The design and verses were returned with a long letter from Cromek, closely packed with insults and slanders, and exhibiting a meanness too contemptible for expression. At the end of the letter he thus refers to the subject of the Pilgrimage, of which one would suppose he would be too ashamed to speak: “Why did you so furiously rage at the success of the little picture of the Pilgrimage? Three thousand people have now seen it and have approved of it. Believe me, yours is ‘the voice of one crying in the wilderness.’
“You say the subject is low and contemptibly treated. For his excellent mode of treating the subject the poet has been admired for the last four hundred years; the poor painter has not yet the advantage of antiquity on his side, therefore with some people an apology may be necessary for him. The conclusion of one of Squire Simpkins’ letters to his mother in the ‘Bath Guide’ will afford one. He speaks greatly to the purpose:
I very well know
Both my subject and verse is exceedingly low,
But if any great critic finds fault with my letter,
He has nothing to do but to send you a better.
“With much respect for your talents,
“I remain, Sir,
“Your real friend and well-wisher,
“R. H. Cromek.”
Perhaps it was that last jeering taunt which determined Blake to show his “Canterbury Pilgrimage” to the public, and make it the occasion of a little exhibition of his own. It was opened in May, 1809. Poor unworldly Blake, enraged and baffled, was the last man to organize an undertaking of this sort. Cromek could afford to laugh at the modest show on the first floor of James Blake’s shop at the corner of Broad Street, all unadvertised and unpatronized as it was.
The exhibition comprised, besides the “Pilgrimage,” sixteen “Poetical and Historical Inventions,” ten “frescoes,” and seven drawings—“a collection,” as Gilchrist remarks, “singularly remote from ordinary sympathies or even ordinary apprehension.”
Few of the general public penetrated here, but Blake’s friends, his few buyers, and many contemporary artists probably went through the rooms with no little curiosity. Seymour Kirkup—the discoverer of Giotto’s portrait of Dante in the Bargello,—and Henry Crabb Robinson were among the number of those who went and purchased catalogues. With the catalogue were issued subscription papers for the engraving of the “Canterbury Pilgrimage,” which, in spite of Cromek and Stothard, Blake intended to execute.
Blake drew up a Descriptive Catalogue to interpret his pictures, and in it gave free rein, unfortunately, to his personal antipathy to Stothard, but he also expressed at some length, and with characteristic fire and intemperance, his views on art. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was intensely sympathetic with his artistic forerunner, says that the Descriptive Catalogue, and the “Address to the Public,” “abound in critical passages, on painting and poetry, which must be ranked without reserve among the very best things ever said on either subject.”
It may be remarked, however, with all respect and honour, that neither Blake nor Rossetti were critics in any exact sense of the word. The unprejudiced and scientific character of mind which analyses, classifies, and lays bare with sharp dissecting knife the structure, bones, muscles, heart, of an artistic creation, belonged to neither of them. The analytic and synthetic qualities are seldom united in one mind. (Goethe recognized this when he wrote, “I, being an artist, prefer that the principles through which I work should be hidden from me.”) Both Blake and Rossetti leaped with unerring instinct and the artistic intuition at all noble and right work, and loved it with passion, rather than appreciated it with cold reason. Blake’s affinities in art, for instance, especially as he grew older, were much more catholic than it would be supposed. Although the Descriptive Catalogue would induce us to believe that works of art which he did not worship were loathed by him, this was only the case when he was doing battle for certain cherished principles, and then he would hit blindly to right and left in the heat of his partisanship. Mr. Samuel Palmer spoke of evenings spent with him in his old age looking over reproductions of the pictures of various masters, which Blake enjoyed greatly, dwelling on whatever was beautiful and true in each. The Catalogue and Address were written by him with a pen steeped in wormwood. His attacks were mainly directed against the “Venetian and Flemish demons,” with their “infernal machine Chiaro Oscuro,” and the “hellish brownness” with which he says they and their school and modern followers load their paintings. It is true that the English school of the day feared colour, and gave a brown tone to nearly all its pictures, but probably Blake had never seen good examples of the Venetians, whose chief glory is that they “conceived colour heroically.” He enunciated his own principle in these words: “The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling.” His mood was exasperated, truculent, passionately prejudiced, though there is much here of artistic insight and originality. It must be admitted that a great deal is painful reading, but through all the unmeasured language one feels the labouring, overstrained, noble, human heart, tormented beyond endurance. He had been galled to this state of Titanic fury by a policy of calumny, plagiarism, and neglect, used against him by the little souls, of what was in many respects a little age, with no mercy and little intermission for many years.
Since the production of Blair’s “Grave,” he had been held up to public ridicule as an artist, in a paper called the “Examiner,” edited by Leigh Hunt, and the occasion of this exhibition called forth another article in its columns full of crass misunderstanding of his aims and the superior sneers of a self-satisfied and material-minded writer. In it he was termed “an unfortunate lunatic whose personal unoffensiveness secures him from confinement.”