-- nr- i n i mih ^- - j< THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES The Popular Library of Art The Popular Library of Art ALBRECHT DURER (37 Illustrations). By LiNA ECKENSTEIN. ROSSETTI (53 Illustrations). By Ford Madox Hueffer. REMBRANDT (61 Illustrations). By AUGUSTE Br^al. FRED. WALKER (32 Illustrations and Photogravure). By Clementina Black. MILLET (32 Illustrations). By Romain Rolland. LEONARDO DA VINCI (44 Illustrations). By Dr Georg Gronau. GAINSBOROUGH (55 Illustrations). By Arthur B. Chamberlain. THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS (50 Illustrations). By Camille Mauclair. BOTTICELLI (37 Illustrations). By Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady). VELAZQUEZ (51 Illustrations). By Auguste Br^al. WATTS (33 Illustrations). By G. K. Chesterto.n. RAPHAEL (50 Illustrations). By Julia Cartwright (Mrs Adv). HOLBEIN (50 Illustrations). By Ford Madox Hueffer. ENGLISH W.\TER COLOUR PAINTERS (42 Illustrations). By A. J. Finbkrg. WATTEAU (35 Illustrations). By Camille Mauclair. PERUGINO (50 Illustrations). By Edward Hutton. THE PRE-RAPH.\ELITE BROTHERHOOD (38 Illustrations). By Ford Madox Hueffer. CRUIKSHANK (55 Illustrations). By W. H. Chesson. WHISTLER (26 Illustrations). By Bernhard Sickert. HOGARTH (4S Illustrations). By Edward Garnett. WILLIAM BLAKE (33 Illustrations). By G. K. Chesterton. /;. iy -^J^, A. ly. ^^ ^* clo^'nrf of III tali iKe*. fWl-wcatIs *^"«*«u a-L/a-["o '^ ." ^ ■fe is m.«ek > l\€ is nv'd . ^^ ^' te kec»me * l"'<^e cK.rU ; ^ '/^ a cKildA^iowa famb /* r^' Wr sure callerui£ rinHi purify vie i/i/n£ , y^'huh i^.K iJt,^ scatter on n'^ryljstlrwiiAi'. of^ral? tk/tt BprvyB^ l\ryu/ee tke niiU^i fc-n .^ i-utrrs ih/^ firf -hrt'trhiJi^ KU>td But JIicl £.< like a /iiiitt i^inul kuiAlrJ at '/v ns'ruf Miin : / ^tflfuAA trvm Jny pe^iriy tJu^>ttf, and who shtui €nri tmr pliz^^ , jC/uien cfliiM vaUa ihr. LiUy an^/rd . tsk the trnda- r'cud , And it MhnlL ttll t/tic »>liy ifjrfdterg in ike mrnimf .iky . And nkr d arattcru it." kv^rhraifff thrr- ti,f hiimvd rdr . ' Drj/rrivJ lutU cloud /^- h,t>er hrfnre lhe_eyrs ciT Ifurl, TIu: Cloud drjrcndgd . >i/ij tlv.l.iUy Lrwrf hrr mcd/sit Urad: ~njvt r.inl tn muul Ker ntimcrcui, cJiarge amrrj; ike fcrdiint uial^ . THE LILLY (1789) WILLIAM BLAKE and interesting in tlie fixed psychology of his youth. He came out into the world a mystic in this very practical sense, that he came out to teach rather than to learn. Even as a boy he was bursting with occult information. And all through his life he had the deficiencies of one who is always giving out and has no time to take in. He was deaf with his own cataract of speech. Hence it followed that he was devoid of patience while he was by no means devoid of charity : but impatience produced every evil effect that could practically have come from uncharitableness: impatience trijiped him up and sent him sprawling twenty times in his life. The result was the unlucky paradox, that he who was always preaching perfect forgiveness seemed not to forgive even imperfectly the feeblest slights. He himself wrote in a strong epigram — "To forgive enemies Hayley does pretend, Who never in his life forgave a friend." But the effect of the epigram is a little lost through its considerable truth if applied to the epigrammatist. The wretched Hayley had himself been a friend to Blake — and Blake ^3 WILLIAM BLAKE could not forgive him. But this was not really lack of love or pity. It was strictly lack of patience, which in its turn was due to that bursting and almost brutal mass of convictions with which he plunged into the world like a red-hot cannon ball, just as we have already imagined him plunging into a room with his big bullet head. His head was indeed a bullet ; it was an explosive bullet. Of his other early relations we know little. The parents who are often mentioned in his poems, both for praise and blame, are the abstract and eternal father and mother and have no individual touches. It might be inferred, perhaps, that he had a special emotional tie with his elder brother Robert, for Robert constantly appeared to him in visions and even explained to him a new method of engraving. But even this inference is doubtful, for Blake saw the oddest people in his visions, people with whom neither he nor any one else has anything particular to do ; and the method of engraving might just as well have been revealed by Bubb Doddington or Prester John or the oldest baker in Brighton. That is one of the facts that makes one fancy WILLIAM BLAKE that Blake's visions were genuine. But whoever taught him his own style of engraving, an ordinary mortal engraver taught him the ordinary mortal style, and he seems to have learnt it very well. When apprenticed by his father to a London engraving business he was diligent and capable. All his life he was a good woi'kman, and his failures, which were many, never arose from that common idleness or looseness of life attributed to the artistic temperament. He was of a bitter and intolerant temper, but not otherwise unbusiness-like ; and he was prone to insult his patrons, but not, as a rule, to fail them. But with this part of his character we shall probably have to deal afterwards. His technical skill was very great. This and a certain original touch also attracted to the young artist the attention and interest of the sculptor Flaxman. The influence of this great man on Blake's life and work has been gravely underrated. The mistake has arisen from causes too complex to be considered, at any rate at this stage ; but they resolve themselves into a misunderstand- ing of the nature of classicism and of the nature of mysticism. But this can be said decisively : WILLIAM BLAKE Blake remained a Flaxmanite to the day of his death. Flaxman as a sculptor and draughts- man stood, as everybody knows, for classicism at its clearest and coldest. He would admit no line into a modern picture that might not have been on a Greek bas-relief. Even fore- shortening and perspective he avoided as if there were something grotesque about them — as, indeed, there is. Nothing can be funnier, properly considered, than the fact that one's own father is a pigmy if he stands far enough off. Perspective really is the comic ele- ment in things. Flaxman vaguely felt this ; Flaxman shrank from the almost insolent fore- shortenings of Rubens or \ eronese as he would have shrank from the gigantic boots in the foreground of an amateur photogra{)h. For him high art w-as flat art in painting or drawing, everything could be done by pure line upon a single plane. Flaxman is probably best known to the existing public by his illustrations in line to Pope's " Homer," — which have certainly copied most exquisitely the austere limitations of Greek vases and reliefs. Anger may be uttered by the lifted arm or sorrow by the sunken head, but the faces of all those gods i6 WILLIAM BLAKE and heroes are, as you may think them, beautiful or foohsh, like the faces of tlie dead. Above all, the line must never falter and come "to nothing; Flaxman would regard a line fading away in such a picture as we should regard a railway line fading away upon a map. This was the principle of Flaxman ; and this remained to the day of his death one of the firmest principles of William Blake. I will not say that Blake took it from the great sculptor, for it formed an integral part of Blake's in- dividual artistic philosophy ; but he must have been eneoui-aged to find it in Flaxman and strengthened in it by the influence of an older and more famous man. No one can understand Blake's pictures, no one can understand a hundred allusions in his epigrams, satires, and art criticism who does not first of all realise that William Blake was a fanatic on the sul)ject of the £ym line . The thing he loved most in art was that lucidity and decision of outline which can be seen best in the cartoons of Raphael, in the Elgin Marbles, and in the simpler designs of Michael Angelo. The thinff he hated most in art Avas the thing which Ave now call Impressionism — the I?B 17 WILLIAM BLAKE substitution of atmospliere for shape, the sacrifice of form to tint, the cloudland of the mere colourist. With that cyclopean impu- dence which was the most stunning sign of his sincerity, he treated the greatest names not only as if they were despicable, but as if they were actually despised. He reasons mildly with the artistic authorities, saying — " You must admit that lluhens was a fool, And yet you make him master in your school. And give more money for his slobherings Than you will give for Raphael's finest thiugs.'' And then, with one of those sudden lunges of sense which made him a swordsman after all, he really gets home upon Rubens — "I understood Christ was a carpenter And not a brewer's drayman, my good sir." In another satire he retells the fable of the dog, the bone, and the river, and permits (with admirable humour) the dog to expatiate upon the vast pictorial superiority of the bone's reflection in the river over the bone itself; the shadow so delicate, suggestive, rich in tone, the real bone so hard and academic in outline. He was the sharpest satirist of the Imjiressionists 18 '^&.' •Y^ p: tiiPi^ dixtrvCi ; *— '- L. ,.,. .-, , Ann ti> Vltes* Mrti!»r;< n» J#iiv{K: 7 ru'tJuntiicif tr*roduln*ls. Vvifi^!^!' Uk (lUii our iirtiM!!' cciti': l/> HinKi* cJulri tuw^ c«lj« |Vtv,« hiunjB-. iioc: ■*— \ •1 n?flc«. tiir Kuniatx ts tu tjvr Jwjtuoi <«")rB\ Avui* An*/ ill must time ike Xu»««»ifonn . ^■' THE DIVINE IMAGE (1789) WILLIAM BLAKE who ever wrote, only he satirised the Impres- sionists before they were born. The ordinary history of Blake would ob- viously be that he was a man who began as agood engraver and became a great artist. The inner truth of Blake could hardly be better put than this : that he was a good artist whose idea of greatness was to be a great e^ngraver. For him it was no mere technical accident that the art of reproduction had to cut into wood or bite into stone. He loved to think that even in being a draughtsman he was also a sculptor. When he put his lines on a decorative page he would have much preferred to carve them out of marble or cut them into rock. Like every true romantic, he loved the irrevocable. Like evei*y true artist, he detested india-rubber. Take, for the sake of example, all the designs to the Book of Job. When he gets the thing right he gets it suddenly and perfectly right, as in the picture of all the sons of God shout- ing for joy. We feel that the sons of God might really shout for joy at the excellence of their own portrait. When he gets it wrong he gets it completely and incurably wrong, as in the preposterous picture of Satan dancing 21 WILLIAM BLAKE among paving-stones. But both are equally final and fixed. If one picture is incurably bad^ the other picture is incurably good. Courage (which is, with kindness, the only fundamental virtue in man), is present and prodigious in both. No coward could have drawn such pictures. The chief movement of Blake either in art or literature was the first publication of the batch of his own allegorical works. " The Gates of Para- dise " came first, and was followed by " Urizen " and the " Book of Thel." With these he intro- duced his own mode of engraving and began, his own style of decorative illustration. That style was steeped in the Blake and Flaxman feeling for the hard line and the harsh and heroic treatment. There were, of course, many other personalities besides that of Flaxman which were destined to influence the art of William Blake. Among others, the per- sonalitv of William Blake influences it not inconsiderably. But no influence ever disturbed the love of the absolute academic line. If the reader will look at any of the designs of Blake, many of which are reproduced in this book, he will see the main fact which I mention 22 WILLIAM BLAKE here. Many of them are hideous, some of them are outrageous, but none of them are shapeless ; none of them are what would now be called "suggestive"; none of them (in a word) are timid. The figure of man may be a monster, but he is a solid monster. The figure of God may be a mistake, but it is an unmis- takable mistake. About this same time Blake began to illustrate books, decollating Blair's "Grave " and the Book of Job with his dark but very definite designs. In these plates it is quite plain that the artist, when he errs, errs not by vagueness but by hardness of treatment. The beauty of the angel upside down who blows the trumpet in the face of Blair's skeleton is the beauty of a perfect Greek athlete. And if the beauty is the beauty of an athlete, so the ugliness is the ugliness of an athlete — or perhaps of an acrobat. The contortions and clumsy attitudes of some of Blake's figures do not arise from his ignor- ance of the human anatomy. They arise from a sort of wild knowledge of it. He is straining muscles and cracking joints like a sportsman racing for a cup. These book illustrations by Blake arc among 23 WILLIAM BLAKE the simplest and strongest designs of his pencil^ which at its best (to do him justice) tended to the simple and the strong. Nothing (for in- stance) could well be more comic or more tragic than the fact that Blake should illustrate Blair's elephantine epic called "The Grave." It was as well that Blake and Blair should meet over the grave. It was about all they had in common. The poet was full of the most crushing platitudes of eighteenth century rationalism. The artist was full of a poetry that would have seemed frightful to the poet, a poetry inherited from the mystics of all ages and handed on to the mystics of to-day. Blake was the child of the Rosy Cross and the Eleusinian Mysteries ; he was the father of the Pi-e-Raphaelite Bi-otherhood and even of the "Yellow Book." But of all this the excellent Mr Blair was innocent, and so, indeed, in all probability was the excellent Mr Blake. But the really interesting point is this : that the illustrations were efficient and satisfactory, from the Blair as well as the Blake point of view. The cut, for instance, with the figure of the old man bowing his head to enter the black grotto of the grave 24 . j, 'v IT\'T»!