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.”

Perhaps the strangest trait the engraving exhibits in comparison with Stothard’s is that it looks so antique. It might have been executed a hundred years earlier than the other picture, so wilfully grotesque and archaic is it. Yes, wilfully is the word, for Blake wished to make his procession as stiff and quaint and rich as the stately Chaucerian language that first painted the scene, forgetting perhaps that the two arts of poetry and painting achieve the same end through widely different conditions, and according to processes contiguous, but non-interchangeable. The want of ease, of careless and familiar naturalism in the engraving, may recall to those who look for it the splendid and ceremonious language of the old story-teller. The description written by Blake of his own design (it will be found in Gilchrist) shows how he loved and understood Chaucer, and, we may add, how very loosely the poem was grasped, and with what want of truth to the original it was represented by his rival. Lamb said of the engraving itself that it was “a work of wonderful power and spirit, hard and dry, yet with grace,” and the Descriptive Catalogue — a copy of which was given him by Crabb Robinson — pleased him greatly; the part devoted to an analysis of the characters in the “Canterbury Pilgrimage” he found to be “the finest criticism of Chaucer’s poem he had ever read.”

Savagely powerful as it is, the engraving is merely an interesting and not a vital utterance of Blake. The tempera picture from which it was engraved was bought by Mr. Butts, but has been lost sight of now for many years. Stothard’s oil painting of the same subject is in the National Gallery.

Turning to the other original single engravings of Blake in the Print Room, we find several of interest. There is that early one, designed and engraved in 1780, which has been called “Glad Day,” and is the expression of a mood oftener felt in Blake’s early manhood than in the ensuing years of chafing complexity and multitudinous emotions. I have wondered whether it be not the pictorial embodiment of the vision which he saw of the “Spiritual Sun on Primrose Hill,” described by him to Crabb Robinson.

Among the original engravings here may be seen the broadsheet of “Little Tom the Sailor,” executed by Blake for Hayley while at Felpham in 1800, for a charitable purpose.

Hayley’s verses and Blake’s designs were bitten in with stopping-out varnish on the pewter plate of the original from which the prints are taken.

In the designs setting out the misfortunes of a poor widow and the heroism of her little son he has given us one theme of natural scenery — a winding path, a little wood surmounted by bare folded downs — testifying to the invasion which the obvious beauty of Felpham had made on his artistic consciousness; while the other illustration represents the tragic moment when little Tom on the wreck is about to be drowned; over the trough of deep sea the spiritual form of his father appears ready to receive and embrace his soul. Mrs. Blake’s hand unfortunately has coloured the Print Room copy.

And now let us turn to the pen-and-ink etchings to Dante, designed and executed for Mr. Linnell between the years 1824 and 1827, the year of Blake’s death.

There are seven of them, wrought by the pen, which had become so deliberate, careful and delicate in execution during these last years of his life.

Let us linger over two of them for a moment.

Among the many pictures of Paolo and Francesca that exist, was there ever seen anything like this of Blake’s imagining?

You may prefer others — Ary Scheffer’s, Dante Rossetti’s, or Mr. G. F. Watts’ — you may object that this one has not grappled with the passionate love-motive of the story, that it has omitted the note of yearning, of beloved pain, with which Dante’s conception is fraught. The austerity of a mind which theorized much on the subject of love — the love of man and woman — but knew actually very little of its vehemence, its trouble, and its languorous sweetness, forbade Blake to focus in the figures of Paolo and Francesca the ideal tragedy of those “whom love bereav’d of life.”

The scene as a whole — that second circle of the Inferno, in which

The stormy blast of hell
With restless fury drives the spirits on,
Whirl’d round and dashed amain
With sore annoy —

was what arrested his imagination. Here, in his rendering of the subject, the blast has torn upward in a visible ribbon-like vortex from the surface of the waters, bearing within it, as images in a crystal, the innumerable figures of the world’s great lovers. From a spit of land, Paolo and Francesca, fluttering “light before the wind,” appear in a single tongue of flame, and Dante lies stretched upon the ground — ”through compassion fainting.” Virgil is seen irradiated by the effulgent light which trembles around the disc wherein the immortal kiss — that which Rostand calls “l’instant d’infini” — is poetically represented.

