It is a rhapsody of Heaven. The River of Life which flows through the City of God, and in which all new-born souls are dipped, is a mighty stream flowing between green banks, on which are situated the gleaming houses of the city. Groups of happy souls wander beside the clear pale waters, and with his back towards us the Saviour with two children (new-born souls) in either hand swims towards the river’s source, which is the Throne of God, typified by the sun. In its rays may be descried adoring angels, reminding us of Blake’s ardent words, which I have already quoted, “What! it will be questioned, when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?” “Oh, no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!’”
Two angels—angels of the presence—remain suspended in flight above the stream on either side, playing on pipes, while a beautiful strong woman, clad in lemon-yellow robe, swoops down like a bird just above the surface of the stream with lithe strenuous body bent to meet the wind. She is a delicious creation, satisfying the aesthetic sense with completeness. The disposition of the figures in this picture, the decorative arrangement of the overhanging fruit-laden branches of the Tree of Life, the clear treble notes of colour, made one think of the rare and iridescent art of Japan. Blake’s mood when he painted “The River of Life” must have attained to a high and heavenly unity and joy.
“The Bard” is a picture of quite another order, and pitched in a very different key. Here is a twilight world of intellectual notions and poetic motives wafted hither and thither on the blast of the Bard’s frenzy. The Bard himself, a commanding figure, stands on a shelf of rock surveying the vortex, while he smites music from his harp. Below, a king and queen and their horses are overwhelmed in a Stygian stream. All is dark, with a strange gleam and shimmer here and there, like jewels and burnished silver seen through a purple veil. This was one of the pictures that appeared in Blake’s own exhibition in his brother’s shop, and his description in the celebrated catalogue is well worth quotation:
On a rock whose haughty brow
Frown’d o’er old Conway’s foaming flood,
Robed in sable garb of evil
With haggard eyes the Poet stood:
Loose his beard and hoary hair
Streamed like a meteor of the troubled air.
Weave the warp and weave the woof,
The winding-sheet of Edward’s race.
Thus the poet Gray; and Blake commented, “Weaving the winding-sheet of Edward’s race by means of sounds of spiritual music, and its accompanying expressions of spiritual speech, is a bold and daring and most masterly conception that the public have embraced and approved with avidity.
“Poetry consists in these conceptions, and shall painting be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile representations of merely mortal and perishing substances, and not be as poetry and music are, elevated to its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception? No, it shall not be so! Painting as well as poetry and music exists and exults in immortal thoughts.
“The connoisseurs and artists who have made objections to Mr. Blake’s mode of representing spirits with real bodies would do well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, the Apollo, which they admire in Greek statues are all of them representations of spiritual existences—of gods immortal—to the ordinary perishing organ of sight; and yet they are embodied and organized in solid marble. Mr. Blake requires the same latitude and all is well. King Edward and Queen Eleanor are prostrated with their horses at the foot of the rock on which the Bard stands—prostrated by the terrors of his harp, on the margin of the river Conway, whose waves bear up a corpse of a slaughtered bard at the foot of the rock. The armies of Edward are seen winding among the mountains.
He wound with toilsome march his long array!
“Mortimer and Gloucester lie spellbound behind the King. The execution of this picture is also in water-colours or fresco,” he added finally. It was probably painted in water-colours with white of egg or glue on a medium of gesso. The gloomy glory of its colour was a thing to ponder on. Like the dim silvery splendour of a pearl seen in the twilight of deep-sea waters, so does it glint and gleam. In no picture has Blake brought home to us more directly the visible population of the world of his mind—its power and grandeur and mystery—than in the complex imagery of this great work.
The picture was probably painted in 1785, and was exhibited at the Royal Academy. It afterwards appeared again at Blake’s own exhibition in 1809. It is a sad thing that he so seldom dated the pictures which he executed for his staunch friend and supporter Mr. Butts. The pictures in the Exhibition, with a very few exceptions, were originally done for him, but few of them could have an authentic date affixed to them. All Blake’s original methods of working were here represented by splendid examples.