-i»i h Ulit, •f Afl 411 4rt'^W ^jJoKc l»i'Ul-i< '>.j>?l<«l »IMi 'I'ti* ,'?•.. THE LITTLE BLACK BOY (T789) WILLIAM BLAKE is a fine piece of drawing, apart from its meaning, and is all the finer for its simplicity. But wherever he errs it is always in being too hard and harsh, not too faint or fanciful. Blake was a greater man than Flaxman, though a less perfectly poised man. He was harder than his master, because he was madder. The figure upside down blowing the trumpet is as perfect as a Flaxman figure : only it is upside down. Flaxman upside down is almost a definition of Blake. Such an elementary statement of Blake's idea of art is not out of place at this stage ; for his convictions had formed and hardened unusually early, and his career is almost unintelligible apart from his opinions. It is fairly eccentric even with them. ^Flaxman had introduced him to literary society, especially to the even- ing parties of a Blue-stocking named Mrs Matthews. Here his force of mind was admitted ; but he was not personally very popular. Most of his biographers attribute this to his "unbending deportment," and a 27 WILLIAM BLAKE certain almost babyish candour which certainly belonged to him. But I cannot help thinking that the fact that he was in the habit of sing- ing his own poems to tunes invented by himself may perhaps have had something to do with it. His opinions on all subjects were not only positive but aggressive. He was a fierce republican and denouncer of kings. But Mrs Matthews was probably accustomed to fierce republicans who denounced kings. She may have been less accustomed to a gentleman who insisted on weai'ing a red cap of liberty in ordinary society. It is due to Blake to say that his politics showed never- theless that eccentric practicality which was mixed up with his unworldliness; it was cer- tainly through his presence of mind that Tom Paine did not perish on the scaffold. But Blake had none of the marks of the poetical weakling, of the mere moon-calf of mysticism. If he was a madman, one can emphasise the word man as well as the word mad. For instance^ in spite of his sedentary trade and his pacific theories, he had extra- ordinary physical courage. Not that reasonable minimum of physical courage which is guaran- 28 WILLIAM BLAKE teed by certain conventional sports, but intrinsic contempt of danger, a readiness to put himself into unknown perils. He would suddenly attack men much bigger and stronger than himself, and that with such vJnk npp that they were often defeated by their own amaze- ment. He attacked a huge drayman who was harsh to some women and beat him in the most excited manner. He leapt upon a Lifeguards- man who came into his front garden, and ran that astonished warrior into the road by the elbows. The vivacity and violence of these physical outbreaks must be remembered and allowed for when we are judging some of his mental outbreaks. The most serious blot (indeed, the only serious blot) on the moral chai-acter of Blake was his habit of letting his rage get the better not only of decency but of gratitude and truth. He would abuse his benefactors as virulently as his enemies. He left epigrams lying about in which he called Flaxman a blockhead and Hayley (as far as the words can be understood) a seducer and an assassin. But the curious thing is that he often did justice to the same people both before and after such eruptions. The truth 29 WILLIAM BLAKE is, I fancy, that such writings were Hke sudden attitudes or bodily movements. We talk of a word and a blow ; with Blake a word had the same momentary character as a blow. It was not a judgment, but a gesture. He had little or no feeling of the idea that " litera scripta manet." He did not see any particular reason why he should not be fond of a man merely because he had called the man a murderer a few days before. And he was innocently surprised if the man was not fond of him. In this he was perhaps rather feminine than masculine. He had many friends and acquaintances of distinction besides Flaxman. Among them was the great Priestley, whose speculations were the life of early Unitarianism and whose Jacobin sympathies led to something not far from martyrdom ; other friends v/ere the wild optimist Godwin and his daughter Mary Woolstonecroft. But although he gained many new acquaint- ances he gained only one new helper. This was a Mr Thomas Butts, who lived in Fitzroy Square, and ought to have a statue there, for he is an eternal model and monument for all patrons of art. While in all other respects apparently a sane and rational British merchant, 30 WILLIAM BLAKE he conceived an affection for Blake's allegorical designs. But he gave no commissions for pictures ; he simply gave Blake money for pictures as fast as Blake chose to paint them. The subject and size and medium were left entirely to the artist. One day Blake might leave at Fitzroy Square a little water-colour of the " Soul of a Porcupine " ; the next day a gorgeous and intricate illumination in gold of the obstetrics and birth of Cain ; the next day an enormous mural painting of Hector capturing the arms of Patroclus ; the following day a simple pen and ink drawing of the prophet Habbakuk taken from life. All these Mr Thomas Butts of Fitzroy Square received with solid benevolence and paid for in solid coin. Many modern writers and painters may think of such a patron somewhat dreamily. He had his reward, though it was unique rather than par- ticularly practical. Blake regarded him with a serene affection which was never ruffled by the flying storms that were too frequent in his friendships. No allusions can be found in his poetry to the effect that Thomas Butts was a Spectre from Satan's Loins. No epigram was discovered among Blake's papers accusing Mr 31 WILLIAM BLAKE Butts of bereaving anybody's life. If to have kept one's own temper with Blake was a large achievement (and it was not a small one), it was certainly a truly noble achievement to have kept Blake's temper for him. And this Mr Butts and Mrs Blake can alone really claim to have done. For Blake was to pass under a patron who showed him how different is kindness from sympathy. In the year 1800 he effected a change of residence which was in many ways an epoch in his life. He was a Londoner, though doubtless a Londoner of the time when London was small enough to feel itself on every side to be on the edge of the country. Still Blake had never in any true sense been in the heart of the country. In his earliest poems we read of seraphs stirring in the trees ; but we have somehow a feeling that they were garden trees. We read of saints and sages walking in the fields, and we almost have the feeling that they were brick- fields. The perfect landscape is pastoral to the point of conventionality; it has not in any sense the actual smell of England. The sights of the town are evidently as native (one might 32 N ^'i^j^tedhy W percepij v"-^ or\3 , none can de -<- t/ii/u- _frej( Am:- L\ut ; Vijrt An^'Hlesf dwu. tAat tre^-f anJ {riut^ Hfiu^i. uJKn Ulf njyA. Jr ;.-,My jtenyar unAnvfii ? tiftyt tfarst.v anti hmis i^,.'.,-, ,« LfiA;vr**n . not ivip^rrjefti- . ^pn-inl ui ft^*- injt^ttr yUi. art Therr utJur wan . 1'est.i.- cAr »:.vj cf.XH'erJ aju/ Jire .' s'iixU an.- cArJyr ,.-!^a- ^vm/vs , it^su^e trie .i^,/-/v-«.v ^ pcr/y-ti- ■tune, ' luv Oiw r'Aerjpyj,. /iKin^ tne f^ys of ricjtt^ itrj Anil IS thcj-e m* tjfui (am /cr (^ciA "tfir iici ami t/i. L> ouvJ thfi n/utntams of r^KiAte/u^- jlnvn t^yrtal L2I ^ \z-^. ^i.^v^j:.^ -y^y OOTHOON (1793) WILLIAM BLAKE of production, because decorative art is ex- pended on the one and not on the other. The sword has a golden hilt ; but no plough has ffolden handles. There is such a thine as a sword of state ; there is no such thing as a scythe of state. Men come to court wearing imitation swords ; few men come to court wearing imitation flails. It is fascinating to reflect how fantastic a story might be written upon this hint by Blake. But Blake does not write the story ; he only gives the hint, and that so hurriedly that even as a hint it ur.iy hardly be understood. Most of Blake's quarrels were trivial, and some were little short of discreditable. But in his quarrel with Cromek and Stothard he does really stand as the champion of all that is heroic and ideal, as against all that is worldly and insincere. The celebrated Stothard was at this time in the heisrht of his earlier success ; he occupied somewhat the same relation to art and society that has been occupied within our own time by Frederic Leighton. He Avas, like Leighton, an accom- plished di'aughtsman, a man of slight but genuine poetic feeling, an artist who thor- WILLIAM BLAKE oughly realised that the aim of art was to please. Ruskin said of him very truly (I forget the exact words) that there were no thorns to his roses. At the same time, his smoothness was a smoothness of innocence rather than a smoothness of self-indulgence ; his work has a girlish timidity rather than any real conventional cowardice ; he was a true artist in a somewhat effeminate style of art. Nor is there any reason to doubt that his personal character was as clean and good- natured as his pictures. It may be that he began his Canterbury Pilgrims without any commission from Cromek, or it may be that he took the commission from Cromek without the least idea that the conception had been borrowed from Blake. That Cromek ti'eated Blake badly is beyond dispute ; that Stothard treated him badly is unproved ; but Blake was not much in the habit of waiting for proof in such cases. Stothard, I say, may not have been morally in the wrong at all. But he was intellectually and critically very much in the wrong; and Blake pointed this out in a pamphlet which, though defaced here and there with his fantastic malice, is a solid and power- 50 WILLIAM BLAKE ful contribution to artistic and literary criticism. ^ Stothard, the elegant gentleman, the man of sensibility, the eighteenth centuiy aesthete, least his condescending eye upon the Middle lAges. He was of that age and school that only saw the Middle Ages by moonlight. Chaucer's Pilgrims were to him a quaint masquerade of hypocrisy or superstition, now only interesting from its comic or antiquated costume. The monk was amusing because he was fat, the wife of Bath because she was gay, the Squire because he was dandified, and so on. Blake knew as little about the Middle Ages as Stothard did ; but Blake knew about .. eternity and about man ; he saw the image of God under all garments. And in a rage which V may really be called noble he tore in pieces Stothard's antiquarian frivolity, and asked him to look with a more decent reverence at the great creations of a great poet. Stothard called the young Squire of Chaucer '^ a fop." Blake points out forcibly and with fine critical truth that the daintiness of the Squire's dress is the mere last touch to his youth, gaiety, and completeness ; but that he was no fop at all, but 51 WILLIAM BLAKE a serious, chivalrous, and many-sided gentleman who enjoyed books, understood music, and was hardy and prompt in battle. Moreover, he is definitely described as humble, reverent, and full of filial respect. That such a man should be called a fop because of a frill or a feather Blake rightly regarded as a sign of the mean superficiality of his rival's ideas. Stothard spoke of " the fair young wife of Bath " ; Blake placidly points out that she had had four husbands, and was, as in Blake's picture, a loud, lewd, brazen woman of quite advanced age, but of enormous vitality and humour. Stothard makes the monk the mere comic monk of commonplace pictures, shaped like a wine barrel and as full of wine. Blake points out that Chaucer's monk was a man, and an infiuential man ; not without sensual faults, but also not without dignity and authority. Everywhere, in fact, he reminds his opjwnent that in entering the world of Chaucer he is not entering a fancy-dress ball, but a temple carved with colossal and eternal imas^es of the gods of good and evil. Stothard was only interested in Chaucer's types because they were dead ; Blake was interested in them 52 i [flyjs^ '*^«' tr dn/tr- im^r ct. \7i--^ Hc ' Sc tfte rj.