 

 

THE CIRCLE OF THE LUSTFUL

Fine Indian ink pen drawing, in the Print Room, 1825-6.
Francesca da Rimini, Canto V. of the “Inferno”

 

As usual, the force, the unusualness of the conception, rather than its ideal beauty are the points we notice first. But closer study attests to its beauty too. Mere literary interest would give the picture no real claim to artistic regard. But Blake felt the drawing of each bounding line as a thing of beauty in itself, having an aesthetic element of its own, apart from its representative or symbolic use. In that coil of entangled fates, what manifold themes of pure sensuous beauty are to be found! For instance — just at the leap and bend of the circle — appears a woman with arms extended in the fluent wind, like a bird in flight, and a man’s embrace encircles her neck — a man whose face she kisses rapturously. Leaping, floating, falling, the multitudinous figures are borne onward by the resistless force of that terrible blast; and, however foreign or antipathetic this embodiment of Dante’s vision may seem to us, we are bound to admit that its imaginative scope is of a temper characteristic not only of Blake, but of the Florentine himself. An aspect of Dante’s conception is developed and emphasized here in a manner which has not been attempted in any other picture of the subject.

The other pen-and-ink drawing from the “Inferno” represents Dante and Virgil in the Circle of the Traitors, with the head of Bocca degli Abati breaking through the lake of ice at the foot of Dante. Blake has given strangely passionless faces to his Dante and Virgil, but the pure simple lines of their figures are severely congruous with the scene, and the iceberg, formed of shadowy frozen figures to the right, is powerfully suggested by a few lines of sufficient economy. The picture is another of those unique embodiments from which, once seen and dwelt on, the modern imagination can never release itself. Gustave Doré’s sensational rendering of the same scene seems to me to acknowledge an inspiration at this source.

The other five designs to Dante merit a description and attention which space does not allow us to give them here. They are of great power, but whether the unflinching realization of the terrible imaginings of Dante is permissible in pictorial art — where the visual representation attacks the emotions and intellect with a poignancy that words, however forcible, can never attain — is a question the discussion of which may provide food for argument to critics of the school of Lessing. For my own part, I incline to the opinion that they overstep the bounds of terror authorized in art, and approach the confines of the horrible in the treatment of the main motive of each design — ”Admirably horrid,” Mr. W. M. Rossetti pronounces them. The unwavering truth to Dante’s detailed descriptions is beyond question, however.

The inmost sanctuary of an artist’s mind is far more accessible through his pencil sketches than through his final consummated pictures and designs. There is something so intimate, so personal in these manifestations of himself, that in regarding them I have something of the feeling of one who listens unseen to a man thinking aloud. Nothing convinces one of the labour, the thought, the balancing, the rejections, the careful choice, that go to make up a picture like the study of the sketches made for it.

The peculiarity of Blake’s pencil sketches is their vehemence, and the absence in them of all hesitation. He seems from the first moment of conception to know exactly what he means to do, and rough, almost hieroglyphic, as the first shadow of his idea may appear at first sight, we have only to compare it with the design or picture which eventually resulted from it, to see that all the rapid “short-hand” lines of the sketch, block out accurately the disposition of the main parts of the design, the final attitude of the figures therein, without as a rule any real variation from the first idea having taken place in the working out.

This testifies more than anything else to the distinctness of the vision seen by Blake, and his eager passionate discernment of it. Among such sketches of clearly apprehended vision is that for “The Soul exploring the recesses of the Grave,” the final design of which we are already very familiar with. It is executed with a broad-ended chalk pencil, in quick unhesitating lines. There is not a single touch that cannot be traced, that is not an essential development, in the finished picture, so that we know Blake saw it all from the first, complete then in his mind’s eye as on the day when he finished the detailed drawing for the engraver.

Another sketch of the same order is one which, although it does not belong to any public collection, is so important as to excuse a reference to it here. Through the great kindness of Mr. Frederick Shields, to whom it belongs, I am enabled to reproduce it. The two motives of the picture in Blair’s “Grave,” called “Death’s Door,” had been favourite ones with Blake, and used by him separately in “The Gates of Paradise,” “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” and “America,” before he combined them so felicitously in the noble design which ranks among his best works. The sketch by Blake belonging to Mr. Shields would seem to represent the moment when he first realized the power and significance and beauty to be obtained by their incorporation in one design. Of this conception it must be admitted that it grew in Blake’s mind after the first flashing vision of it, and was not from the beginning discernible in all the splendour to which it was eventually developed.

