In much the same way the last motive of Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony” rings forth after the tentative, subtle and passionate music of the preceding movements like a shout of joy, the cry of a faith which says—not, “I have heard, I have learnt, I believe,” but, “I know! absolutely and for ever!”
Plate 15 shows God pointing out the works that His hand has fashioned. “Behemoth” and Leviathan, in a circular design very Gothic in character, appear below. And to this succeeds Plate 16, “Satan Falling.”
Plate 17, in which God appears blessing Job and his wife, while the false comforters hide their diminished heads with an almost comic fright, is distinguished by another of those fine effects of light for which Blake had so great an aptitude. The sun, which forms the nimbus of God’s head, emits strange prismatic rays, very beautiful and weird. “Also the Lord accepted Job” shows us Job with his wife and friends offering a fire on an altar before a great sun, which, like God’s halo in the previous picture, flashes the same strange light. The design is calm and solemn, and has an exquisite decorative feeling. Immediately below the altar, on some steps which form part of the border, Blake has touchingly and humbly laid his own palette and brushes, as if to indicate that, like Job, his work had been offered and accepted by the Lord.
In Plate 19 Job and his wife are seated beneath a fig-tree in a field of standing corn, gratefully receiving offerings from a father and mother and their two beautiful daughters.
“Everyone also gave him a piece of money.” The border contains, as usual, amid its palm leaves and angelic figures, verses relating to and assisting the chief motive of the picture.
For pure melodious beauty perhaps there is no plate like 20. “There were not found women fair as the daughters of Job in all the land, and their father gave them inheritance among their brethren.” Job is seated in a dim rich chamber, on whose walls are wrought paintings illustrating the trials he has experienced. Around him are grouped three beautiful daughters, who listen rapt while he relates to them God’s dealings with him.
This is a rare example of Blake’s choosing an interior with no opening out into the beyond. It is quaint and beautiful, but we are so accustomed to seeing Blake’s figures set in the open air with the sky above them, that this closed-in chamber, exquisitely wrought and fantastic as it is, seems a thing foreign to his usual methods, his elective affinity for the great expansive types of God’s universe. I think the reason he chose an interior in this instance was that we might be shut in and enclosed within the mind of Job as it revealed itself to his daughters. Instinctively we know that Blake’s true lover Rossetti must have cared for this plate with quite special fervour, so close is the analogy between its hidden mysterious richness and the wonderful painted interiors in which he set his women, and from which he developed such a high degree of romantic suggestion and atmosphere. A lute and harp amid trailing vines, grape-laden, form a border to Blake’s design, as delicate as the illuminated tracery in a mediaeval Hour-Book. In the final plate—“So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning”—the hole of the great tree that has figured in so many of the designs is surrounded by a crowd of persons, with Job, his wife and beautiful daughters in the midst. All play on instruments of music, while sheep and lambs and (it must be admitted) a most Gothic-looking sheep-dog repose in the immediate foreground. The ancient and fantastic instruments, the rapt upraised faces, the beautiful girls, recall the old Florentine singing galleries—cantorias as they are called—the one by Donatello and the other by Luca della Robbia, now in the Museo del Duomo at Florence. In neither has the joy of praise, the delight in making music, found more complete expression.
Blake’s “Book of Job” is a holy thing. The full compass of his orchestral nature exerted itself for this final effort. All his long sacrifices, deprivations, passionate sorrows and sacred joys, his burning aspirations and his steadfast faith, found their true meaning, their perfect consecration in the blossoming of this supreme flower on his tree of life. It was Blake’s offering to God, like the Sacred Host, reserved and offered up in his own hands on the altar of his storm-weary heart.