-ni'- <•.'•.. i-jr ^ InJiour Jfuit IS uocve. aajniytt. uiul ^ijt tLu tuAt- ik'r [fjCf *y ccu-Ye/^r. a- tiu ,i-^ Sr,t ^r>,v//,,^..vWr to tlir rJJMr.A / JMes Ju- ^lu, ctrUanny pcv.:cy.^-^ Jie -'/u> turns mkK ahhcrrsnre rnm usury: /&:/ Uu^a.ne p,uQlcr. er art- M,> //iJir// a/^ ' ; rip.' c^in. iht-^atr li bilts- exjwru-n.; a,e J,rv ,Tf' ' tft^ tnfT'Jt-i'' _ f'ru. ^{rtjjn. 'H^' {Jfereftt far ftw ^ ,fi^ Mr^Lj^ ,^, ^„.„. «„^, ' ^ ^•g'j- '•i*"^ ,<*'^ >'vii^' "'/^' -a^.^y.^'u/ j^mj-j.- „pcn tL- /-W: 'Mutt are his .„„ ^ >;,„, ^ -!'u .ihi K/w burns- Kjk ' jL Zf:r"i "''■W"^.- -"W «e^.^ ^^^, t'u,,^,.,.c&,:^^ , tf ^ ^./, ,vv--,.r .A,.,, tt- rr,2jU^. bcu,,/ CD hrlH a r^S. Sarmtr.' tiufu,-. &. kow^ Jefi he lurrewvl mm ard t'dA ^creytv ufseljud^'. hjgit -^rrs. «4,vv- hn^ dc firunsf-' mit, ..^ ^mM.anS Whs- n^ fixed i,:t,- ts hourly a.- Melt xifi, a,u- At /,/fes- . and dc' t/i/r d^e,{ , /.v is • /Ivy- ?Ac- y.j^ i^er'Afi air ^,y A, tsfffiS as' dw Juwi^r dci; ? ur da.u-f Ju: .sr&tt Ae pvija.uji pn. ti/aause hj.-.- ruutrja wide IJyaii,' ut //v ocean '^ cfoo- A.- eve d^-idrr vuw tfie cJiji-,- tJterr fe«' hiA« (Anr^eu/i^ .' Cj- dees tne Hv rr/ru-e . heroine 'Ju' ha-iest l-- iroulj'Ur in.' ZA'C ru-t the eag/.-- -fecr/i liu eart,-T. A despur," iJie-Ti^tiiu/.-^ teienlh .%it tfte jru-Le iutcwetJi m/udr «• Ma .- . cV ot<- Aiir„ 3/,// £.// ,t ^M . . Dve^ jwt «v '•'crm. erect a pjhr ,.- ^fu f7^uUlenr^ c/-M.-ch tardj SPELLS OF LAW (1793; WILLIAM BLAKE Decause they cannot die. In many of Blake's pictures may be found one figure quite monoton- ously recurrent — the figure of a monstrously "^ muscular old man, with hair and beard like a ( snowstorm, but with limbs like young trees. That is Blake's I'oot conception ; the Ancient ~~) of Days ; the thing which is old with all the awfulness of its past, but young with all the ' energies of its future. I make no excuse for dwelling at length on this in a life of Blake ; it is the most important event. It is worth while to describe this quarrel between Blake and Stothard, because it is really a symbolic quarrel, interesting to the whole world of artists and important to the whole destiny of art. It is the quarrel between the artist who is a poet and the artist who is only a painter. In many of his merely technical designs Blake was a better and bolder artist than Stothard ; still, I should admit, and most people who saw the two pictures would be ready to admit, that Stothard's Canterhury Pilgrims as a mere piece of drawing and paint- ing is better than Blake's. But this if any- thing only makes the whole argument more certain. It is the duel between the artist who ss c WILLIAM BLAKE wishes only to be an artist and the artist who has the higher and harder ambition to be a man — that is, an archangel. Or, again, it might y^ be put thus : whether an artist ought to be a uni- versalist or whether he is better as a specialist. Now against the specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really important argument, and that, for some reason or other, is never offered. People say that specialists are inhuman ; but that is unjust. People say an expert is not a man ; but that is unkind and untrue. The real difficulty about the specialist or expert is much more singular and fascinating. The trouble with the expert is never that he is not a man ; it is always that wherever he is not ^ an expert he is too much of an ordinaiy man. Wherever he is not exceptionally learned he is quite casually ignorant. This is the great fallacy in the case of what is called the impartiality of men of science. If scientific men had no idea beyond their scientific work it might be all very well — that is to say, all very well for everybody except them. But the truth is that, beyond their scientific ideas, they 56 WILLIAM BLAKE have not the absence of ideas but the presence of the most vulgar and sentimental ideas that happen to be common to their social clique. If a bioloffist had no views on art and morals it might be all very well. The truth is that a biologist has all the wrong views of art and morals that happen to be going about in the smart set in his time. If Professor Tyndall had held no views about politics, he could have done no harm with his views about evolution. Unfortunately, however, he held a very low order of political ideas from his sectarian and Orange ancestrv ; and those ideas have poisoned evolution to this day. In short, the danger of the mere technical artist or expert is that of becoming a snob or average silly man in all things not aifecting his peculiar topic of study ; wherever he is not an extraordinary man he is a particularly stupid ordinary man. The very fact that he has studied machine guns to fight the French proves that he has not studied the French. Therefore he will probably say that they eat frogs. The very fact that he has learnt to paint the light on medieval armour proves that he has not studied the medieval philosophy. Therefore he will 57 WILLIAM BLAKE probably suppose that medieval barons did nothing but order vassals into the dungeons beneath the castle moat. Now all through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries art, that is, the art of painting, suffered terribly from this conventional and uncultured quality in the working artist. People talk about something pedantic in the knowledge of the expert ; but what ruins mankind is the ignorance of the expert. In the period of which we speak the experts in painting were bursting with this ignorance. The early essays of Thackeray are full of the complaint, that the whole trouble with painters was that they only knew how to paint. If they had painted unimportant or contemptible subjects, all would have been well ; if they had painted the nearest donkey or lamp-post no one would have complained. But exactly because they were experts they fell into the mere snobbish sentimentalism of their times ; they insisted on painting all the things they had read about in the cheapest history books and the most maudlin novels. As Thackeray has immortally described in the case of Mr Gandish, they painted Boadishia and declared that they had discovered " in 58 WILLIAM BLAKE their researches into 'istry " the story of King Alfred and the Cakes. In other words, the expert does not escape his age ; he only lays himself open to the meanest and most obvious of the influences of his age. The specialist does not avoid having prejudices ; he only succeeds in specialising in the most passing and illiterate prejudices. Of all this type of technical ignorance Stothard is absolutely typical. He was an admirable instance of the highly cultivated and utterly ignorant man. He had spent his life in making lines swerve smoothly and shadows creep exactly into their right place ; he had never had any time to understand the things that he was drawing except by their basest and most conventional connotation. Somebody suggested that he should draw some medieval pilgrims — that is, some vigorous types in the heyday of European civilisation in the act of accepting the European religion. But he who alone could draw them right was especially likely to see them wrong. He had learnt, like a modern, the truth from news- papers, because he had no time to read even encyclopedias. He had learnt how to paint 59 WILLIAM BLAKE armour and armorial bearings ; it was too much to expect him to understand them. He had learnt to draw a horse ; it was too late to ask him to ride one. His whole business was somehow or other to make pictures ; and therefore when he looked at Chaucer, he could see nothing but the pictui'esque. Against this sort of sound technical artist, another type of artist has been eternally offered ; this was the type of Blake. It was also the type of Michael Angelo ; it was the type of Leonardo de Vinci ; it was the type of several French mystics, and in our own country and recent period, of Rossetti. Blake, as a painter among other things, belongs to that small group of painters who did something else besides paint. But this is indeed a very inadequate way of stating the matter. The fuller and fairer way is this : that Blake was one of those few painters who iinderstood his subject as well as his picture. I have already said that I think Stothard's picture of the Canterhuri) Pilgrims in a purely technical sense better than his. Indeed, there is nothing to be said against Stothard's picture of the Canter- Imry Pilgiims, except that it is not a picture 60 PROPHECY. LAMBETH . FRONTISPIECE TO "AMERICA" WILLIAM BLAKE of the Canterbury Pilgrims. Blake (to sum- marise the whole matter as simply as it can be summarised) was in the tradition of the best and most educated ideas about Chaucer; Stothard was the inheritor of the most fashionable ideas and the worst. The whole incident cannot be without its moral and effect for all discussions about the morality or unmorality of art. If art could be unmoral it might be all very well. But the truth is that unless art is moral, art is not only im- y moral, but immoral in the most commonplace, slangy, and prosaic way. In the future, the fastidious artists who refuse to be anything but artists will go down to history as the em- bodiment of all the vulgarities and banalities of their time. People will point to a picture by Mr Sargent or Mr Shannon and say, " See, that man had caught all the most middle class cant of the early twentieth century." We can now recur, however, to the general relations of Blake with his later patron. In a phrase of singular unconscious humour Mr Cromek accused Blake of " a want of common politeness." Common politeness certainly can hardly be said to have been Blake's strong 63 WILLIAM BLAKE point. But Cromek's politeness was certainly an uncommon sort of politeness. One is tempted to be thankful that it is not a common sort. Cromek's notion of common politeness was to give the artist a guinea a drawing on the understanding that he should get some more for engraving them, and then give the enffravinjj to somebody else who cost him next to nothing. Blake, as we have said, resented this startling simplicity of swindling. Blake was in such matters a singular mixture of madness and shrewdness in the judgment of such things. He was the kind of man whom a publisher found at one moment more vague and viewless than any poet, and at the next moment more prompt and rapacious than any literary agent. He was sometimes above his commercial enemy, sometimes below him ; but he never was on his level ; one never knew where he was. Cromek's letter is a human document of extraordinary sincerity and interest. The Yorkshire publisher positively breaks for once in his life into a kind of poetry. He describes Blake as being "a combination of the serpent and the dove." He did not quite realise, perhaps, that according to the New 64 WILLIAM BLAKE Testament he was pacing Blake a compliment. But the truth is, I fancy, that the painter and poet had been one too many for the publisher. I think that on any occasion Cromek would have willingly forgiven Blake for showing the harmlessness of the dove. I fancy that on one occasion Blake must have shown the wisdom of the serpent. From the mere slavery of this sweater Blake was probably delivered by the help of the last and most human of his patrons, a young man named John Linnell, a landscape painter and a friend of the great Mulready. It is extraordinary to think that he was young enough to die in 1882; and that a man who had read in the Prophetic Books the last crusades of Blake may have lived to read in the newspapers some of the last crusades of Gladstone. This man Linnell covers the last years of Blake as with an ambulance tent in the wilderness. Blake never had any ugly relations with Linnell, just as he had never had any with Butts. His quarrels had wearied many friends ; but by this time I think he was too weary even to quarrel. On Linnell' s commission he began WILLIAM BLAKE a system of illustrations to Dante ; but I think that no one expected him to live to finish it. His last sickness fell upon him very slowly, and he does not seem to have taken much notice of it. He continued perpetually his pictorial designs ; and as long as they were growing stronger he seems to have cared very little for the fact that he was growing weaker himself One of the last designs he made was one of the strongest he ever made — the tre- mendous image of the Almighty bending forward, foreshortened in a colossal perspective, to trace out the heavens with a compass. Nowhere else has he so well expressed his primary theistic ideas — that God, though infinitely gigantic, should be as solid as a giant. He had often drawn men from the life ; not unfrequently he had drawn his dead men from the life. Here, according to his own conceptions, he may be said to have drawn God from the life. When he had finished the portrait (which he made sitting up in his sick-bed) he called out cheerfully, " What shall I draw after that } " Doubtless 66 ^'^reluc/iiim vu im ff » n \r ^ y*"'^ <^%i *5"v -rfTfc .