CHAPTER XI
WORK IN THE EXHIBITION OF 1904
In the January of 1904 Messrs. Carfax’s tiny galleries at 17, Ryder Street, St. James’s, became a shrine to which all pious lovers of William Blake hastened to make their pilgrimage. None of the usual crowd that visit picture shows were to be descried here.
Blake’s appreciators are not those who are most learned in schools of painting, in tricks of style and niceties of technique. They are mainly composed of those who, having a strong pictorial sense, are yet only effectively moved by ideas in art.
And what a harvest of ideas was garnered here!—ideas which sprung like Athene fully developed and armed from the head of Blake—of which head a cast taken by Deville the phrenologist was conspicuously placed in the centre of the lower room of the exhibition. The closely-set mouth and jaw, arched and inflated nostrils, massy brow, and intense and rapt expression, tell one something of the nature of this rare and spiritual intellect.
Out of forty-one exhibits, twenty-five were subjects from the Bible, three were single plates repeated from Blake’s “Prophetic Books,” one was an Indian ink drawing illustrating a scene in his poem “Tiriel,” three were purely imaginative compositions, the keys to which were to be sought in themselves, and seven were illustrations to the poets (three of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” one of a scene in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and three sketches to illustrate Gray, Young, and Blair). Mainly, then, the exhibition might be said to have dealt with Biblical subjects, though good specimens of all kinds of Blake’s work rendered it representative of his genius in its various phases.
From the old Byzantine mosaicists through art’s early springtime to her full summer in the Renaissance, and even since then, no class of subjects has so deeply occupied the mind of painters as sacred history. There are no incidents left untreated in the New Testament, and the Old has had a large meed of attention, yet we find a painter of such unique and peculiar genius as William Blake expending his strength and invention on this well-worn field of motives. But with results so new, so different from anything ever achieved before, that our interest and delight were stimulated in proportion to our susceptibility to Blake’s influence. I am not saying that this new treatment of Biblical subjects, of the Gospel story, is finer than the work of the old masters of the golden age of Italy. Nor do I rank it lower. “The ages are all equal,” Blake says himself, “but genius is always above its age.” The great point is that it is entirely different, and that it exhibits a total disregard for traditional treatment. Blake only found it possible to see these subjects from his own point of view—one never before attained by any artist. And as objects seen from different outlooks vary in colour, profile, and proportion, so as to be sometimes quite unrecognizable, so do these religious pictures of Blake’s appear startlingly alien to any we have ever seen before. Or as he puts it himself, “If perceptive organs vary, objects of perception seem to vary too.”
Looking round the characteristic and representative collection, the ingenuous student realized that the predominant effect of this art on his mind was one of strangeness. It seemed to him unconnected with the past, unrelated to the present, an art set apart, unique, somewhat disquieting, which took him into Blake’s visionary world, opposed in every sense to the natural world of daily experience. This visionary world of Blake’s, was minutely discriminated by him, however, and was no formless region of emasculating dreams.
The amazing vigour of his conceptions, and the flat contradiction which they impose on the orthodox and traditional images which most people’s minds unconsciously harbour, added a sense of shock to that of strangeness. Inquiring yet further into the causes of this impression one discovered the truth of W. B. Scott’s assertion, that Blake’s genius was unaided by its usual correlative, talent—that facility which enthrones the idea in its appropriately wrought shrine, dowers it with its organically perfect form. Greatly as Blake disliked it to be said, the truth was apparent among these collected works of his, that his execution was seldom equal to his invention. As proof of the strangeness, the independence of his work, we may quote the water-colour drawing of the “Three Maries with the Angel at the Sepulchre” (date 1803), in which the holy women shrink terrified from the angel, with all the shuddering horror that humanity feels at the manifestations of the spiritual world. A small colour-print from “Urizen”—called here “The Flames of Furious Desire”—with which we are already very familiar, must have augmented the impression of unique imagination and strangeness to those who had no previous acquaintance with Blake’s work.
The furious raging, the vital majesty of the water-colour called “Fire,” the delicate and curious imagination in “Satan watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve,” with many others must have contributed to this effect; but the final strangeness and most curious beauty were to be found in “The Nativity,” “The River of Life,” and “The Bard.” In these, Blake’s highest and most mystic qualities are manifest, and his divergence from all preconceived ideas startlingly apparent. “The Nativity” is a small tempera picture painted on copper without the usual foundation of gesso that Blake first laid on the plate. Small patches of tempera have been dislodged, showing little gleaming bits of copper, but happily this has occurred mainly at the top part of the picture in the gloom of the roof of the stable. All the long succession of Nativities from Giotto to Correggio (“the soft and effeminate and consequently most cruel demon,” as Blake termed him) seem not to have touched his imagination. Most artists carry an “infused remembrance” of great pictures in their mind, and can seldom divest themselves of the subtle influence emanating therefrom. But Blake’s picture is not in any sense a composition which even unconsciously has been built up with the aid of memory. Imagination has here become vision, the uncovering of the veritable image; and Blake has faithfully copied what his entranced consciousness beheld.