Here is another beautiful and careful sketch of a female figure diving through the air. The force of her perpendicular flight, the attitude of one leg (the left, not the right, however) recall the “Reunion of the Soul and the Body,” but this figure is undraped, and the arms are extended downwards, and indeed the differences are so numerous that it cannot be regarded as a sketch for that picture. In all probability it is a preliminary study for one of the numerous figures in the “Last Judgment” which he executed for the Countess of Egremont in 1807.

Looking at the terse expressive little drawing, we are reminded of Blake’s “golden rule of art” — ”that the more distinct, sharp, and wiry the boundary line, the more perfect the work of art.” Ah! but how he played with his line! “Wiry” at least it never was, say what Blake would! He never “painted” it, but felt his way along with sympathetic accuracy. And with what infinite inflexions of tenderness and strength did his pencil impress itself on the paper, indicating by that rare quality of touch more than form and modelling — almost, one had said — the very nature of the flesh of the figures he drew.

Speaking of Blake’s drawings, the manner in which he drew the muscular form of the male leg is very noticeable and strangely characteristic of him. Another line he felt very tenderly was the curved sweep of a woman’s back from shoulder to indented waist, and downwards to delicate ankles and heels.

 

 

UNDATED PENCIL SKETCH FOR “DEATH’S DOOR”

Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. Frederic J. Shields

 

Let us linger a minute over another of what I may call Blake’s shorthand sketches in the Print Room collection. It is undoubtedly the first idea for the picture entitled “The Spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan, in whose wreathings are enfolded the nations of the earth.” The finished picture appeared in Blake’s own exhibition in 1809; it is now in the possession of T. W. Jackson, Esq., of Worcester College, Oxford.

In the sketch, “Nelson” is drawn symbolically as a young sea-god, nude and commanding. He stands firmly on a coil of Leviathan’s body, which rearing and circling surrounds him like a frame. We can just distinguish the human forms caught in the serpent’s toils, and its great mouth is in the act of devouring a man. The mouth is bridled, and the reins held by Nelson’s hand. The symbolism is easy enough to understand and requires no explanation.

A carefully shaded and conscientious drawing of a naked man with arms upraised testifies to the fact that Blake did work from the model sometimes. But how cold such work appears — valuable and necessary as it is — compared with the passionate half-defined sketches, the mood of which transfers to us something of the high pleasure that Blake himself felt in making these burning transcripts from his imagination or visions.

I had much ado to make out the subject of the pen-and-wash sketch of a woman and man with a group of people on their knees in a cornfield. In the distance a thunder-cloud emits a lightning flash. Mr. Shields tells me that he and Dante Gabriel Rossetti spent an evening trying to decipher a larger and more definite sketch of the same idea, and finally decided that it was an illustration of the following verses (1 Sam. xii. 16-19): “Now therefore stand and see this great thing which the Lord will do before your eyes. Is it not wheat harvest to-day? I will call unto the Lord and he shall send thunder and rain; that ye may perceive and see that your wickedness is great, which ye have done in the sight of the Lord, in asking you a king. So Samuel called unto the Lord, and the Lord sent thunder and rain that day; and all the people greatly feared the Lord and Samuel.”