^^ 'y *-' PRELUDIUM (1793) WILLIAM BLAKE he racked his brain for some superlative spirit or archangel which would not be a mere bathos after the other. His rolling eyes (those round lustrous eyes which one can always see roll in his painted portraits) fell on the old frail and somewhat ugly woman who had been his companion so long, and he called out, " Catherine, you have been an angel to me ; I will draw you next. " Throwing aside the sketch of God measuring the universe, he began industriously to draw a portrait of his wife, a portrait which is unfortunately lost, but which must have substantially resembled the remarkable sketch which a friend drew some months afterwards ; the portrait of a woman at once plain and distinguished, with a face that is supremely humorous and at once harsh and kind. Long before that portrait was drawn, long before those months had elapsed, William Blake was dead. Whatever be the explanation, it is quite certain that Blake had more positive joy on his death-bed than any other of the sons of Adam. One has heard of men singing hymns on their death-beds, in low plaintive voices. Blake was not at all like that on his death-bed : 69 WILLIAM BLAKE the room shook with his singing. All his songs were in praise of God, and apparently new : all his songs were songs of innocence. Every now and then he would stop and cry out to his wife, "Not mine! Not mine ! " in a sort of ecstatic explanation. He truly seemed to wait for the opening of the door of death as a child waits for the opening of the cupboard on his birthday. He genuinely and solemnly seemed to hear the hoofs of the horses of death as a baby hears on Christmas eve the rheindeei'-hooves of Santa Claus. He was in his last moments in that wonderful world of whiteness in which white is still a colour. He would have clapped his hands at a white snowflake and sung as at the white wings of an angel at the moment when he himself turned suddenly white with death. And now, after a due pause, someone will ask and we must answer a popular question which, like many popular questions, is really a some- what deep and subtle one. To put the matter quite simply, as the popular instinct would put it, " Was William Blake mad ? " It is easy 70 WILLIAM BLAKE enough to say, of course, in the non-committal modern manner that it all depends on how you define madness. If you mean it in its practical or legal sense (which is perhaps the most really useful sense of all), if you mean was William Blake unfit to look after himself, unable to exercise civic functions or to administer pro- perty, then certainly the answer is "No." Blake was a citizen, and capable of being a very good citizen. Blake, so far from being incap- able of managing property, was capable (in so far as he chose) of collecting a great deal of it. His conduct was generally business-like ; and when it was unbusiness-like it was not through any subhuman imbecility or superhuman ab- straction, but generally through an unmixed exhibition of very human bad temper. Again, if when we say " Was Blake mad ?" we mean was he fundamentally morbid, was his soul cut off" from the universe and merely feeding on itself, then again the answer is emphatically "No." There was nothing defective about Blake ; he was in contact with all the songs \ and smells of the universe, and he was entirely guiltless of that one evil element which is almost universal in the character of the morbidly 71 WILLIAM BLAKE insane — I mean secrecy. Yet again, if we mean by madness anything inconsistent or unreason- able, then Blake was not mad. Blake was one of the most consistent men that ever lived, both in theory and practice. Blake may have been quite wrong, but he was not in the least un- reasonable. He was quite as calm and scientific as Herbert Spencer on the basis of his own theory of things. He was vain to the last degree ; but it was the gay and gusty vanity A of a child, not the imprisoned pride of a maniac. In all these aspects we can say with confidence that the man was not at least obviously mad or completely mad. But if we ask whether there was not some madness about him, whether his naturally just mind was not subject to some kind of disturbing influence which was not essential to itself, then we ask a very ditterent question, and require, unless I am mistaken, a very different answer. When all Philistine mistakes are set aside, when all mystical ideas are appreciated, there is a real sense in which Blake was mad. It is a practical and certain sense, exactly like the sense in which he was not mad. In fact, in almost every case of his character and extra- 72 WILLIAM BLAKE ordinary career we can safely offer this proposi- tioH;, that if there was something wrong with it, it was wi-ong even from his own best standpoint. People talk of appealing from Philip drunk to Philip sober ; it is easy to appeal from Blake mad to Blake sane. When Blake lived at Felpham angels appear to have been as native to the Sussex trees as birds. Hebrew jjatriarchs walked on the Sussex Downs as easily as if they were in the desert. Some people will be quite satisfied with saying that the mere solemn attestation of such miracles marks a man as a madman or a liar. But that is a short cut of sceptical dog- matism which is not far removed from impu- dence. Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the mad-house on all the mystics of history. To call a man mad because he has seen ghosts is in a literal sense religious persecution. It is denying him his full dignity as a citizen because he cannot be fitted into your theory of the cosmos. It is disfranchising him because of his religion. It is just as in- tolerant to tell an old woman that she cannot be a witch as to tell her that she must be a 73 WILLIAM BLAKE witch. In both cases you are setting your own theory of things inexorably against the sincerity or sanity of human testimony. Such dogmatism at least must be quite as impossible to anyone calling himself an agnostic as to anyone calling himself a spiritualist. You cannot take the region called the unknown and calmly say that though you know nothing about it, you know that all its gates are locked. You cannot say, " This island is not discovered yet ; but I am sure that it has a wall of cliffs all round it and no harbour." That was the whole fallacy of Herbert Spencer and Huxley when they talked about the unknowable instead of about the unknown. An agnostic like Huxley must concede the possibility of a gnostic like Blake. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable. If, then, people call Blake mad merely for seeing ghosts and angels, we shall venture to dismiss them as highly respectable but very bigoted people. But then, again, there is another line along which the same swift assumption can be made. While he was at Felpham Blake's eccentricity broke out on another side. A quality that can frankly be 74 J-lnid-y ^fi'^'' ■#: A PROPHECY (1793) WILLIAM BLAKE called indecency appeared in his pictures, his opinions, and to some extent in his conduct. But it was an idealistic indecency. Blake's mistake was not so much that he aimed at sin as that he aimed at an impossible and inhuman sinlessness. It is said that he proposed to his wife that they should live naked in their back garden like Adam and Eve. If the husband ever really proposed this, the Avife succeeded in averting it. But in his verse and prose, jjarticularly in some of the Prophetic Books, he began to talk very wildly. However far he really meant to go against common morality, he certainly meant (like Walt 'Whitman) to go the whole way against common decency. He professed to regard the veiling of the most central of human relations as the unnatural cloaking of a natural work. He was never at a loss for an effective phrase ; and in one of his poems on this topic he says finely if fallaciously — '' Does the sower sow by night Or the ploughman in darkness plough ? '' But his speculations went past decorum and at least touched the idea of primary law. In 77 WILLIAM BLAKE some parts of the Prophetic Books (written in the period which may fairly be called a paroxysm) he really seems to be preaching the idea that sin is sometimes a good thing because it leads to forgiveness. I cannot think this idea does much credit to Blake's power of logic, which was generally good. The very fact of forgiveness implies that what led up to it was evil. But though the position is hardly rational, it is quite unfair to say that it is insane. It is no sillier or more untenable than a hundred sophisti*ies that one may hear at every tea-table or read in every magazine. A little while ago the family of a young lady attempted to shut her up in an asylum because she believed in Free Love. This atrocious injustice was stopped ; but many people wrote to the papers to say that marriage was a very fine thing — as indeed it is. Of course the answer was simple : that if everyone with silly opinions were locked up in an asylum, the asylums of the twentieth century would have to be somewhat unduly enlarged. The same common-sense applies to the case of Blake. That he did maintain some monstrous pro- positions proves that he was not always right, 78 WILLIAM BLAKE that he had even a fine faculty for being exceedingly wrong. But it does not prove that he was a madman or anything remotely resembling one. Nor is there any reason to suppose that he was carried into any practice inconsistent with his strong domestic affections. Indeed, I think that much of Blake's anarchy is connected with his innocence. I have noticed the combination more than once, especially in men of Irish blood like Blake. Heavy, full-blooded men feel the need of bonds and are glad to bind themselves. But the chaste are often lawless. They are theoretically reckless, because they are prac- tically pure. Thus Ireland, while it is the island of rebels is also the island of saints, and might be called the island of virgins. But when we have reached this point — that this ugly element in Blake was an intrusion of Blake's mere theory of things — we have come, I think, very close to the true principle to be pursued in estimating his madness or his sanity. Blake the mere poet, would have been decent and respectable. It was Blake the logician 19 WILLIAM BLAKE who was forced to be almost blackguardly. In other words, Blake was not mad ; for such part of him as was mad was not Blake. It was an alien influence, and in a sense even an accidental one ; in an extreme sense it might even be called antagonist. Properly to appreciate what this influence was, we must see the man's artistic character as a whole and notice what are its biggest forces and its bisrorest defects when taken in the bulk — in etc) the whole mass of his poetry, his pictures, his criticism and his conversation. Blake's position can be summed up as a sufficiently simple problem. Blake could do so many things. Why is it that he could do none of them quite right } Blake was not a frail or fairy-like sort of person ; he had not the light unity, the caper- ing completeness of the entirely irresponsible man. He had not the independence, one might almost say the omnipotence, that comes from being hopelessly weak. There was nothing in him of Mr Skimpole ; he was not a puff of silver thistledown. He was not a reed shaken in the wind in Jordan. He was rather an oak rooted in England, but an oak half killed by the ivy. The interesting 80 bF A FEMALE UREAM (1793; WILLIAM BLAKE question of spiritual botany is — What was the ivy that half killed him ? Originally his in- tellect was not only strong but strongly rational — one might almost say strongly sceptical. There never was a man of whom it was less true to say (as has been said) that he was a light sensitive lyrist, a mere piper of pretty songs for children. His mind was like a ruined Roman arch ; it has been broken by barbarians ; but what there is of it is Roman. ^ So it was with William Blake's reason ; it had been broken (or cracked) by something ; but what there was of it was reasonable. In his art criticism he never said anything that was not strictly consistent with his first principles. In his controversies, in the many matters in which he argued angrily or venomously, he never lost the thread of the argument. Like every great mystic he was also a great rationalist. Read Blake's attack upon Stothard's picture of the Canterbury Pilgrims, and you will see that he could not only write a quite sensible piece of criticism, but even a quite slashing piece of journalism. By nature one almost feels that he might have done anything ; have conducted campaigns like Napoleon or 83 WILLIAM BLAKE studied the stars like Newton. But something, when all is said and done, had eaten away whole parts of that powerful brain, leaving parts of it standing like great Greek pillars in a desert. What was this thing ? Madness is not an anarchy. Madness is a bondage : a contraction. I will not call Blake mad because of anything he would say. But I will call him mad in so far as there was anything he 7mtst say. Now, there are notes