CHAPTER XII
ENGRAVINGS AND DRAWINGS IN THE PRINT ROOM
I am afraid that the first view of Blake’s engraving of “The Canterbury Pilgrimage” will prejudice the spectator unfavourably towards our artist, even if the work by him already seen has made its fascination felt.
Especially will this prejudice be heightened if the engraving from Stothard’s picture of the same subject be set against Blake’s and compared with it, for Blake’s astonishes and repels on first sight, while Stothard’s pleases at once.
In Stothard’s composition the variety of the company, and especially of the horses they ride, is charming. Very different are the grim ranks of Blake’s procession, the ten horses therein exhibiting only three positions among them, and those positions being all traditionally faithful to the hobby-horse type. Stothard’s motley throng are gracefully habited, and appear dainty and spruce in spite of the dust of the highway as they amble along. His lighting of the picture, the firm and effective modelling of the horses and their riders, the wide range of tones amounting almost to colour itself, give a satisfying richness which we fail to find in Blake’s picture.
The whole composition is harmonious, and for those who desire nothing further of art than that it shall cater for the eye without much or intimate reference to the mind, then Stothard’s graceful performance is indeed pre-eminent.
Turning to Blake’s picture, we find he has catered for the mind, but, having done that, he has denied us the one thing of which Stothard is so prodigal—beauty. In his restless search beneath the surface with which beauty obviously is concerned, for the things of the spirit and the intelligence underlying the appearance, Blake has here lost sight of art’s first principle, beauty in the whole, as the result of the parts. The composition in its entirety is not beautiful. It has no harmony. It is an accretion of separate parts, made out without reference to the picture’s final unity. These parts, although some are beautiful in themselves, are not intimately related to each other, and contribute so little towards a general predominant scheme that the effect of discord is produced, and the multitudinous meanings and intentions with which each figure is fraught over-weight the composition and confuse the beholder; the simple reason of all this being, that the first obligation of the painter, his sense of harmony and balance, has been ruthlessly violated. Perhaps Blake’s sense of style—about which I imagine he never reasoned, it being innate and intuitive—deserted him on this one occasion, because anger was making havoc in his heart and blinding his eyes. The conditions under which he worked, it will be remembered, must have been destructive to all concentration and artistic isolation of mood. Still, as I have said, though sadly wanting as a whole, there is beauty of an intricate and curious sort in the details.
Look on the wide expanse of swelling downs over-arched by the tragic splendour of an evening sky. Here the thought, as ever with Blake, is lifted up above the accidents, into the eternal and the infinite. But Stothard’s gentle hills and bowery trees shut out such vistas, and he concerns himself scarcely at all about the sky, which is merely the background on which to throw up the graceful heads of his graceful unintelligent folk.
The characteristic group of children with their mother and grandfather, which Blake has set beside the gateway of the Tabard Inn, has great beauty as a single motive. No labour has been spared to make all faithful to the Chaucerian conception: the curious semi-Gothic gateway, the crowding pigeons, the barbaric splendours of the wife of Bath, the mediaeval figure of the knight, whose face reminds one somewhat of the supposed portrait of Cimabue in the Chapel of the Spaniards in Santa Maria Novella; all have been wrought with painful care. The work is an illustration of Blake’s principle enunciated in his notes on Reynolds’ “Discourses” and elsewhere that “Real effect is making out of parts, and it is nothing else but that.”