Among the many other sketches which space does not permit me to comment on, are two very beautiful studies in red chalk, showing Blake to be a master of line indeed. Of his engravings after designs by Stothard, Romney, Flaxman, Hogarth, examples of which the Print Room possesses, it is not necessary to speak, for this book is not concerned with engraving or any other technical branch of art. Its purpose is merely to examine into, and if possible lay bare, the nature of the artistic impulse that makes the work of Blake — as we may all know it in our public collections — so rare and so precious a thing. But though we shall not concern ourselves with these engravings, as they contribute nothing to our purpose, it is interesting to look at the numerous copies which our artist made from prints of Michael Angelo’s frescoes on the roof of the Sistine, from drawings after the antique, and from Cumberland’s “Designs for Engravings.” These latter are pen drawings of Greek figures — similar to those represented on old black and yellow vases — and display the Greek ideal of form, so beautiful yet so passionless and un-individual, when compared with the figures of the great Florentine, in which the soul with all its struggles is apparent. Copying such diverse work faithfully — ”for,” wrote Blake, “servile copying is the great merit of copying” — must have made him think, compare, choose. Goethe says that his study of the ancient classic literature convinced him “that a vast abundance of objects must lie before us ere we can think upon them, — that we must accomplish something, nay, fail in something, before we can learn our own capacities and those of others.” And this was much more the case with Blake and his art than might be supposed. It was not ignorance of other ideals, of other methods of thought and work, that caused him to take the artistic path he did; it was definite choice, the ratification of his innate, strongly individualistic tendencies, resulting from comparing them with the characteristic principles of art exhibited in other ages, other masters. Blake in fact copied a good deal; he himself writes in his notes on Reynolds, “the difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal, the good one really does copy a great deal.”

 

 

HEAD OF AN OLD MAN

Pencil, pen, and wash drawing. Undated

 

Turning to his water-colour sketches in the Print Room, I consider the finest to be a very portrait-like head of an old man. It was evidently put in in pencil and pale washes of colour, and afterwards strengthened, rather daringly, with pen-and-ink outlines. The face with its deep eyes and noble contours is that of a seer, awestruck before his vision. It is in such work as this — swift, strong and delicate — that we see Blake at his best. In finished work — such little as he has left us — some heat, some fire seems to have escaped, but in sketches such as this the inspiration is contained in all its strongly-spiced vitality; that which is left undone, assisting that which is done, in producing an impression of energy and imaginative development. A pale-tinted, very careful and elaborate drawing of the Whore of Babylon, as Blake imagined her, next claims our attention. It was etched and reproduced by William Bell Scott. Never did Blake represent so voluptuous, so sensual a face, as this of the Whore of Babylon, which in spite of its beauty is of the same type as that of the Wife of Bath in his “Canterbury Pilgrimage.” In its expression it has no fellow, save perhaps the face of Leda in Michael Angelo’s small statuette in the Bargello. The woman is seated on a seven-headed semi-human monster, and she holds in her hand a cup out of which smoke issues and condenses in the forms of floating men and women of incomparable grace. These swim around her head in a long ribbon-like streamer, and as the little figures reach the ground they are devoured by the seven heads. They symbolize the pleasures, ambitions, lusts of this world.

Another beautiful water-colour, in faint and tender colour, is perhaps the very vignette for Blair’s “Grave,” which Blake sent to Cromek with his verses of dedication to the Queen, and which was returned on his hands with such a cruel and insulting letter. Part of this design has been etched and reproduced by William Bell Scott. A mother and her young family, from whose ankles the chains of mortality have just been severed, ascend upward with looks of solemn exaltation on their rapt faces. They form a noble group. Above, on the left, is an angel with a sword and key who has presumably just set them free; he is Death, I suppose — a young and beautiful Death; while to the right is another Apollo-like being, who holds a pair of scales and represents St. Michael. In the most ancient Italian pictures the Archangel is often pictured as weighing the souls of the newly dead.

A large and very important water-colour drawing is called the “Lazar House,” from Milton. It is one of Blake’s terrible works, and has a tendency to haunt the memory unpleasantly. It is very powerful.

 

 

THE WHORE OF BABYLON

Water colour drawing, 1809

 

A great blind, bearded figure, with outstretched arms — Death in another aspect — is suspended in air over a scene of painfulness and intense horror, such as few artists would dare to represent. The victims of plague are writhing in death-agonies on the floor, while a figure to the right, with sinister face and nervous hand clutching a bolt (or is it a knife?), fills the spectator with insane shudderings and alarm. He eyes the sufferers with gloating satisfaction, and the fact that he is coloured green as verdigris from head to foot does not detract from his horrible fascinations. I can never get over the feeling that pictures such as these caused Blake profound pain, that indeed he sought relief from their dominion over his mental life by turning the vision that haunted him into a definite artistic image, thus by the act of projection getting rid of the disquieting, the torturing inward tyrant. For with him, as I have striven to show, all thought came with the definiteness of vision; so that he could not read Milton’s or Dante’s descriptions without seeing the thing described, immediately start into visible being before him.

