WILLIAM BLAKE was the first writer of modern times to preach the
indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol. There had been
allegorists and teachers of allegory in plenty, but the symbolic
imagination, or, as Blake preferred to call it, ‘vision,’ is not
allegory, being ‘a representation of what actually exists really and
unchangeably.’ A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some
invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while
allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing,
or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination:
the one is a revelation, the other an amusement. It is happily no part
of my purpose to expound in detail the relations he believed to exist
between symbol and mind, for in doing so I should come upon not a few
doctrines which, though they have not been difficult to many simple
persons, ascetics wrapped in skins, women who had cast away all common
knowledge, peasants dreaming by their sheepfolds upon the hills, are
full of obscurity to the man of modern culture; but it is necessary to
just touch upon these relations, because in them was the fountain of
much of the practice and of all the precept of his artistic life.
If a man would enter into ‘Noah’s rainbow,’ he has written, and ‘make a
friend’ of one of ‘the images of wonder’ which dwell there, and which
always entreat him ‘to leave mortal things,’ ‘then would he arise
from the grave and meet the Lord in the air’; and by this rainbow,
this sign of a covenant granted to him who is with Shem and Japhet,
‘painting, poetry and music,’ ‘the three powers in man of conversing
with Paradise which the flood “of time and space” did not sweep
away,’ Blake represented the shapes of beauty haunting our moments of
inspiration: shapes held by most for the frailest of ephemera, but by
him for a people older than the world, citizens of eternity, appearing
and reappearing in the minds of artists and of poets, creating all
we touch and see by casting distorted images of themselves upon ‘the
vegetable glass of nature’; and because beings, none the less symbols,
blossoms, as it were, growing from invisible immortal roots, hands, as
it were, pointing the way into some divine labyrinth. If ‘the world of
imagination’ was ‘the world of eternity,’ as this doctrine implied, it
was of less importance to know men and nature than to distinguish the
beings and substances of imagination from those of a more perishable
kind, created by the phantasy, in uninspired moments, out of memory
and whim; and this could best be done by purifying one’s mind, as with
a flame, in study of the works of the great masters, who were great
because they had been granted by divine favour a vision of the unfallen
world from which others are kept apart by the flaming sword that turns
every way; and by flying from the painters who studied ‘the vegetable
glass’ for its own sake, and not to discover there the shadows of
imperishable beings and substances, and who entered into their own
minds, not to make the unfallen world a test of all they heard and
saw and felt with the senses, but to cover the naked spirit with ‘the
rotten rags of memory’ of older sensations. The struggle of the first
part of his life had been to distinguish between these two schools, and
to cleave always to the Florentine, and so to escape the fascination of
those who seemed to him to offer the sleep of nature to a spirit weary
with the labours of inspiration; but it was only after his return to
London from Felpham in 1804 that he finally escaped from ‘temptations
and perturbations’ which sought to destroy ‘the imaginative power’ at
‘the hands of Venetian and Flemish Demons.’ ‘The spirit of Titian’—and
one must always remember that he had only seen poor engravings, and
what his disciple, Palmer, has called ‘picture-dealers’ Titians’—‘was
particularly active in raising doubts concerning the possibility of
executing without a model; and when once he had raised the doubt it
became easy for him to snatch away the vision time after time’; and
Blake’s imagination ‘weakened’ and ‘darkened’ until a ‘memory of
nature and of the pictures of various schools possessed his mind,
instead of appropriate execution’ flowing from the vision itself. But
now he wrote, ‘O glory, and O delight! I have entirely reduced that
spectrous fiend to his station’—he had overcome the merely reasoning
and sensual portion of the mind—‘whose annoyance has been the ruin
of my labours for the last twenty years of my life.... I speak with
perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which has passed upon me.
Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him, I have had twenty;
thank God I was not altogether a beast as he was.... Suddenly, on
the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures’—this
was a gallery containing pictures by Albert Dürer and by the great
Florentines—‘I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my
youth, and which had for exactly twenty years been closed from me,
as by a door and window shutters.... Excuse my enthusiasm, or rather
madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take
a pencil or graver in my hand, as I used to be in my youth.’