of this tyranny in Blake. It was not like the actual disease of the mind that makes a man believe he is a cat or a dog; it was more like the disease of the nerves, which makes a man say " dog " when he means " cat." One mental jump or jerk of this nature may be especially remarked in Blake. He had in his poetry one very peculiar habit, a habit which cannot be considered quite sane. It was the habit of being haunted, one may say hag-ridden by a fixed phrase, which gets itself written in ten separate poems on quite different subjects, when it had no apparent connection with any of them. The amusing 84 WILLIAM BLAKE thing is that the omnipresent piece of poetry is generally the one piece that is quite incom- prehensible. The verse that Blake's readers can understand least seems always to be the verse that Blake likes best. I give an ordinar}' instance, if anything connected with Blake can be called ordinary. The harmless Hayley, who was a fool, but a gentleman and a poet (a country gentleman and a very minor poet), provoked Blake's indignation by giving him commissions for miniatures when he wanted to do something else, probably frescoes as big as the house. Blake wrote the epigram — " If Hayley knows the thing you cannot do, That is the very thing he'll set you to." And then, feeling that there was a lack of colour and warmth in the portrait, he lightly added, for no reason in particular, the lines — " And when he could not act upon my wife. Hired a villain to bereave my life." There is, apparently, no trace here of any allusion to fact. Hayley never tried to bereave anybody's life. He lacked even the adequate 85 WILLIAM BLAKE energy. Nevertheless I should not say for a moment that this startling fiction proved Blake to be mad. It proved him to be violent and recklessly suspicious ; but there was never the least doubt that he was that. But now turn to another poem of Blake's, a merely romantic and narrative poem called " Fair Eleanor," which is all about somebody acting on somebody else's wife. Here we find the same line repeated word for word in quite another connection — " Hired a villain to bereave my life." It is not a musical line ; it does not resemble English grammar to any great extent. Yet Blake is somehow forced to put it into a poem about a real person exactly as he had put it into an utterly different poem about a fictitious person. There seems no jiarticular reason for writing it even once ; but he has to write it asain and again. This is what I do call a mad spot on the mind. I should not call Blake mad for hating Hayley or for boiling Hayley (though he had done him nothing but kind- ness), or for making up any statements however monstrous or mystical about Hayley. I should not in the least degree think that Blake was 86 WILLIAM BLAKE mad if he had said that he saw Hayley's soul in hell, that it had green hair, one eye, and a serpent for a nose. A man may have a wild vision without being insane ; a man may have a lying vision without being insane. But I should smell insanity if in turning over Blake's books I found that this one pictorial image obsessed him apart from its spiritual meaning ; if I found that the arms of the Black Prince in " King Edward III." were a cyclops vert rampant, nosed serpentine ; if I found that Flaxman was ]n*aised for his kindness to a one- eyed animal with green bristles and a snaky snout; if Albion or Ezekiel had appeared to Blake and commanded him to write a history of the men in the moon, who are one-eyed, green-haired, with long curling noses ; if any flimsy sketch or fine decorative pattern that came from Blake's pencil might reproduce ceaselessly and meaninglessly the writhing proboscis and the cyclopean eye. I should call that morbidity or even madness ; for it would be the triumph of the palpable image over its own intellectual meaning. And there is something of that madness in the dark obstinacy or weakness that makes Blake introduce again 87 WILLIAM BLAKE and again these senseless scraps of rhyme, as if they were spells to keep off the devil. In four of five different poems, without any apparent connection with those poems, occur these two extraordinary lines — " Tlie caterpillar on the leaf Repeats to tliee thy mother's grief." In the abstract this might perhaps mean something, though it would, I think, take most people some time to see what it could mean. In the abstract it may perhaps involve some allusion to a universal law of sacrifice in nature. In the concrete — that is, in the context — -it involves no allusion to anything in heaven or earth. Here is another couplet that constantly recurs — " The red blood ran from tlie grey monk's side, His hands and his feet were wounded wide." This is worse still ; for this cannot be merely abstract. The ordinary rational reader will naturally exclaim at last, with a not unnatural explosion, " Who the devil is the grey monk .'' and why should he be always bleeding in places where he has no business ? " Now to say that this sort of thing is not insanity of some kind 88 /Vie iyp'sf. THE TYGER (1794) WILLIAM BLAKE is simply to play the fool with the words. A madman who writes this may be higher than ordinary humanity ; so may any madman in Hanwell. But he is a madman in every sense that the word has among men. I have taken this case of actual and abrujit irrelevance as the strongest form of the thing ; but it has other forms almost equally decisive. For instance, Blake had a strong sense of humour, but it was not under control ; it could be eclipsed and could completely disappear. There was certainly a spouting fountain of fierce laughter in the man who could write in an ej>igi'am — ''A dirty sneakioiT kiuivo I knew . . . Oil, Mr Cromek, how do you do .' " Yet the lauo-hter was as fitful as it was fierce ; and it can suddenly fail. Blake's sense of humour can sometimes completely desert him. He writes a string of verses against cruelty to the smallest creature as a sort of mystical insult to the universe. It contains such really fine couplets as these — " F^ach outcry of the hunted hare A fibre from tlie lirain can tear." 91 WILLIAM BLAKE ) " A skylark wounded in the wingf, A cherubim does cease to sing." Or again, in a more fanciful but genuinely weii'd way — " He who torments the chafer's sprite Weaves a bovver in endless night." And then, after all this excellent and quite serious poetry, Blake can calmly write down the following two lines — " He who the ox to wrath has moved Shall never be by woman loved." One could hardly find a more Gilbertian absurdity in the conjunction of ideas in the whole of the " Bab Ballads " than the idea that the success of some gentleman in the society of ladies depends upon whether he has previously at some time or other slightly irritated an ox. Such sudden inaccesibility to laughter must be called a morbid symptom. V It must mean a blind spot on the brain. The whole thing, of course, would prove nothing if Blake were a common ranter incapable of writing well, or a common dunce incapable of seeing a joke. Such a man might easily be 92 WILLIAM BLAKE sane enough ; he might be as sane as he was stupid. If Blake had always written badly he might be sane. But a man who could write so well and did write so badly must be mad. What was it that was eating away a part of Blake's brain t I venture to offer an answer which in the eyes of many people will have nothing to i-ecommend it except the accident of its personal sincerity. I firmly believe that what did hurt Blake's brain was the reality of his spiritual communications. In the case of all poets, and especially in the case of Blake, the phrase "an inspired poet" commonly means a good poet. About Blake it is specially instinctive. And about Blake, I am quite convinced, it is specially untrue. His inspired poems were not his good jwems. His inspired poems were very often his particularly bad ones ; they were bad by inspiration. If a ploughman says that he saw a ghost, it is not quite sufficient to answer merely that he is a madman. It may have been seeing the ghost that drove him mad. His lunacy may not prove the falsehood of his tale, but rather its terrible truth. So in the same way I differ 93 WILLIAM BLAKE from the common or sceptical critics of a man like Blake. Such critics say that his visions were false because he was mad. I say he was mad because his visions were true. It was exactly because he was unnaturally exposed to a hail of forces that were more than natural that some breaches were made in his mental continuity, some damage was done to his mind. He was, in a far more awful sense than Goldsmith, "an inspired idiot." He was an idiot because he was inspired. When he said of "Jerusalem" that its authors were in eternity, one can only say that nobody is likely to go there to get any more of their work. He did not say that the author of "The Tyger" was in eternity ; the author of that glorious thing was in Carnaby Market. It will generally be found, I think, Avith some important exceptions, that whenever Blake talked most about inspiration he was actually least inspired. That is, he was least inspired by whatever spirit presides over good poetry and good thinking. He was abundantly inspired by whatever spirit presides over bad poetry or bad thinking. Whatever god specialises in unreadable and almost unpro- 94 HOLY THURSDAY (1794) WILLIAM BLAKE nounceable verse was cei*tainly present when he invented the extraordinary history of "William Bond" or the maddening metre of the lines "To Mr Butts." Whatever archangel rules over utter intellectual error had certainly spread his wings of darkness over Blake when he came to the conclusion that a man ought to be bad in order to be pardoned. But these unthinkable thoughts are mostly to be found in his most unliterary productions ; notably in the Prophetic Books. To put my meaning broadly, the opinions which nobody can agree with are mostly in the books that nobody can read. I really believe that this was not from Blake, but from his spirits. It is all very well for great men, like Mr Rossetti and Mr Swinburne, to trust utterly to the seraphim of Blake. They may naturally trust angels — they do not believe in them. But I do be- lieve in angels, and incidentally in fallen angels. There is no danger to health in being a mystic ; but there may be some danger to health in being a spiritualist. It would be a very poor bG 97 WILLIAM BLAKE pun to say that a taste for spirits is bad for the health ; nevertheless, oddly enough, though a poor pun it is a perfectly correct philosophical parallel. The difference between having a real religion and having a mere curiosity about psychic marvels is really very like the difference between drinking beer and drinking brandy, between drinking wine and drinking gin. Beer is a food as well as a stimulant ; so a positive religion is a comfort as well as an adventure. A man drinks his wine because it is his favourite wine, the pleasure of his palate or the vintage of his valley. A man drinks alcohol merely because it is alcoholic. So a man calls upon his gods because they are good or at any rate good to him, because they are the idols that jirotect his tribe or the saints that have blessed his birthday. But spiritualists call upon sj)irits merely because they are spirits ; they ask for ghosts merely because they are ghosts. I have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for genuine Catholicism and ale for genuine Protestantism ; for these at least are real religions with comfort and strength in 98 WILLIAM BLAKE them. Clean cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water, an excellent thing, if you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda-water — which is a fuss about nothing. Mr Bernard Shaw's philosophy is exactly like black coffee — it awakens but it does not really insjnre. Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa ; it would be impossible to express one's contempt for it in stronger terms than that. Sometimes, very rarely, one may come across something that may honestly be compared to milk, an ancient and heathen mildness, an earthly yet sustaining mercy — the milk of human kindness. You can find it in a few pagan poets and a few old fables ; but it is everywhere dying out. Now if we adopt this analogy for the sake of argument, we shall really come back to the bad pun ; we shall conclude that a taste for spiritualism is very like a taste for spirits. The man who drinks gin or methylated spirit does it only because it makes him super-normal ; so the man who with tables or planchettes invokes super- natural beings invokes them only because they are supernatural. He does not know that they 99 WILLIAM BLAKE are good or wise or helpful. He knows that he desires the deity, but he does not even know that he likes him. He attempts to invoke the god without adoring him. He is interested in whatever he can find out touching super- natural existence ; but he is not really filled with joy as by the face of a divine friend, any more than anyone actually likes the taste of methylated spirit. In such psychic investiga- tions, in a word, there is excitement, but not afFectional satisfaction ; there is brandy, but no food. Now Blake was in the most reckless, and sometimes even in the most vulgar, sense a spiritualist. He threw the doors of his mind open to what the late George Macdonald called in a fine phrase "the canaille of the other world." I think it is impossible to look at some of the pictures which Blake drew, under what he considered direct spiritual dictation, without feeling that he was from time to time under influences that Avere not only evil but even foolishly evil. I give one case out of numberless cases. Blake drew, from his own vision a head which he called The Man who built the Pyramids. Anyone can loo WILLIAM BLAKE appreciate the size and mystery of the idea ; and most people would form some sort of fancy of how a great poetical painter, such as Michael Angelo or Watts, would have rendered the idea ; they can conceive a face swarthy and secret, or ponderous and lowering, or star- ing and tropical, or Appolonian and pure. Whatever was the man who built the pyramids, one feels that he must (to put it mildly) have been a clever man. We look at Blake's picture of the man, and with a start behold the face of an idiot. Nay, we behold even the face of an evil idiot, a leei'ing, half-witted face with no chin and the protuberant nose of a pig. Blake declared that he drew this face from a real spirit, and I see no reason to doubt that he did. But if he did, it was not really the man who built the pyramids ; it was not any spirit with whom a gentleman ought to wish to be on intimate terms. That vision of swinish silliness was really a bad vision to have, it left a smell of demoniac silliness behind it. I am very sure that it left Blake sillier than it found him. In this way, rightly or wrongly, I explain the chaos and occasional weakness which perplexes loi WILLIAM BLAKE Blake's critics and often perplexed Blake himself. I think he suffered from the great modern loneliness and scepticism which is the root of the sorrows of the mere spiritualist. The tragedy of the spiritualist simply is that he has to know his gods before he loves them. But a man ought to love his gods before he is sure that there are any. The sublime words of St John's Gospel permit of a sympathetic parody ; if a man love not God whom he has not seen, how shall he love God whom he has seen? If we do not delight in Santa Claus even as a fancy, how can we expect to be happy even if we find that he is a fact .'' But a mystic like Blake simply puts up a placard for the whole universe, like an old woman letting; lodffing^s. The mansion of his mind was indeed a magnificent one ; but no one must be surprised if the first man that walked into it was " the man who built the pyramids," the man with the face of a moon-calf. And whether or no he built the pyramids, he unbuilt the house. But this conclusion touching Blake's original sanity but incidental madness brings us abruptly in contact with the larger question 102 HP" !■■■■ ^^^^^^^^^K^^''^ ■. f\ ^^^^^H ^^^^^^^ r 3 .j^^^B ^^^^H^^^^P^'r^ ^^^^^^^M BHBI' ^^H^^^ ^H^^^^H ^^^E- ^^^^^^^H ^^IV' ''^-^^i^^^^^^^^B WmM^ ^^^IhI I fl|^^^9 '^l^3^^^i^x?Q^^HI^I Fm^^Ih &^^^^^S0C ^^"^fi^^^S^^^^^H^^nfl ARIEL WILLIAM BLAKE of how far his soul and creed gained or suffered from his whole position ; his heterodoxy, his orthodoxy, his attitude towards his age. Properly to do all this we must do now at the end of this book what ought (but the form of the book forbade) more strictly to have been done at the beginning ; we must speak as shortly as possible about the actual age in which Blake lived. And Ave cannot do it without saying something, which we will say as briefly as possible, of that whole great western society and tradition to which he belonged and we belong equally ; that Christendom or continent of Europe which is at once too big for us to measure and too close for us to understand. What was the eighteenth century? Or rather (to speak less mechanically and with more intelligence), what was that mighty and unmistakable phase or mood through which western society was passing about the time that William Blake became its living child ? What was that persistent trend or spirit which all through the eighteenth cen- tury lifted itself like a very slow and very smooth wave to the deafening breaker of the 105 WILLIAM BLAKE French Revolution ? Of course it meant some- thing slightly different to all its different children. Let us here ask ourselves what it meant to Blake, the poet, the painter, and the dreamer. Let us try to state the thing as nearly as possible in terms of his spirit and in relation to his unique work in this world. Every man of us to-day is three men. There is in every modern European three powers so distinct as to be almost personal, the trinity of our earthly destiny. The three may be rudely summarised thus. First and nearest to us is the Christian, the man of the historic church, of the creed that must have coloured our minds incurably whether we regard it (as I do) as the crown and combination of the other two, or whether we regard it as an accidental superstition which has remained for two thousand years. First, then, comes the Christian ; behind him comes the Roman, the citizen of that great cosmopolitan realm of reason and order in the level and equality of which Christianity arose. He is the stoic who is so much sterner than the anchorites. He is the republican who is so much prouder than kings. He it is that makes straight roads and 106 WILLIAM BLAKE clear laws, and for whom good sense is good enough. And the third man — he is harder to speak of. He has no name, and all true tales of him are blotted out ; yet he walks behind us in every forest path and wakes within us when the wind wakes at night. He is the origins — he is the man in the forest. It is no part of our subject to elaborate the point ; but it may be said in passing that the chief claim of Christianity is exactly this — that it revived the pre- Roman madness, yet brought into it the Roman order. The gods had really died long before Christ was born. What had taken their place was simply the god of government — Divus Caesar. The pagans of the real Roman Empire were nothing if not respectable. It is said that when Christ was born the ciy went through the world that Pan was dead. The truth is that when Christ was born Pan for the first time began to stir in his grave. The pagan gods had become pure fables when Christianity gave them a new lease of life as devils. I venture to wager that if you found one man in such a society who seriously believed in the personal existence of Apollo, he was probably a Christian. Chris- 107 WILLIAM BLAKE tianity called to a kind of clamorous resurrection all the old supernatural instincts of the forests and the hill. But it put upon this occult chaos the Roman idea of balance and sanity. Thus, marriage was a sacrament, but mere sex was not a sacrament as it was in many of the frenzies of the forest. Thus wine was a sacra- ment with Christ ; but drunkenness was not a sacrament as with Dionysus. In short, Chris- tianity (merely historically seen) can best be understood as an attempt to combine the reason of the market-place with the mysticism of the forest. It Avas an attempt to accept all the superstitions that are necessary to man and to be philosophic at the end of them. Pagan Rome has sought to bring order or reason among men. Christian Rome sought to bring order and reason among gods. Given these three principles, the epoch we discuss can be defined. The eighteenth century was primarily the return of reason — and of Rome. It was the coming to the top of the stoic and civic element in that triple mixture. It was full, like the Roman world, io8 PRELUDIUM TO URIZEN (1794) WILLIAM BLAKE of a respect for law. Note that the priest still wears, in the main, the popular garb of the Middle Ages : but the lawyer still wears the head-dress of the eighteenth century. Yet while the Roman world was full of rule it was also full of revolution. But indeed the two things necessarily go together. The English used to boast that they had achieved a constitutional revolution ; but every revolu- tion must necessarily be a constitutional revolution, in so far that it must have reference to some antecedent theory of justice. A man must have rights before he can have wrongs. So it may be constantly remarked that the countries which have done most to spread legal generalisations and judicial decisions are those most filled with political fury and potential rebellion — Rome, for instance, and France. Rome planted in every tribe and village the root of the Roman law at the very time when her own town was torn with faction and bloody with partisan butcheries. France forced intellectually on nearly all Europe an excellent code of law, and she did it when her own streets were hardly cleared of corpses, when she was in a panting pause between two III WILLIAM BLAKE pulverising civil wars. And, on the other hand, you may remark that the countries where there is no revolution are the countries where there is no law ; where mental chaos has clouded every intelligible legal principle — such countries as Morocco and modern England. The eighteenth century, then, ended in revolution because it began in law. It was the age of reason, and therefore the age of revolt. It is needless to say how systematic- ally it revived all the marks and motives of that ancient pagan society in which Chris- tianity first arose. Its greatest art was oratory, its favourite affectation was severity. Its pet virtue was jniblic spirit, its pet sin political assassination. It endured the pompous, but hated the fantastic ; it had pure contempt for anything that could be called obscure. To a virile mind of that epoch, such as Dr Johnson or Fox, a poem or picture that did not at once explain itself was simply like a gun that did not go off or a clock that stopped suddenly : it was simply a failure, fit for indifference or for a fleeting satire. In spite of their solid convictions (for which they 112 WILLIAM BLAKE died) the men of that time always used the word "enthusiast" as a term of scorn. All that we call mysticism they called madness. Such was the eighteenth century civilisation ; such was the strict and undecorated frame from which look at us the blazing eyes of William Blake. So far Blake and his century are a mere contrast. But here we must remember that the three elements of Europe are not the strata of a rock, but the strands of a rope ; since all three have existed not one of them has ever appeared entirely unmixed. You may call the Renascence pagan, but Michael Angelo cannot be imagined as anything but a Christian. You may call Thomas Aquinas Christian, but you cannot say exactly what he would have been without Aristotle the pagan. You may, even in calling Virgil the poet of Roman dignity and good sense, still ask whether he did not remember something older than Rome when he spoke of the good luck of him who knew the field gods and the old man of the forest. In the same way there was even in the eighteenth century an element of the purely Christian and an element of the /?H 112 WILLIAM BLAKE purely primitive. And, as it happens, both these non-rational (or non-Roman) strains in the eighteenth century are particularly important in considering the mental make-up of William Blake. For the first alien strain in this century practically represents all that is effective and fine in this great genius, the second strain represents without question all that is doubtful, all that is irritating, and all that is ineffective in him. In the eighteenth century there were two elements not taken from the Roman stoic or the Roman citizen. The first was what our century calls humanitarianism — what that century called "the tear of sensibility." The old pagan commonwealths were democratic, but they were not in the least humanitarian. They had no tears to spare for a man at the mercy of the community ; they reserved all their anger and sympathy for the community at the mercy of a man. That individual com- passion for an individual case was a pure pro- duct of Christianitv ; and when Voltaire flunsr iiimself with fury into the special case of Galas, 114 HAR AND HEVA (1795) WILLIAM BLAKE he Avas drawing all his energies from the re- liffion that he denied. A Roman would have rebelled for Rome, but not for Calas. This personal humanitarianism is the relic of Christianity — perhaps (if I may say so) the / dregs of Christianity. Of this humanitarianism or sentimentalism, or whatever it can best be called, Blake was the enthusiastic inheritor. Being the great man that he was, he naturally anticipated lesser men than himself; and amonff the men less than himself I should count Shelley, for instance, and Tolstoy. He carried his instinct of personal kindness to the point of denouncing war as such — " Naught can deform tlie human race Like the Armourer's iron brace." Or, again — " The strongest poison ever known Came from Caesar's iron crown." No pagan republican, such as those on Avhom the eighteenth century ethic was founded, could have made head or tail of this mere humanitarian horror. He could not even have comprehended this idea — that war is immoral 117 WILLIAM BLAKE when it is not unjust. You cannot find this sentiment in the pagans of antiquity, but you can find it in the pagans of the eighteenth century ; you can find it in the speeches of Fox, the sohloquies of Rousseau and even in the sniggering of Gibbon. Here is an element of the eighteenth century which is derived dai'kly but indubitably from Christianity, and in which Blake strongly shares. Regulus has returned to be tortured and pagan Rome is saved ; but Christianity thinks a little of Regulus. A man must be pitied even when he must be killed. That individual compassion provoked Blake to violent and splendid lines — " And the slaughtered soldier's cry Runs iu blood down palace walls." The eighteenth century did not find that pity where it found its pagan liberty and its pagan law. It took this out of the very churches that it violated and from the desperate faith that it denied. 