The exuberance and abandonment of Baroque art were natural expressions both of the Italian and Spanish natures, but they were foreign to the intellectual severity of the French genius, and it was from France, and in the person of Poussin, that the counterblast came. He, indeed, could tolerate no such rapid simplification of design. He imposed on himself endless scruples and compunctions, making artistic unity the reward of a long process of selection and discovery. His art became difficult and esoteric. People wonder sometimes at the diversity of modern art, but it is impossible to conceive a sharper opposition than that between Poussin and the Baroque. It is curious, therefore, that modern artists should be able to look back with almost equal reverence to Poussin and to El Greco. In part, this is due to Cézanne’s influence, for, from one point of view, his art may be regarded as a synthesis of these two apparently adverse conceptions of design. For Cézanne consciously studied both, taking from Poussin his discretion and the subtlety of his rhythm, and from El Greco his great discovery of the permeation of every part of the design with a uniform and continuous plastic theme. The likeness is indeed sometimes startling. One of the greatest critics of our time, von Tschudi—of Swiss origin, I hasten to add, and an enemy of the Kaiser—was showing me El Greco’s “Laocoon,” which he had just bought for Munich, when he whispered to me, as being too dangerous a doctrine to be spoken aloud even in his private room, “Do you know why we admire El Greco’s handling so much? Because it reminds us of Cézanne.”
No wonder, then, that for the artist of to-day the new El Greco is of capital importance. For it shows us the master at the height of his powers, at last perfectly aware of his personal conception and daring to give it the completest, most uncompromising expression. That the picture is in a marvellous state of preservation and has been admirably cleaned adds greatly to its value. Dirty yellow varnish no longer interposes here its hallowing influence between the spectator and the artist’s original creation. Since the eye can follow every stroke of the brush, the mind can recover the artist’s gesture and almost the movements of his mind. For never was work more perfectly transparent to the idea, never was an artist’s intention more deliberately and precisely recorded.
THREE PICTURES IN TEMPERA BY WILLIAM BLAKE[42]
BLAKE’S finished pictures have never received the same attention nor aroused the same admiration as his wash-drawings, his wood-cuts, or his engravings. It is difficult to account for this comparative neglect, since they not only show command of a technique which admits of the completest realisation of the idea, but they seem actually to express what was personal to Blake in a purer form than many of his other works, with less admixture of those unfortunate caprices which the false romantic taste of his day imposed too often even on so original and independent a genius. The explanation may perhaps lie in the fact that to most people Blake, for all his inimitable gifts, appears as a divinely inspired amateur rather than as a finished master of his art, and they are willing to tolerate what they regard as his imperfect control of form in media which admit only of hints and suggestions of the artist’s vision.
There assuredly never was a more singular, more inexplicable phenomenon than the intrusion, as though by direct intervention of Providence, of this Assyrian spirit into the vapidly polite circles of eighteenth-century London. The fact that, as far as the middle classes of England were concerned, Puritanism had for a century and a half blocked every inlet and outlet of poetical feeling and imaginative conviction save one, may give us a clue to the causes of such a phenomenon. It was the devotion of Puritan England to the Bible, to the Old Testament especially, that fed such a spirit as Blake’s directly from the sources of the most primeval, the vastest and most abstract imagery which we possess. Brooding on the vague and tremendous images of Hebrew and Chaldæan poetry, he arrived at such indifference to the actual material world, at such an intimate perception of the elemental forces which sway the spirit with immortal hopes and infinite terrors when it is most withdrawn from its bodily conditions, that what was given to his internal vision became incomparably more definite, more precisely and more clearly articulated, than anything presented to his senses. His forms are the visible counterparts to those words, like the deep, many waters, firmament, the foundations of the earth, pit and host, whose resonant overtones blur and enrich the sense of the Old Testament. Blake’s art moves us, if at all, by a similar evocation of vast elemental forces. He deals directly with these spiritual sensations, bringing in from external nature the least possible content which will enable him to create visible forms at all. But though he pushed them to their furthest limits, even he could not transcend the bounds which beset pictorial language; even he was forced to take something of external nature with him into his visionary world, and his wildest inventions are but recombinations and distorted memories of the actual objects of sense.
By the strangest irony, too, the forms which came to his hand as the readiest means of expressing his stupendous conceptions were in themselves the least expressive, the least grandiose, that ever art has dealt with. It was with the worn-out rags of an effete classical tradition long ago emptied of all meaning, and given over to turgid rhetorical display, that Blake had to piece together the visible garments of his majestic and profound ideas. The complete obsession of his nature by these ideas in itself compelled him to this: he was entirely without curiosity about such trivial and ephemeral things as the earth contained. His was the most anti-Hellenic temperament; he had no concern, either gay or serious, with phenomena; they were too transparent to arrest his eye, and that patient and scientific quarrying from the infinite possibilities of nature of just the appropriate forms to convey his ideas was beyond the powers with which nature and the poor traditions of his day supplied him. Tintoretto, who had in some respects a similar temperament, who felt a similar need of conveying directly the revelations of his internal vision, was more happily situated. He was, by comparison, a trivial and vulgar seer, but the richness and expressive power of the forms which lay to his hand in Titian’s and Michelangelo’s art enabled him to attain a more unquestionable achievement.
But, allowing for circumstances, what Blake did was surely more considerable and implied a greater sheer lift of imaginative effort. That it was an attempt which remained almost without consequences, isolated and incomplete—marred, too, by a certain incoherence and want of reasonable co-ordination—must be allowed, and may perhaps explain why Blake is not universally admitted among our greatest.
The Byzantine style, he declares, was directly and divinely revealed to him; and whether this were so, or whether he obtained it by the dim indications of Ottley’s prints, or through illuminated manuscripts, the marvellous fact remains that he did succeed in recovering for a moment that pristine directness and grandeur of expression which puts him beside the great Byzantine designers as the only fit interpreter of Hebrew mythology. His “Flight into Egypt”[43] will at once recall Giotto’s treatment of the subject in the Arena chapel at Padua; but the likeness is, in a sense, deceptive, for Giotto was working away from Byzantinism as fast as Blake was working towards it, and the two pass one another on the road. For there is here but little of Giotto’s tender human feeling, less still of his robust rationalism; what they have in common, what Blake rediscovered and Giotto inherited, is the sentiment of supernatural dignity, the hieratic solemnity and superhuman purposefulness of the gestures. Even more than in Giotto’s version, the Virgin here sits on the ass as though enthroned in monumental state, her limbs fixed in the rigid symmetry which oriental art has used to express complete withdrawal from the world of sense. No less perfect in its expressiveness of the strange and exalted mood is the movement, repeated with such impressive monotony, in the figures of Joseph and the archangel. It is absurd, we think, to deny to the man who discovered the lines of these figures the power of draughtsmanship. Since Giotto’s day scarcely any one has drawn thus—simplification has been possible only as the last effort of consummate science refining away the superfluous; but here the simplification of the forms is the result of an instinctive passionate reaching out for the direct symbol of the idea.
Blake’s art indeed is a test case for our theories of æsthetics. It boldly makes the plea for art that it is a language for conveying impassioned thought and feeling, which takes up the objects of sense