A finished and elaborate water-colour of a female recumbent figure on a tomb, with a foreground starred with brilliant flowers, is called “Letho Similis,” but in no respect is it like Blake’s work, and there seems no reason whatever to consider it as having been done by his hand, except that it has passed as his for a long time. So acute a critic as Mr. W. M. Rossetti casts doubt on the authorship of the work in his descriptive catalogue.

On the whole I think the review of Blake’s pencil sketches and drawings impress one as powerfully as any of the work of his which we have previously seen, and mainly for the reason that it is in these that we can most clearly trace his thoughts in process of evolution.

And now all that remains for us to do is to visit the National Gallery, and there in the little octagonal room behind the Turner Gallery seek out those few precious works which are the representatives of his genius to the public at large. Whether that public often penetrates here, or, being here, lingers even momently before the few strange little pictures by Blake which it contains, may be questioned.

That they are not popular, and that the little room is never crowded, needs no demonstration. Blake’s greatness is not of the kind that can ever compete successfully with the claims of such masters as his contemporaries — Stothard, Romney, Gainsborough and Reynolds — whose brilliant and alluring work adorns the galleries through which one must pass to reach the little octagonal room where his few pictures, modestly retired behind the door, await such as will patiently seek them out.

First let us look at the water-colour numbered 43, entitled “David delivered out of Deep Waters.” It has qualities of handling akin to the “River of Life,” belonging to Captain Butts, and the conception is specially Blakean. David, with his arms bound round with cords, floats symbolically on dark waters. Above, seven cherubim, with wings interlacing like the shields of a phalanx, swoop down in rhythmic ranks, with Christ in their centre. The remarkable thing about these cherubim is that two have the faces of children, two those of old white-bearded men, two those of mature manhood, while the centre one alone, immediately below Christ, has the face of a beautiful youth.

The figure and attitude of the Saviour have a noble grace, but the face is weak and ineffectual, as is usual with Blake when treating the divine lineaments.

The effect of the picture — with those strong, ordered wings in ranks, recalling the banners borne in some rich church procession — is one of curious symmetry, of almost heraldic composition. A delicate and remote strangeness of imagination makes itself felt in every line, every tint; and the range of tone is noticeably peculiar, the deepest and highest parts of the scale being used with great effect, while no recourse has been had to the intermediate gamut, so that there is no full body of colour present at all. The nearest approach to it is the quivering pale golden light that is diffused around the figure of Christ.

 

 

DAVID, DELIVERED OUT OF MANY WATERS

Water-colour. In National Gallery, undated

 

No. 1164, “The Procession from Calvary,” is a tempera picture reminiscent in quality of colour of the quattrocento Italian masters. Stiff, composed and straight is the body of Jesus laid on the bier. Three pairs of bearers support the holy burden on their shoulders. The Virgin alone, and two other women side by side, follow the cortége, while in the distance Calvary, with its three crosses, may be seen; and Jerusalem is represented by a group of buildings defiantly Gothic in character. The bearers and the women moving across the foreground so majestically, so quietly, might be the somewhat stiff rendering of an idea, inspired by the procession in a basrelief on some old Greek or Roman sarcophagus, such as Mantegna or Andrea del Castagno worked out on canvas.

Then there is a highly-finished water-colour of an allegory — numbered 44 — to be studied. It is soon evident to the spectator that the elaborate composition owns as central motive the Atonement, with all the symbolic correspondences which in the scriptures predicted it. At the highest point of the picture is a medallion wherein the Almighty is represented. Dull flames flicker and smoke around, while on them is inscribed in very small writing the significant words “God out of Christ is a consuming fire.” This, as we know, was a much-insisted-on doctrine of Blake’s, for he seems to have denied at times the responsible fatherhood of God; and never did he share the respectable conception of Him, prevalent at that day even more than in this, which Tennyson so aptly defined as “an immeasurable clergyman.”