'C This irrational individual pity is the purely Christian element in the eigh- teenth century. This irrational individual pity is the purely Christian element in William Blake. '^ ^ 118 WILLIAM BLAKE And second^ there was another eighteenth century element that was neither of Christian nor of pagan Rome. It was from the origins ; it had been in the woi'ld thi'ough the whole history of paganism and Christianity ; it had been in the world, but not of it. This element appeared populai'ly in the eighteenth century in an extravagant but unmistakable shape ; the element can be summed up in one word — Cagliostro. No other name is quite so adequate ; but if anyone desires a nobler name (a very t noble one), we may say — Swedenborg. There wasinthe eighteenth century, despite its obvious good sense, this strain of a somewhat theatrical L thaumaturgy. The histoiy of that element "? is, in the most literal sense of the word, horribly interesting. For it all works back to the mere bogey feeling of the beginnings. It is amusing to remark that in the eighteenth century for the first time start up a number of societies which calmly announce that they have existed almost from the beginning of the world. Of these, of course, the best known instance is the Freemasons ; according to their own account they began with the Pyramids ; but according to everyone else's account that can be effectively 119 WILLIAM BLAKE collected, they began with the eighteenth century. Nevertheless the Freemasons are right in the spirit even if they are wrong in the letter. There is a tradition of things analogous to mystical masonry throughout all the historic generations of Paganism and Christianity. There is a definite tradition outside Christianity, not of rationalism, but of paganism, paganism in the original and frightful forest sense — pagan magic. Chris- tianity, rightly or wrongly, always discouraged it on the ground that it was, or tended to be, black magic. That is not here our concern. The point is that this non-Christian super- naturalism, whether it was good or bad, was continuous in spite of Christianity. Its signs and traces can be seen in every age : it hung like a huge fume, in many monstrous forms, over the dying Roman Empire : it was the energy in the Gnostics who so nearly captured Christianity, and who were persecuted for their pessimism ; in the full sunlight of the living Church it dared to carve its symbols upon the tombs of the Templars ; and when the first sects raised their heads at the Reformation, its ancient and awful voice was heard. I20 xiGHT tut: SFCONI') \VlIEN' the cock trcvv. lie «ci.f'— snu-tu \,y lliat cv<: W'h:. Ii l.ioks on me, on yjl ; tlial j>o«iT. who liuls IIm-. iiiiJiH^'Iil tciitirKl, \vilh clarion shrill. • Kinhl.Jii .,f l!i3t whUh shall ;n\iil;o the O-.-a.). It'.iixe soLils Crom slumber into ilimighis of Ikmmii : Sli.ill I tii>> Micp • \^hcic then i_s fuiiitinl.- ? Anl, (.ni.lr.d^ :.lun,hm\!. ^^hc^c■ l^ n.jn ! I km.-,- th^- [i-i rii.v oil ^vhicli he mm.'s llie lii;ht . IK- ilu( IS Iwrn, .s listed ; life is war. Mli-rii-i! war with woe : who bears it bcit. ^J^<.".ei\i,N il lojsi — on olhcr tlionic» I'll dwell. ),<>ius^o ' kt iiif turn my thoin|;Iits on the. And thine, on ihcmes may profit; ])rufit Oktc. AVIkiv >in'sl ih_v need — themes, too, the genuine provth Of cloai- ]*tiii^N'nFn's dust; he. thus, ihmi^^h de-nl, Mii_\ .■.nil lii'IrieiiJ — What (heiii'-s ? lime's woiulroiis prico, lX-3lh, lr:<.ii'l5h!]', jnd Pkii.avlif.b's fiiul icene. PHILANDER'S DUST (1796) WILLIAM BLAKE Now the eighteenth century was primarily the release (as its leaders held) of reason and nature from the control of the Church. But when the Church was once really weakened, it was the release of many other things. It was not the release of reason only, but of a more ancient unreason. It was not the release of the natural, but also of the supernatural, and also, alas ! of the unnatural. The heathen mystics hidden for two thousand years came out of their caverns^and Freemasonry was founded. It was entirely innocent in the manner of its foundation ; but so were all the other resurrections of this ancestral occultism. I give but one obvious instance out of many. The idea of enslaving another human soul, without lifting a finger or making a gesture of force, of enslaving a soul simply by willing its slavery, is an idea which all healthy human societies would regard and did regard as hideous and detestable, if true. Throughout all the Christian ages the witches and warlocks claimed this abominable power and boasted of it. They were (somewhat excusably) killed for their boasting. The eighteenth century rationalist movement came, intent, thank God, 123 WILLIAM BLAKE upon much cleaner things, upon common justice and right reason in the state. Neverthe- less it did weaken Christianity, and in weaken- ing Christianity it uplifted and protected the wizard. Mesmer stepped forward, and for the first time safely affirmed this infamous power to exist : for the first time a warlock could threaten spiritual tyranny and not be lynched. Nevertheless, if a mesmerist really had the powers which some mesmerists have claimed, and which most novels give to him, there is (I hope) no doubt at all that any decent mob would drown him like a witch. The revolt of the eighteenth century, then, did not merely release naturalism, but a certain kind of supernaturalism also. And of this particular kind of supernaturalism, Blake is particularly the heir. Its coarse embodiment is Cagliostro. Its noble embodiment is Swedenborg. But in both cases it can be remarked that the mysticism mai'ks an effort to escape from or even to forget the historic Christian, and especially the Catholic Church. Cagliostro, being a man of mean spirituality, separated himself from Catholicism by rearing against it a blazing pageant of mystical 124 WILLIAM BLAKE paganism, of triangles, secret seals, Eleusinian initiation, and all the vulgar refinements of a secret society. Swedenborg, being a man of large and noble spirituality, marked his separa- tion from Catholicism by inventing out of his own innocence and genius nearly all the old Catholic doctrines, sincerely believing them to be his own discoveries. It is startling to note how near Swedenborg was to Catholicism — in his insistence on free will, for instance, on the humanity of the incarnate God, and on the relative and mystical view of the Old Testa- ment. There was in Blake a great deal ot Swedenborg (as he would have been the first to admit), and there was, occasionally, a little of Cagliostro. Blake did not belong to a secret society : for, to tell the truth, he had some difficulty in belonging to any society. But Blake did talk a secret language. He had something of that haughty and oligarchic element in his mysticism which marked the old pagan secret societies and which marks the Theosophists and oriental initiates to this day. There was in him, besides the beneficent wealth of Swedenborg, some touch of Cagliostro and the Freemasons. These things Blake did 125 WILLIAM BLAKE inherit from that break up of behef that can be called the eighteenth century : we will debit him with these as an inheritance. And when we have said this we have said everything that can be said of any debt he owed. His debts are cleared here. His estate is cleared with this payment. All that follows is himself. If a man has some fierce or unfamiliar point of view, he must, even when he is talking about his cat, begin with the origin of the cosmos ; for his cosmos is as private as his cat. Horace could tell his pupils to plunge into the middle of the thing, because he and they were agreed about the particular kind of thing ; the author and his readers substantially sympathised about the beauty of Helen or the duties of Hector. But Blake really had to begin at the beginning, because it was a different beginning. This ex- plains the extraordinary air of digression and irrelevancy which can be observed in some of the most direct and sincere minds. It explains the bewildering allusiveness of Dante ; the galloping parentheses of Rabelais ; the gigantic prefaces of Mr Bernard Shaw. The brilliant man seems more lumbering and elaborate than 126 o a. o O WILLIAM BLAKE anyone else, because he has something to say about everything. The very quickness of his mind makes the slowness of his narrative. For he finds sermons in stones, in all the paving- stones of the street he plods along. Every fact or phrase that occurs in the immediate question carries back his mind to the ages and the initial power. Because he is original he is always going back to the origins. Take, for instance, Blake's verse rather than his pictorial art. When the average sensible person reads Blake's verse, he simply comes to the conclusion that he cannot understand it. But in truth he has a much better right to offer this objection to Blake than to most of the slightly elusive or eccentric writers to whom he also offers it. Blake is obscure in a much more positive and practical sense than Browning is obscure — or, in another manner, Mr Henry James is obscure. Browning is generally obscure through an almost brutal eagerness to get to big truths, w'hich leads him to smash a sentence and leave only bits of it. Mr Henry James is obscure because he wishes to trace tiny truths by a dissec- tion for which human language (even in his hi 129 WILLIAM BLAKE exquisite hands) is hardly equal. In shorty Browning wishes almost unscrupulously to get to the point. Mr James refuses to admit (on the mere authority of Euclid) that the point is indivisible. Vli'^it Blake's obscurity is startlingly different to both, it is at once more simple and more impenetrable.J It is not a different diction but a different language. It is not that we cannot understand the sentences ; it is that we often misunderstand the words. The obscurity of Blake connnonly consists in the fact that the actual words used mean one thing in Blake and quite another thing in the dictionary. Mr Henry James wants to split hairs ; Browning wants to tear them up by the roots. But in Blake the enigma is at once plainer and more perplexing ; it is simply this, that if Blake says "hairs" he may not mean hairs, but something else — perhaps peacocks' feathers. To quote but one example out of a thousand ; when Blake uses the word " devils " he generally means some particularly exalted order of angels such as preside over energy and imagination. 13 o WILLIAM BLAKE A VERBAL accident has confused the mystical with the mysterious. Mysticism is generally felt vaguely to be itself vague — a thing of clouds and curtains, of darkness or concealing vapours, of bewildering conspiracies or im- penetrable symbols. Some quacks have indeed dealt in such things : but no true mystic ever loved darkness rather than light. No pure mystic ever loved mere mystery. The mystic does not bring doubts or riddles : the doubts and riddles exist already. We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and cur- tains of darkness, the confounding vapours, these are the daily weather of this world. Whatever else we have grown accustomed to, we have grown accustomed to the unaccount- able. Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key ; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunder- stand. The mystic is not the man who makes mysteries but the man who destroys them. The mystic is one who offers an explanation which may be true or false, but which is always WILLIAM BLAKE comprehensible — by which I mean, not that it is always comprehended, but that it always can be comprehended, because there is always something to comprehend. The man whose meaning remains mysterious fails, I think, as a mystic : and Blake, as we shall see, did, for certain peculiar reasons of his own, often fail in this way. But even when he was himself hard to be understood, it was never through himself not understanding : it was never because he was vague or mystified or groping, that he was unintelligible. While his utterance was not only dim but dense, his opinion was not only clear, but even cocksure. You and I may be a little vague about the relations of Albion to Jerusalem, but Blake is as certain about them as Mr Chamberlain about the relations of Birmingham to the British Empire. 