William Blake

by G. K. Chesterton

Than you will give for Raphael’s finest things.”

And then, with one of those sudden lunges of sense which made him a swordsman after all, he really gets home upon Rubens—

“I understood Christ was a carpenter

And not a brewer’s drayman, my good sir.”

In another satire he retells the fable of the dog, the bone, and the river, and permits (with admirable humour) the dog to expatiate upon the vast pictorial superiority of the bone’s reflection in the river over the bone itself; the shadow so delicate, suggestive, rich in tone, the real bone so hard and academic in outline. He was the sharpest satirist of the Impressionists who ever wrote, only he satirised the Impressionists before they were born.

THE DIVINE IMAGE (1789)

The ordinary history of Blake would obviously be that he was a man who began as a good engraver and became a great artist. The inner truth of Blake could hardly be better put than this: that he was a good artist whose idea of greatness was to be a great engraver. For him it was no mere technical accident that the art of reproduction had to cut into wood or bite into stone. He loved to think that even in being a draughtsman he was also a sculptor. When he put his lines on a decorative page he would have much preferred to carve them out of marble or cut them into rock. Like every true romantic, he loved the irrevocable. Like every true artist, he detested india-rubber. Take, for the sake of example, all the designs to the Book of Job. When he gets the thing right he gets it suddenly and perfectly right, as in the picture of all the sons of God shouting for joy. We feel that the sons of God might really shout for joy at the excellence of their own portrait. When he gets it wrong he gets it completely and incurably wrong, as in the preposterous picture of Satan dancing among paving-stones. But both are equally final and fixed. If one picture is incurably bad, the other picture is incurably good. Courage (which is, with kindness, the only fundamental virtue in man), is present and prodigious in both. No coward could have drawn such pictures.

The chief movement of Blake either in art or literature was the first publication of the batch of his own allegorical works. “The Gates of Paradise” came first, and was followed by “Urizen” and the “Book of Thel.” With these he introduced his own mode of engraving and began his own style of decorative illustration. That style was steeped in the Blake and Flaxman feeling for the hard line and the harsh and heroic treatment. There were, of course, many other personalities besides that of Flaxman which were destined to influence the art of William Blake. Among others, the personality of William Blake influences it not inconsiderably. But no influence ever disturbed the love of the absolute academic line. If the reader will look at any of the designs of Blake, many of which are reproduced in this book, he will see the main fact which I mention here. Many of them are hideous, some of them are outrageous, but none of them are shapeless; none of them are what would now be called “suggestive”; none of them (in a word) are timid. The figure of man may be a monster, but he is a solid monster. The figure of God may be a mistake, but it is an unmistakable mistake. About this same time Blake began to illustrate books, decorating Blair’s “Grave” and the Book of Job with his dark but very definite designs. In these plates it is quite plain that the artist, when he errs, errs not by vagueness but by hardness of treatment. The beauty of the angel upside down who blows the trumpet in the face of Blair’s skeleton is the beauty of a perfect Greek athlete. And if the beauty is the beauty of an athlete, so the ugliness is the ugliness of an athlete—or perhaps of an acrobat. The contortions and clumsy attitudes of some of Blake’s figures do not arise from his ignorance of the human anatomy. They arise from a sort of wild knowledge of it. He is straining muscles and cracking joints like a sportsman racing for a cup.

These book illustrations by Blake are among the simplest and strongest designs of his pencil, which at its best (to do him justice) tended to the simple and the strong. Nothing (for instance) could well be more comic or more tragic than the fact that Blake should illustrate Blair’s elephantine epic called “The Grave.” It was as well that Blake and Blair should meet over the grave. It was about all they had in common. The poet was full of the most crushing platitudes of eighteenth century rationalism. The artist was full of a poetry that would have seemed frightful to the poet, a poetry inherited from the mystics of all ages and handed on to the mystics of to-day. Blake was the child of the Rosy Cross and the Eleusinian Mysteries; he was the father of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and even of the “Yellow Book.” But of all this the excellent Mr Blair was innocent, and so, indeed, in all probability was the excellent Mr Blake. But the really interesting point is this: that the illustrations were efficient and satisfactory, from the Blair as well as the Blake point of view. The cut, for instance, with the figure of the old man bowing his head to enter the black grotto of the grave is a fine piece of drawing, apart from its meaning, and is all the finer for its simplicity. But wherever he errs it is always in being too hard and harsh, not too faint or fanciful. Blake was a greater man than Flaxman, though a less perfectly poised man. He was harder than his master, because he was madder. The figure upside down blowing the trumpet is as perfect as a Flaxman figure: only it is upside down. Flaxman upside down is almost a definition of Blake.