A brother artist said of Blake, with beautiful simplicity, “He is a good man to steal from.” The remark is as philosophical as it is practical. Blake had the great mark of real intellectual wealth; anything that fell from him might be worth picking up. What he dropped in the street might as easily be half-a-sovereign as a halfpenny. Moreover, he invited theft in this further sense, that his mental wealth existed, so to speak, in the most concentrated form. It is easier to steal half-a-sovereign in gold than in halfpence. He was literally packed with ideas—with ideas which required unpacking. In him and his works they were too compressed to be intelligible; they were too brief to be even witty. And as a thief might steal a diamond and turn it into twenty farms, so the plagiarist of Blake might steal a sentence and turn it into twenty volumes. It was profitable to steal an epigram from Blake for three reasons—first, that the original phrase was small and would not leave a large gap; second, that it was cosmic and synthetic and could be applied to things in general; third, that it was unintelligible and no one would know it again. I could give innumerable instances of what I mean; I will let one instance stand for the rest. In the middle of that long poem which is so disconnected that it may reasonably be doubted whether it is a long poem at all (I mean that commonly bearing the title “The Auguries of Innocence”), he introduces these two lines:
“When gold and gems adorn the plough
To peaceful arts shall envy bow.”
A careless and honest man would read these lines and make nothing of them. A careful thief might make out of them a whole entertaining and symbolic romance, like “Gulliver’s Travels” or “Erewhon.” The idea obviously is this;—that we still for some reason admit the tools of destruction to be nobler than the tools of production, because decorative art is expended on the one and not on the other. The sword has a golden hilt; but no plough has golden handles. There is such a thing as a sword of state; there is no such thing as a scythe of state. Men come to court wearing imitation swords; few men come to court wearing imitation flails. It is fascinating to reflect how fantastic a story might be written upon this hint by Blake. But Blake does not write the story; he only gives the hint, and that so hurriedly that even as a hint it may hardly be understood.
OOTHOON (1793)
Most of Blake’s quarrels were trivial, and some were little short of discreditable. But in his quarrel with Cromek and Stothard he does really stand as the champion of all that is heroic and ideal, as against all that is worldly and insincere. The celebrated Stothard was at this time in the height of his earlier success; he occupied somewhat the same relation to art and society that has been occupied within our own time by Frederic Leighton. He was, like Leighton, an accomplished draughtsman, a man of slight but genuine poetic feeling, an artist who thoroughly realised that the aim of art was to please. Ruskin said of him very truly (I forget the exact words) that there were no thorns to his roses. At the same time, his smoothness was a smoothness of innocence rather than a smoothness of self-indulgence; his work has a girlish timidity rather than any real conventional cowardice; he was a true artist in a somewhat effeminate style of art. Nor is there any reason to doubt that his personal character was as clean and good-natured as his pictures. It may be that he began his Canterbury Pilgrims without any commission from Cromek, or it may be that he took the commission from Cromek without the least idea that the conception had been borrowed from Blake. That Cromek treated Blake badly is beyond dispute; that Stothard treated him badly is unproved; but Blake was not much in the habit of waiting for proof in such cases. Stothard, I say, may not have been morally in the wrong at all. But he was intellectually and critically very much in the wrong; and Blake pointed this out in a pamphlet which, though defaced here and there with his fantastic malice, is a solid and powerful contribution to artistic and literary criticism.
Stothard, the elegant gentleman, the man of sensibility, the eighteenth century æsthete, cast his condescending eye upon the Middle Ages. He was of that age and school that only saw the Middle Ages by moonlight. Chaucer’s Pilgrims were to him a quaint masquerade of hypocrisy or superstition, now only interesting from its comic or antiquated costume. The monk was amusing because he was fat, the wife of Bath because she was gay, the Squire because he was dandified, and so on. Blake knew as little about the Middle Ages as Stothard did; but Blake knew about eternity and about man; he saw the image of God under all garments. And in a rage which may really be called noble he tore in pieces Stothard’s antiquarian frivolity, and asked him to look with a more decent reverence at the great creations of a great poet. Stothard called the young Squire of Chaucer “a fop.” Blake points out forcibly and with fine critical truth that the daintiness of the Squire’s dress is the mere last touch to his youth, gaiety, and completeness; but that he was no fop at all, but a serious, chivalrous, and many-sided gentleman who enjoyed books, understood music, and was hardy and prompt in battle. Moreover, he is definitely described as humble, reverent, and full of filial respect. That such a man should be called a fop because of a frill or a feather Blake rightly regarded as a sign of the mean superficiality of his rival’s ideas. Stothard spoke of “the fair young wife of Bath”; Blake placidly points out that she had had four husbands, and was, as in Blake’s picture, a loud, lewd, brazen woman of quite advanced age, but of enormous vitality and humour. Stothard makes the monk the mere comic monk of commonplace pictures, shaped like a wine barrel and as full of wine. Blake points out that Chaucer’s monk was a man, and an influential man; not without sensual faults, but also not without dignity and authority. Everywhere, in fact, he reminds his opponent that in entering the world of Chaucer he is not entering a fancy-dress ball, but a temple carved with colossal and eternal images of the gods of good and evil. Stothard was only interested in Chaucer’s types because they were dead; Blake was interested in them because they cannot die. In many of Blake’s pictures may be found one figure quite monotonously recurrent—the figure of a monstrously muscular old man, with hair and beard like a snowstorm, but with limbs like young trees. That is Blake’s root conception; the Ancient of Days; the thing which is old with all the awfulness of its past, but young with all the energies of its future.
