The finest example of the process is, however, “Lamech and his two Wives,” in which the tragic nature of the subject is deepened by the colour-printing, here most successfully handled.

Pure water-colour, sometimes delicately outlined with the pen, was Blake’s fourth mode of working, and the exhibition had a goodly array of this class of work. We have mentioned “The River of Life,” perhaps the most beautiful example extant, but several others, noticeably “Oberon, Titania, and Puck with fairies dancing” and “The Wise and Foolish Virgins,” were very lovely. The first represents Blake in a rare mood, his mysticism in abeyance, and his temper one of aesthetic abandon. We are so little accustomed to think of him as an artist of varied and wide appeal, that this rhythmic dance, which acted on the spectator like music, surprised. It has in it the delirious joy of elemental things. The fairies’ delicate muslins are fetched out like mist in the greenwood; butterflies’ wings and petals of flower adorn their dainty heads. Puck has wings on the back of his hands (a new and delightful idea this!), and the rapid graceful movements of the dance do not seem to be arrested by their embodiment in a painting. Though this phase of Blake is distinctly novel, even strange to us, it is entirely delightful. There is no stress, no repelling yet attractive mystery as in the “Hecate” here. It is just pure “joie de vivre.”

“The Wise and Foolish Virgins” is much more characteristic of him. The wise virgins in the foreground are ranged in a row, their lamps by their sides. Their bodies and faces are smitten with a cold unearthly white light, presumably, but not obviously, thrown by the lamps. The modelling of their forms is most careful. Behind them, issuing from a small hut, the foolish virgins, in wild confusion, implore oil for their lamps. The landscape in which the scene is laid is anything but Eastern. Dark, intensely green downs undulate and swell to meet the sky. A lurid light defines the horizon, and in the swathed masses of gray cloud above, an angel blowing a trump (suggesting a Last Judgement) wings his fateful way. It may easily be urged (and the prosaic mind which only rejoices in the precise and neat imitation of what it can see is sure to exclaim) that here is a defiance of all artistic rules, a pitiable inability to copy the most ordinary natural phenomena, proclaiming Blake a wilful “poseur” or an unobservant madman. “Here,” they exclaim, “is little atmosphere, no distance, no attempt at truth of tone, and no comprehensible rendering of the light.”

Blake rendered it as he did because he chose; because his masterly sense of style (that is, the treatment best suited to the representation of the idea, his subjective vision) required it to be so painted and thus only, because he considered himself free to take from Nature just what he needed for his purpose, and never felt himself obliged to make an entire and wholly truthful representation of her. To emphasize the light on the figures of the foreground, he overcharged the colour in the sky and the downs behind, and by this treatment obtained an effect productive of strange and solemn emotion in the beholder.

Nature was to him shadow or reminiscence only, and here he has defiantly subordinated the truth of the landscape to the spiritual truth of his subject.

[Larger Image]

OBERON, TITANIA AND PUCK WITH FAIRIES DANCING

Water-colour. Undated. Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. A. A. de Pass

The most significant types were revealed in his soul, and owned a relationship to the visible creation only in so far as this relationship was necessary to render his art-work intelligible to the world. His decorative sense approved of the white virgins set so statue-pale against the dark green of the downs. The suddenness of the contrast, the livid and supernatural effect, were part of his deliberate intention. So does the white fire of an intense spiritual alertness contrast with the opaque darkness of natural physical life. For this scene, taken from the parable of Jesus, is only another of those types which Blake regarded in so wide and catholic a sense, and which by his treatment he has lifted above all merely historical association into a realm of pure spiritual symbolism.