From On Virgil I gather this, which needs no comment: “A warlike State never can produce Art. It will rob and plunder and accumulate into one place, and translate and copy and buy and sell and criticize, but not make.”

During Blake’s last year in South Molton Street he executed seventeen woodcuts for Dr Thornton’s Pastorals of Virgil. These are very simple and childlike or childish, according to our state when we look at Blake’s work. They seem to me of very unequal merit; but the best of them are invaluable, for they show that Blake at the age of sixty-three had not lost that childlike innocence, the parody of which is all that most men attain to in their second childhood.

In 1821 Blake removed to 3 Fountain Court, Strand, where he had the plainest of neutral rooms, not without value as a background for his visions. Here relief was at hand, but he knew it not. Harassed by poverty, he must raise money somehow. His collection of engravings, which had steadily grown since the day that he had endowed his bride with it as his sole treasure, was marketable, and with as little fuss as need be he sold it to Messrs Colnaghi and Company. It was the final self-stripping. Humbled and disciplined by the inexorable years, having surrendered himself and his last precious possession, he was ready to bring forth the rich fruit of his mature genius. His old friend and patron Butts gave him a commission to paint twenty-one water-colour designs illustrating the Book of Job. He was allowed to show them, and they drew forth from his friend Linnell a further commission to execute and engrave a duplicate set, with the written agreement that he should receive £100 for the designs and copyright and another £100 out of the profits. There were no profits forthcoming; but Linnell paid him in instalments £50 besides the first £100. We may note here that the Royal Academy in 1822 made him a grant of £25. And so, at last, Blake had sufficient means to enable him to devote himself to his joyous work without the gnawing distraction of poverty and want.

There is no book in the world better suited for Blake’s genius than the Book of Job. It has been in itself a complete Bible to the mystic in all ages. In it is given a marvellous description in dramatic form of that mysterious and awful self-stripping which the saint experiences after his conversion and not before. It is an expansion of the text that even here death is the gate of life. The same truth is insisted on by all the prophets, especially by the prophets to the nations like Ezekiel and Jonah; by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; by the personal experience of St Paul; and recently by Hegel, till it has become a commonplace both in religion and philosophy.

Blake was troubled by no modern criticism of the Book of Job, which by post-dating it several hundred years has robbed it of much of its literary interest. To him it was the porch of the Sanctuary, the oldest book in the Bible, at once the most ancient and most modern of books. Job, after his dark night of testing and judgment, emerged simple and guileless, a Patriarch who served God solely because that was the supremely right thing to do. Who was Job? The Book gives no hint of his parentage. Who wrote the wonderful prologue? Who could write it? Again the Book is silent. Tradition says Moses; and if tradition speak truly, then several very interesting things follow. Job was probably the son of Issachar,[6] and as such went down with his father into Egypt when Joseph had been advanced in that land. He would then remove to Uz in Chaldæa, carrying within treasures of Egyptian learning. In later years, Moses, fleeing from Egypt into the desert of Midian, would become his neighbour. Moses is admittedly one of the world’s greatest initiates. As such he could certainly have written the prologue and the epilogue. And how lofty a level the drama maintains throughout! Even Job’s friends, who pour out pithy things in rich poetical language surpassing that attained by all laureates, are rebuked for uttering only what everybody knows. Yet so universal is the Book in its symbolism that it can afford, if need be, to dispense with picturesque details of its authorship and date, and stand simply on its merits as an inspired dramatic epic of Man’s passage from his consciousness of degradation as a worm, and his stubbornness as a wild ass’s colt, to the dignity and power of a son of God.

Blake had already traced the course of man’s day of judgment in Night IX of The Four Zoas, and had painted a fresco of the subject in 1820. In the poem he had used his own peculiar mythology, and closed his poem to nearly all readers. The Book of Job obliged him to drop his own symbolism and use the simple and universal symbols that the drama itself supplies. A brief reference to each design in order will make his purpose clear.

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Design I.—Job and his wife and family, like true Israelites, are at prayer under a spreading fig-tree. The shepherd sons have for the time left their flocks at rest and hanged their musical instruments on the tree. At first sight the picture presents a scene of idyllic peace. But there are ominous signs. The sun is setting, night is fast coming, and the fig-tree suggests the immemorial symbol of Israel’s wrestling during the dark night.

Design II.—An illustration of the prologue of the Book. It is a marvellous representation of what an initiate only—a Moses, a Blake—could have imagined of the cosmos, with its heavenly portion peopled with the angelic sons of God in the middle, the earth and its inhabitants below, and above and beyond all God in His Heaven.