamb roared. With note-book at hand he jotted:
“A petty sneaking knave I knew—
O! Mr. Cromek, how do ye do?”
Stothard and Blake had been young together. It was he who had introduced him to Flaxman. The friendship, of course, was not of the closest, for they followed a very different track in art.