'C\And this can be said for his singular literary style even at his worst, that we always feel that he is saying something very plain and 1 emphatic, even when we have not the Avildest notion of what it isTI There is one element always to be remarked in the true mystic, however disputed his symbolism, and that is its brightness of colour 132 'o cxcst o/ftAe rottsft--^ '^i'i-'' rJr'/'A'yrr/:' rK M Znspcr-aa^Jt- 'o cast aO~\Iiaoart..ZfOcA:c' ck,JVa.«=• hi/^/inisA^r of'pa&ry BLota'.f' rntjie/crc't^. or t)a/^~y .fvh'^rc^', at- paffr-v J/ar-jruitLrei,''. -^-—^^ Who creeps criio S&ite '&o> ■cm/i:^yc!~ 'jAe a. cattiy/xUt^r ft. tiestrgy ^ cast off '/Ac uicot: 3ti&s^tioncr' mAa tS atn'oys" eftuiStu>ru^g-^f^ Etutrjrever cafioMf cJ ajTS'K'crcTg: fnio sets' tvctA a. -^iy^^tji. 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'^h .i.-r...'^ S'mt'natlvn w/urh Ac /i.ncC /uUilc/t t.t ■/f^iff^uX-v' C2./iMura nxnv uf. the. /rr>''iun.^ ( AncS pmfih^ up^.n C/z.^rTT'/^to s- ^/ainc cA^ WAr oj-rtk rf- tkoiL r/tiir '//ipe-tj-fit m j;LccrrLy pcinp }'cSion in. coltf.u-f ora!,n7ma /-ipen^is 4/-.- tjrnc.rtc.- /„At'tC YiJf. a/,:n\iefeU rf. at::rTacteci -; rryj^'rrri^il /Leld . "/alu. repuecC en. cA'ixiAsc/ tears' .^ifAi^ns^iir/nent CntArct£cn^- /^^•■'a.-s a City <£. a'y<'iiip'j: t>uiU hvylUiiy.-is CAuiiren ',~-~^ y tt'oS" a tTtiriteii p^.-rrr3 n^itA i>C'i'^.f^ / <:./.'-rc-a' oji JtiU ScvaJLi^y . ./A£ Rli't'r CtX^i/c' ti- rTcJv' ai>mtr^t,-riyt\'l/tjs Ji<^ Ctincn^ fit^y trPt:S ^ : U'u K'«.>- <.l/.i,ton^Jir,c/e i' Wifi ui great Eternity "'« — -i—r. /he invelinitat cAe ,-:.v;. THE MORNING STARS (1821) WILLIAM BLAKE female " because they really thought, with their whole souls, that a female ought to be elegant. The old rebels preserved the old fashions — and among others the old fashion of rebelling. The new rebels, the revolution- ists of our time, are intent upon introducing new fashions in boots, beds, food or furnitui*e ; so they have no time to rebel. But if we have once grasped this eighteenth century element of the insistence upon the elegant female because she is elegant, we have got hold of a fundamental fact in the relation of that century to Blake. It is instinctive to describe Blake as a fantastic artist ; and yet there is a very real sense in which Blake is conventional. If any reader thinks the phrase paradoxical, he can easily discover that it is true ; he can discover it simjjly by comparing Blake even in his most wild and arbitrary work with any merely modern artist who has the name of being wild ; with Aubrey Beardsley or even with Rossetti. All Blake's heroes are conventional heroes made unconventionally heroic. All Blake's heroines are elegant females without their clothes. But in both cases they ex- 189 WILLIAM BLAKE aggerate and insist upon the traditional ideal of the sexes — the broad shoulders of the god and the broad hips of the goddess. Blake de- tested the sensuality of Rubens. But if he had been obliged to choose between the women of Rubens and the women of Rossetti, lie would have flung himself on the neck of Rubens. For we have a false conception of what constitutes exaggeration. The end of the eighteenth century (being a dogmatic period) believed in certain things and ex- aggerated them. The end of the nineteenth century simply did not know what things to exaggerate ; so it fell back upon merely under- rating them. Blake tried to make Wallace look even bolder and fiercer than Wallace can possibly have looked. That was his exaggera- tion of Wallace. But Burne-Jones' exaggera- tion of Perseus is not an exaggeration at all. It is an under-statement ; for the whole fascination of Burne-Jones' Perseus is that he looks frightened. Blake's figure of a woman is aggressively and monstrously womanly. That is its fascination, if it has any. But the fascination of a Beardsley woman (if she has any) is exactly that she is not quite a woman, 190 WILLIAM BLAKE So much of what we have meant by exaggera- tion is really diminution ; so much of what we have meant by fancy is simply falling short of fact. The Burne-Jones' man is interesting because he is not quite brave enough to be a man. The Beardsley woman is interesting because she is not quite pretty enough to be a woman. But Blake's men are brave beyond all decency : and Blake's women are so swaggeringly bent on being beautiful that they become quite ugly in the process. If anvone wishes to know exactly what I mean, I recommend him to look at one of those extraordinary designs of nymphs in which a woman (or, as Blake loved to call it, the Female Form) is made to perform an impossible feat of acrobatics. It is impossible, but it is quite female ; perhaps the words are not wholly inconsistent. A living serpent might perform such a piece of athletics ; but even then only a female living serpent. But nobody would ask a Burne-Jones or Beardsley female to perform any athletics at all. Blake in pictorial art was not a mere master of the moonstruck or the grotesque. On the contrary, he was, as artists go, exceptionally a 191 WILLIAM BLAKE champion of the smooth and sensible. In so far as being "modern" means being against the great conventions of mankind, indifferent to the difference of the sexes, or incHned to despise doctrinal outline, then there was never any man who was so little of a modern as Blake. He may have been mad ; but there are varieties even in madness. There are madmen, like Blake, who go mad on health, and there are madmen who go mad on sickness. The distinction is a solid one. You may think the queerly and partially clothed women of Aubrey Beardsley ugly. You may think the naked women of William Blake ugly. But you must perceive this jieculiar and extraordinary effect about the women of William Blake, that they are women. They are exaggerated in the direction of the female form ; they swing upon big hips ; they let out and loosen long and luxuriant hair. Now the queer females of Aubrey Beardsley are queerest of all in this, that they are not even female. They are narrow where women have a curve and cropped where women have a head of hair. Blake's women are often anatomically impossible. 192 ^Il^^^y\a\ 4!.rken«K counsel fci werrf,. ^; 1>N THE WHIRLWIND (1815) WILLIAM BLAKE But they are so for women that they could not possibly be anything else. This comparison between Blake's art and such art as Aubrey Beardsley's is not an in- vidious impertinence, it is really an important distinction. Blake's work may be fantastic ; but it is a fantasia on an old and recognisable air. It exaggerates characteristics. Blake's women are too womanish, his young men are too athletic, his old men are too preposterously old. But Aubrey Beardsley does not really exaggerate ; he understates. His young men have less than the energy of youth. His women fascinate by the weakness of sex rather than by its strength. In short, if one is really to exaggerate the truth, one must have some truth to exaggerate. The decadent mystic produces an effect not by exaggei'ating but by distorting. True exaggeration is a thing both subtle and austere. Caricature is a serious thing ; it is almost blasphemously serious. Caricature really means making a pig more like a pig than even God has made him. But any- one can make him not like a pig at all ; anyone can create a weird imjjression by giving him the beard of a goat. In Aubrey Beardsley the 195 (-(<■• , ,'^ J WILLIAM BLAKE artistic thrill (and there is an artistic thrill) consists in the fact that the womenarejiot ^ ,> '■'^' guite women nor the men quite men. Blake had absolutely no trace of this morbidity of deficiency. He never asks us to consider a tree magical because it is a stunted tree ; or a man a magician merely because he has one eye. His form of fantasy would rather be to give a tree more branches than it could carry and to give a man bigger eyes than he could kee}) in his head. There is really a great deal of difference between the fantastic and the ex- aggerative. One may be fantastic by merely leaving something out. One might call it a fantasy if the official portrait of Wellington represented him without a nose. But one could hardly call it an exaggeration. There is an everlasting battle in which Blake is on the side of the angels, and what is much more difficult and dangerous, on the side of all the sensible men. The question is so enormous and so important, that it is difficult to state even by reason. of its reality. For in this world of ours we do not so much go on and discover small things ; rather we go on and discover biff thinffs. It is the details that we see first ; 196 WILLIAM BLAKE it is the design that we only see very slowly ; and some men die never having seen it at all. We all wake up on a battle-field. W^e see certain squadrons in certain uniforms gallop past ; we take an arbitrary fancy to this or that colour, to this or that plume. But it often takes us a long time to realise what the fight is about or even who is fighting whom. One may say, to keep up the metaphor, that many a man has joined the French army from love of the Horse Guards Blue ; many an old- fashioned eighteenth century sailor has gone over to the Chinese merely because they wore pigtails. It is so easy to turn against what is really yourself for the sake of some accidental resemblance to yourself. You may envy the curled hair of Hercules ; but do not envy curly hair until you wish that you were a nigger. You may regret that you have a short nose ; but do not dream of its growing longer and longer till it is like the trunk of an elephant. Wait until you know what the battle is broadly about before you rush roaring after any advancing regiment. For a battle is a complicated thing ; each army contains coats of different colour ; each section of each army 197 WILLIAM BLAKE advances at a different angle. You may fancy that the Greens are charging the Bhies exactly at the moment when both are combining to effect a fine military manoeuvre. You may con- ceive that two similar-looking columns are supporting each other at the very instant when they are about to blaze at each other with cannon, rifle, and revolver. So in the modern intellectual world we can see flags of many colours, deeds of manifold interest ; the one thing we cannot see is the map. We cannot see the simplified statement which tells us what is the origin of all the trouble. How shall we manage to state in an obvious and alphabetical manner the ultimate query, the primordial pivot on which the whole modern problem turns ? It cannot be done in long rationalistic words ; they convey by their very sound the suggestion of something subtle. One must try to think of something in the way of a plain street metaphor or an obvious analogy. For the thing is not too hard for human speech ; it is actually too obvious for human speech. The fundamental fight in which, despite all this heat and headlong misunderstanding, 198 % Bill lit iMH>»i nezv points of view, and they trust each volume rvill prove afresh and stimu- lating appreciation of the subject it treats. Each Volume about 200 pp. Average Number of Illustrations, 45. ALBRECHT DURER. By Lina Ecken- STEIN. ROSSETTI. By Ford Madox Hueffer. REMBRANDT. By Auguste Breal. FREDERICK WALKER. By Clemen- tina Black. MILLET. By RoMAiN Rolland. LEONARDO DA VINCI. By Dr Georg Gronau. GAINSBOROUGH. By Arthur B. Cham- berlain. THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS. By Camii.i.e Mauclair. BOTTICELLI. By Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady). G. F. WATTS. By G. K. Chesterton. VELAZQUEZ. By Auguste Breal. THE POPULAR LIBRARY OPART RAPHAEL. By Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady). HOLBEIN. By Ford Madox Hueffer. THE ENGLISH WATER-COLOUR PAINTERS. By A. J. Finberg. WATTEAU. By Camille Mauclair. PERUGINO. By Edward Hutton. THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD. By Ford Madox Hueffer. CRUIKSHANK. By W. H. Chesson. WHISTLER. By Bernhard Sickert. BLAKE. By G. K. Chesterton. HOGARTH. By Edward Garnett. "A charming series. The pictures serve admirably the best purpose of book-illustration, and help the reader the better to understand the letterpress. Instructive and attractive. They deserve to be widely popular." "Of all the little Libraries of Art brought out at popular prices, this promises to be the best. The illus- trations are extremely well chosen. The printing through- out is exceptional, and the binding is simple and appropriate." "Conducted on other lines than those of the many series of small books on art which the times bring forward so plentifully. In each case a critical essay which con- tains real criticism. Interesting and stimulating." UT This book is DUE on the last date stamped below ■MM 31976 1 RECTO LDLIWl,, „^, JW»- ~ ^986 «K'£) u..o,u. £F-I^^^g 1990 /s Series 4 c y UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A A 000 312 665 3