Who never in his life forgave a friend.”
THE LILLY (1789)
But the effect of the epigram is a little lost through its considerable truth if applied to the epigrammatist. The wretched Hayley had himself been a friend to Blake—and Blake could not forgive him. But this was not really lack of love or pity. It was strictly lack of patience, which in its turn was due to that bursting and almost brutal mass of convictions with which he plunged into the world like a red-hot cannon ball, just as we have already imagined him plunging into a room with his big bullet head. His head was indeed a bullet; it was an explosive bullet.
Of his other early relations we know little. The parents who are often mentioned in his poems, both for praise and blame, are the abstract and eternal father and mother and have no individual touches. It might be inferred, perhaps, that he had a special emotional tie with his elder brother Robert, for Robert constantly appeared to him in visions and even explained to him a new method of engraving. But even this inference is doubtful, for Blake saw the oddest people in his visions, people with whom neither he nor any one else has anything particular to do; and the method of engraving might just as well have been revealed by Bubb Doddington or Prester John or the oldest baker in Brighton. That is one of the facts that makes one fancy that Blake’s visions were genuine. But whoever taught him his own style of engraving, an ordinary mortal engraver taught him the ordinary mortal style, and he seems to have learnt it very well. When apprenticed by his father to a London engraving business he was diligent and capable. All his life he was a good workman, and his failures, which were many, never arose from that common idleness or looseness of life attributed to the artistic temperament. He was of a bitter and intolerant temper, but not otherwise unbusiness-like; and he was prone to insult his patrons, but not, as a rule, to fail them. But with this part of his character we shall probably have to deal afterwards. His technical skill was very great. This and a certain original touch also attracted to the young artist the attention and interest of the sculptor Flaxman.
The influence of this great man on Blake’s life and work has been gravely underrated. The mistake has arisen from causes too complex to be considered, at any rate at this stage; but they resolve themselves into a misunderstanding of the nature of classicism and of the nature of mysticism. But this can be said decisively: Blake remained a Flaxmanite to the day of his death. Flaxman as a sculptor and draughtsman stood, as everybody knows, for classicism at its clearest and coldest. He would admit no line into a modern picture that might not have been on a Greek bas-relief. Even foreshortening and perspective he avoided as if there were something grotesque about them—as, indeed, there is. Nothing can be funnier, properly considered, than the fact that one’s own father is a pigmy if he stands far enough off. Perspective really is the comic element in things. Flaxman vaguely felt this; Flaxman shrank from the almost insolent foreshortenings of Rubens or Veronese as he would have shrank from the gigantic boots in the foreground of an amateur photograph. For him high art was flat art in painting or drawing, everything could be done by pure line upon a single plane. Flaxman is probably best known to the existing public by his illustrations in line to Pope’s “Homer,”—which have certainly copied most exquisitely the austere limitations of Greek vases and reliefs. Anger may be uttered by the lifted arm or sorrow by the sunken head, but the faces of all those gods and heroes are, as you may think them, beautiful or foolish, like the faces of the dead. Above all, the line must never falter and come to nothing; Flaxman would regard a line fading away in such a picture as we should regard a railway line fading away upon a map.
This was the principle of Flaxman; and this remained to the day of his death one of the firmest principles of William Blake. I will not say that Blake took it from the great sculptor, for it formed an integral part of Blake’s individual artistic philosophy; but he must have been encouraged to find it in Flaxman and strengthened in it by the influence of an older and more famous man. No one can understand Blake’s pictures, no one can understand a hundred allusions in his epigrams, satires, and art criticism who does not first of all realise that William Blake was a fanatic on the subject of the firm line. The thing he loved most in art was that lucidity and decision of outline which can be seen best in the cartoons of Raphael, in the Elgin Marbles, and in the simpler designs of Michael Angelo. The thing he hated most in art was the thing which we now call Impressionism—the substitution of atmosphere for shape, the sacrifice of form to tint, the cloudland of the mere colourist. With that cyclopean impudence which was the most stunning sign of his sincerity, he treated the greatest names not only as if they were despicable, but as if they were actually despised. He reasons mildly with the artistic authorities, saying—
“You must admit that Rubens was a fool,
And yet you make him master in your school,
And give more money for his slobberings