This letter may have been the expression of a moment’s enthusiasm,
but was more probably rooted in one of those intuitions of coming
technical power which every creator feels, and learns to rely upon;
for all his greatest work was done, and the principles of his art
were formulated, after this date. Except a word here and there, his
writings hitherto had not dealt with the principles of art except
remotely and by implication; but now he wrote much upon them, and not
in obscure symbolic verse, but in emphatic prose, and explicit if not
very poetical rhyme. In his _Descriptive Catalogue_, in _The Address
to the Public_, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds, in _The Book of
Moonlight_—of which some not very dignified rhymes alone remain—in
beautiful detached passages in _The MS. Book_, he explained spiritual
art, and praised the painters of Florence and their influence, and
cursed all that has come of Venice and Holland. The limitation of
his view was from the very intensity of his vision; he was a too
literal realist of imagination, as others are of nature; and because
he believed that the figures seen by the mind’s eye, when exalted by
inspiration, were ‘eternal existences,’ symbols of divine essences,
he hated every grace of style that might obscure their lineaments.
To wrap them about in reflected lights was to do this, and to dwell
over-fondly upon any softness of hair or flesh was to dwell upon that
which was least permanent and least characteristic, for ‘The great and
golden rule of art, as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp
and wiry the boundary-line, the more perfect the work of art; and the
less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation,
plagiarism and bungling.’ Inspiration was to see the permanent and
characteristic in all forms, and if you had it not, you must needs
imitate with a languid mind the things you saw or remembered, and so
sink into the sleep of nature where all is soft and melting. ‘Great
inventors in all ages knew this. Protogenes and Apelles knew each
other by their line. Raphael and Michael Angelo and Albert Dürer
are known by this and this alone. How do we distinguish the owl
from the beast, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline?
How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another but by
the bounding-line and its infinite inflections and movements? What
is it that builds a house and plants a garden but the definite and
determinate? What is it that distinguished honesty from knavery but
the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty in the actions and
intentions? Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; and all
is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it
before man or beast can exist.’ He even insisted that ‘colouring does
not depend upon where the colours are put, but upon where the light
and dark are put, and all depends upon the form or outline’—meaning,
I suppose, that a colour gets its brilliance or its depth from being
in light or in shadow. He does not mean by outline the bounding-line
dividing a form from its background, as one of his commentators has
thought, but the line that divides it from surrounding space, and
unless you have an overmastering sense of this you cannot draw true
beauty at all, but only ‘the beauty that is appended to folly,’ a
beauty of mere voluptuous softness, ‘a lamentable accident of the
mortal and perishing life,’ for ‘the beauty proper for sublime art is
lineaments, or forms and features capable of being the receptacles of
intellect,’ and ‘the face or limbs that alter least from youth to old
age are the face and limbs of the greatest beauty and perfection.’
His praise of a severe art had been beyond price had his age rested
a moment to listen, in the midst of its enthusiasm for Correggio and
the later Renaissance, for Bartolozzi and for Stothard; and yet in
his visionary realism, and in his enthusiasm for what, after all, is
perhaps the greatest art, and a necessary part of every picture that
is art at all, he forgot how he who wraps the vision in lights and
shadows, in iridescent or glowing colour, having in the midst of his
labour many little visions of these secondary essences, until form be
half lost in pattern, may compel the canvas or paper to become itself a
symbol of some not indefinite because unsearchable essence; for is not
the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian a talisman as powerfully charged with
intellectual virtue as though it were a jewel-studded door of the city
seen on Patmos?
To cover the imperishable lineaments of beauty with shadows and
reflected lights was to fall into the power of his ‘Vala,’ the
indolent fascination of nature, the woman divinity who is so often
described in ‘the prophetic books’ as ‘sweet pestilence,’ and whose
children weave webs to take the souls of men; but there was yet a
more lamentable chance, for nature has also a ‘masculine portion’ or
‘spectre’ which kills instead of merely hiding, and is continually at
war with inspiration. To ‘generalize’ forms and shadows, to ‘smooth
out’ spaces and lines in obedience to ‘laws of composition,’ and of
painting; founded, not upon imagination, which always thirsts for
variety and delights in freedom, but upon reasoning from sensation
which is always seeking to reduce everything to a lifeless and slavish
uniformity; as the popular art of Blake’s day had done, and as he
understood Sir Joshua Reynolds to advise, was to fall into ‘Entuthon
Benithon,’ or ‘the Lake of Udan Adan,’ or some other of those regions
where the imagination and the flesh are alike dead, that he names by
so many resonant phantastical names. ‘General knowledge is remote
knowledge,’ he wrote; ‘it is in particulars that wisdom consists, and
happiness too. Both in art and life general masses are as much art as a
pasteboard man is human. Every man has eyes, nose and mouth; this every
idiot knows. But he who enters into and discriminates most minutely
the manners and intentions, the characters in all their branches, is
the alone wise or sensible man, and on this discrimination all art is
founded.... As poetry admits not a letter that is insignificant, so
painting admits not a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant,
much less an insignificant blot or blur.’