Below the medallion are little scenes displaying the Death of Abel, the Flood, the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Transfiguration, and, finally, the symbolic Vision of the Holy Grail. All these separate but related motives are woven together, with subsidiary scenes to right and left, into one intricate and most beautiful scheme.

The low tones of the composition, the dim, delicate tinting, bring the varied and multitudinous parts into a harmony of effect that is very delightful, while the spiritual and intellectual material with which it is characteristically builded up, send our thoughts voyaging out like birds over the sea of religious mysticism.

I have left the most important picture to be dealt with last. The tempera picture, numbered 1110, was painted as the companion to “Nelson and Leviathan” — a sketch for which is in the British Museum, it will be remembered — and was shown for the first time at Blake’s own exhibition in 1809. In his Descriptive Catalogue the title ran as follows: “The spiritual form of Pitt guiding Behemoth; he is that Angel, who, pleased to perform the Almighty’s orders, rides on the whirlwind directing the storms of war; he is ordering the Reaper to reap the vine of the earth, and the Ploughman to plough up the cities and towers.”

At first sight the figure of a beautiful young man is the one thing that stands out clearly from the dim splendour and bewildering detail of the picture. This noble form, instinct with power and authority, represents the spiritual body of Pitt. A gleaming halo surrounds his head, and the background is massed with seething indistinct figures.

Here and there strange glancing lights and phosphorescent stars emit a milky radiance, but it is some few minutes before the eye can distinguish the head and back of Leviathan. On either side of the great halo appears a man’s form; one holds the crescent moon by way of sickle, the other presses heavily upon a harrow. They are the Reaper, Death, and the Ploughman Equality. All is steeped in gloomy twilight touched here and there with subdued yet brilliant light, as of moonlight on water. Strange little figures seem to gather form out of the brownish mist before one’s very eyes, and there is something of a miraculous charm on this cosmos — the fruit of the travail of Blake’s intellect.

 

 

THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF PITT GUIDING BEHEMOTH

Tempera. 1809 or earlier. In the National Gallery

 

Of serenity, of clarity, there is none; but Blake’s virtue, his quality with its necessary attendant defects, dominates this work and makes it precious in the sense of a unique record of a unique conception. Therefore it is fittingly placed as a representative of Blake’s genius in our National Palace of Art.

What the place assigned to Blake by future generations will be is not for me to predict. That he has been gravely misapprehended and foolishly neglected until the last few years is common knowledge, but even to-day the ranks of his true lovers are scattered and few, though there are some people who affirm that an exaggerated distinction, an inflated value, attaches to his name at present, as a result of the swing of time’s pendulum. Such people, however, are not among those who under any circumstances would be likely to admire Blake or appreciate his unique point of view.

This little book has had for its object, not the imparting of any new facts about him, nor the technical discussion of his works, but the reverent and sympathetic meditation on our own National Blake treasures, with a view to understanding the great spirit who projected them. I have attempted to point out their essential beauties and value, not from the vantage-ground of the connoisseur, but from the point of view of the sympathetic observer. I have sought to explain, to justify, the affinity felt for them by those to whom the doctrine of “Art for art’s sake” is not an all-satisfying thesis, who would fain find in plastic art a language expressive of spiritual intuitions and revelation. Blake’s mission undoubtedly was to discover in his representations of visible phenomena the spiritual cause, or correspondence, of which it appeared to him to be merely a type. How far his ideas are consistent with the conditions and scope of an art which must necessarily concern itself with surfaces and appearances, it is hard to say. His view of art’s function was largely, but not wholly true, yet in its special application was profoundly noble and salutary. Exaggerated, perhaps, in his recoil from the materialism and preoccupation with physical and natural beauties as ends in themselves which characterized the art of his day, he set to work to liberate one hitherto unsuspected aspect of art’s functions, at the expense of belittling the recognized and practised articles of belief recited in her honour by the masters of his time.

The innerness of art; that is what he was concerned about. Impetuously, passionately he stormed along the rugged track he had set himself to explore, ignoring much of beauty and truth to either side of him, because his eyes were so steadfastly fixed on his goal. To-day we acclaim him as the heroic and devoted priest of a new and yet old altar to Art, the flame of which has been kept burning since his time by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, and Mr. G. F. Watts.