Against another desire of his time, derivative also from what he has
called ‘corporeal reason,’ the desire for ‘a tepid moderation,’ for a
lifeless ‘sanity in both art and life,’ he had protested years before
with a paradoxical violence. ‘The roadway of excess leads to the palace
of wisdom,’ and we must only ‘bring out weight and measure in time of
dearth.’ This protest, carried, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds,
to the point of dwelling with pleasure on the thought that ‘The _Lives
of the Painters_ say that Raphael died of dissipation,’ because
dissipation is better than emotional penury, seemed as important to his
old age as to his youth. He taught it to his disciples, and one finds
it in its purely artistic shape in a diary written by Samuel Palmer, in
1824: ‘Excess is the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark, embalming
spice of the finest art. There are many mediums in the _means_—none,
oh, not a jot, not a shadow of a jot, in the _end_ of great art. In a
picture whose merit is to be excessively brilliant, it can’t be too
brilliant, but individual tints may be too brilliant.... We must not
begin with medium, but think always on excess and only use medium to
make excess more abundantly excessive.’
These three primary commands, to seek a determinate outline, to avoid a
generalized treatment, and to desire always abundance and exuberance,
were insisted upon with vehement anger, and their opponents called
again and again ‘demons’ and ‘villains,’ ‘hired’ by the wealthy and
the idle; but in private, Palmer has told us, he could find ‘sources
of delight throughout the whole range of art,’ and was ever ready to
praise excellence in any school, finding, doubtless, among friends, no
need for the emphasis of exaggeration. There is a beautiful passage in
‘Jerusalem’ in which the merely mortal part of the mind, ‘the spectre,’
creates ‘pyramids of pride,’ and ‘pillars in the deepest hell to reach
the heavenly arches,’ and seeks to discover wisdom in ‘the spaces
between the stars,’ not ‘in the stars,’ where it is, but the immortal
part makes all his labours vain, and turns his pyramids to ‘grains of
sand,’ his ‘pillars’ to ‘dust on the fly’s wing,’ and makes of ‘his
starry heavens a moth of gold and silver mocking his anxious grasp.’
So when man’s desire to rest from spiritual labour, and his thirst
to fill his art with mere sensation and memory, seem upon the point
of triumph, some miracle transforms them to a new inspiration; and
here and there among the pictures born of sensation and memory is the
murmuring of a new ritual, the glimmering of new talismans and symbols.
It was during and after the writing of these opinions that Blake did
the various series of pictures which have brought him the bulk of his
fame. He had already completed the illustrations to Young’s _Night
Thoughts_—in which the great sprawling figures, a little wearisome even
with the luminous colours of the original water-colour, became nearly
intolerable in plain black and white—and almost all the illustrations
to ‘the prophetic books,’ which have an energy like that of the
elements, but are rather rapid sketches taken while some phantasmic
procession swept over him, than elaborate compositions, and in whose
shadowy adventures one finds not merely, as did Dr. Garth Wilkinson,
‘the hells of the ancient people, the Anakim, the Nephalim, and the
Rephaim ... gigantic petrifactions from which the fires of lust and
intense selfish passion have long dissipated what was animal and
vital’; not merely the shadows cast by the powers who had closed the
light from him as ‘with a door and window shutters,’ but the shadows
of those who gave them battle. He did now, however, the many designs
to Milton, of which I have only seen those to _Paradise Regained_; the
reproductions of those to _Comus_, published, I think, by Mr. Quaritch;
and the three or four to _Paradise Lost_, engraved by Bell Scott—a
series of designs which one good judge considers his greatest work; the
illustrations to Blair’s _Grave_, whose gravity and passion struggle
with the mechanical softness and trivial smoothness of Schiavonetti’s
engraving; the illustrations to Thornton’s _Virgil_, whose influence
is manifest in the work of the little group of landscape-painters who
gathered about him in his old age and delighted to call him master. The
member of the group, whom I have already so often quoted, has alone
praised worthily these illustrations to the first _eclogue_: ‘There is
in all such a misty and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the
inmost soul and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy
daylight of this world. They are like all this wonderful artist’s work,
the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain, and the glimpse which all the
most holy, studious saints and sages have enjoyed, of the rest which
remains to the people of God.’ Now, too, he did the great series, the
crowning work of his life, the illustrations to _The Book of Job_ and
the illustrations to _The Divine Comedy_. Hitherto he had protested
against the mechanical ‘dots and lozenges’ and ‘blots and blurs’ of
Woollett and Strange, but had himself used both ‘dot and lozenge,’
‘blot and blur,’ though always in subordination ‘to a firm and
determinate outline’; but in Marc Antonio, certain of whose engravings
he was shown by Linnell, he found a style full of delicate lines, a
style where all was living and energetic, strong and subtle. And almost
his last words, a letter written upon his death-bed, attack the ‘dots
and lozenges’ with even more than usually quaint symbolism, and praise
expressive lines. ‘I know that the majority of Englishmen are bound
by the indefinite ... a line is a line in its minutest particulars,
straight or crooked. It is itself not intermeasurable by anything else
... but since the French Revolution’—since the reign of reason began,
that is—‘Englishmen are all intermeasurable with one another, certainly
a happy state of agreement in which I do not agree.’ The Dante series
occupied the last years of his life; even when too weak to get out of
bed he worked on, propped up with the great drawing-book before him.
He sketched a hundred designs, but left all incomplete, some very
greatly so, and partly engraved seven plates, of which the ‘Francesca
and Paolo’ is the most finished. It is not, I think, inferior to
any but the finest in the Job, if indeed to them, and shows in its
perfection Blake’s mastery over elemental things, the swirl in which
the lost spirits are hurried, ‘a watery flame’ he would have called it,
the haunted waters and the huddling shapes. In the illustrations of
Purgatory there is a serene beauty, and one finds his Dante and Virgil
climbing among the rough rocks under a cloudy sun, and in their sleep
upon the smooth steps towards the summit, a placid, marmoreal, tender,
starry rapture.
All in this great series are in some measure powerful and moving, and
not, as it is customary to say of the work of Blake, because a flaming
imagination pierces through a cloudy and indecisive technique, but
because they have the only excellence possible in any art, a mastery
over artistic expression. The technique of Blake was imperfect,
incomplete, as is the technique of well-nigh all artists who have
striven to bring fires from remote summits; but where his imagination
is perfect and complete, his technique has a like perfection, a like
completeness. He strove to embody more subtle raptures, more elaborate
intuitions than any before him; his imagination and technique are
more broken and strained under a great burden than the imagination
and technique of any other master. ‘I am,’ wrote Blake, ‘like others,
just equal in invention and execution.’ And again, ‘No man can improve
an original invention; nor can an original invention exist without
execution, organized, delineated and articulated either by God or
man ... I have heard people say, “Give me the ideas; it is no matter
what words you put them into”; and others say, “Give me the designs;
it is no matter for the execution.”... Ideas cannot be given but in
their minutely appropriate words, nor can a design be made without
its minutely appropriate execution.’ Living in a time when technique
and imagination are continually perfect and complete, because they no
longer strive to bring fire from heaven, we forget how imperfect and
incomplete they were in even the greatest masters, in Botticelli, in
Orcagna, and in Giotto.
The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits are as the more
phantastical errors in their lives; as Coleridge’s opium cloud; as
Villiers De L’Isle Adam’s candidature for the throne of Greece; as
Blake’s anger against causes and purposes he but half understood;
as the flickering madness an Eastern scripture would allow in august
dreamers; for he who half lives in eternity endures a rending of the
structures of the mind, a crucifixion of the intellectual body.