CROMEK, SIR JOSHUA, STOTHARD, AND CHAUCER
Blake had left Hayley to face poverty again in September 1803. He lodged
at 17 South Molton Street, and from there he continued till December 11th,
1805, to write to the patron who had caused him so much inward
disturbance. As long as he had thought it was possible to be on terms of
complete friendship with Hayley he had quarrelled with him. Now he knew
that such friendship was impossible. He saw Hayley as he was, and after
years of self-conflict he saw himself as he was, and he recognized that
there was no fundamental agreement to bridge over their differences. The
effect of this discovery was to put him at peace with Hayley, and also to
lower his sanguine expectations of a wide fellowship in this world.
The letters to Hayley are courteous and almost affectionate in tone.
Hayley was occupied with his _Life of Romney_, Blake was hard at work on a
_Head of Romney_ and an engraving of the _Shipwreck_, after Romney. Hence
there are many references to the artist from which we learn how genuine
was Blake's admiration for the classic simplicity and the skilful massing
of the lights and shades of Sir Joshua's great rival. Mr and Mrs Blake
regularly send their love to Hayley and solicitations for his health till
the correspondence gradually lessens, and Hayley, having no further use
for Blake, gently closes it, and takes himself away out of his sight for
ever. The severance was inevitable, and Blake could not be surprised. He
jotted in his note-book:
"I write the rascal thanks till he and I
With thanks and compliments are both drawn dry."
And so the patron passes. The artist who has faced poverty is tasting its
bitterness, stirred with the faint hope that he may find another patron
who will be a corporeal friend and not a spiritual enemy. The patron in
due time appeared. Robert Hartley Cromek was his name, print-jobber,
book-maker, publisher, also an engraver who had studied under Bartolozzi.
This last fact was not auspicious. Blake, we know, had no regard for
Bartolozzi's work, and a pupil of his might prove as little understanding
of Blake's severe art as the Bard of Sussex. Still, there was hope. Cromek
had an admirable business capacity. He understood how to advertise, to
puff, to work the artist, and, what is still more materially important, to
work the public. He had, in a word, all the practical qualities that Blake
lacked. Blake with his love for uniting contraries believed that his art
married to Cromek's practice might produce fame and money, and he was
sorely in need of both.
At this time Blake was making designs for Blair's _Grave_, which he
intended himself to engrave and publish. These were seen by Cromek, who
admired them, and whose business instinct detected money in them.
Immediately he proposed to publish a new edition of _The Grave_, and made
a verbal agreement with Blake that he should contribute twelve engravings
from his own designs. But, inspired by the same business instinct, it
occurred to him that Blake's designs would sell much better if they were
engraved by one who was known to be able to meet the popular taste.
Accordingly he went off to Schiavonetti, who had been a fellow-pupil of
Bartolozzi, and proposed to him to do the engravings.
The result was satisfactory to everyone except Blake. His illustrations
appeared in the summer of 1808, and he received twenty guineas for his
designs, but he was naturally furious and resentful against Cromek for
playing him such a trick.
Cromek was quite right in his judgment that the Blake designs for _The
Grave_ would be popular. Yet this did not arise from any affinity between
Blake and the then famous author of _The Grave_. Blair had been dead for
fifty years. His poem expressed the strict orthodoxy of his day. Its fine
passages are scarcely able to give vitality to the whole. Blake can have
had no sympathy with the long-drawn-out description of the damask-cheeked
maiden lying in her grave, the food of worms. The real genius of
Christianity does not permit of such nauseous details of the
charnel-house. We know how sensitive Blake was to the damask cheek of a
maiden; but we also know that he had come to regard it as the very
transitory manifestation of the eternal beauty, and with his spiritual eye
continually on the "Inviolable Rose" he did not need to remind himself of
the mouldering relics in the grave.
He selected for what proved to be one of his finest designs Blair's
description of the reunion of soul and body on the Day of Judgment. The
poem repeats the doctrine of the resuscitation of the body that has long
since returned to dust. Blake, of course, repudiated this dogma. He
believed that the spiritual body is already present in one who has been
born again of the spirit; and, therefore, death is the bursting of the
mortal shell that the spiritual body may pass on into its spiritual
environment. Yet with his love of marriages he depicted the rending of
the tomb and the passionate reunion of soul and body, not because he
believed in such a future event, but because that reunion taken
symbolically was marvellously expressive of the rapturous marriage of many
pairs of contraries that man in his day persisted in keeping apart.
For the rest, Blair's poem was sufficiently universal in its treatment of
death to enable Blake to illustrate him, and yet read his own opinions
into the words he selected.
Blake's indignation was hot against Cromek, as we can all understand. But
unfortunately his soul was torn with the kindred passion of resentment,
which he was inclined to nurse rather than exterminate. Here a little
reason might have helped him; but his distrust of reason, and his own
passivity, led him to give vent to his resentments against successful men
that strike us as captious and rude. He might plead the example of Christ
in His treatment of the Pharisees, and he did jot down in his note-book
words that I cannot help thinking he applied to himself:
"Sir Joshua praises Michael Angelo.
'Tis Christian mildness when knaves praise a foe;
But 'twould be madness, all the world would say,
Should Michael Angelo praise Sir Joshua--
Christ used the Pharisees in a rougher way."
In answer to this we can but say that Sir Joshua was not a Pharisee, and
that Blake was not Christ.
Blake's resentment against Sir Joshua seems to have begun at an interview
when, a very young man, he had shown him some designs, and had been
"recommended to work with less extravagance and more simplicity, and to
correct his drawings." That was the sort of advice that he never would
take at any time. One would have thought that if Sir Joshua was so
palpably a Pharisee, Blake would not have troubled to ask his advice.
As the years passed, the significant facts about Sir Joshua and Blake were
that the one was famous and rich, the other was unrecognized and poor.
Blake's vision, sharpened just here by the injustice of fame, was
preternaturally quick to discover that Sir Joshua was earthy and of the
earth, while his own aim was the so much loftier one of piercing to the
heavenly reality, and then expressing it by clear, definite, and "sweet
outlines," and making the colours, lights, and shades serve to emphasize
the heaven-revealing lines.
Sir Joshua died February 23rd, 1792. His coffin was carried to St Paul's
followed by ninety coaches, and the most eloquent man of the day, Burke,
was bidden to sing his praises. In 1808, when everyone was reading the
collected _Discourses_ of Reynolds, Blake too read, and as his custom was,
made copious marginal notes. With the help of these we are able to relate
Blake to Reynolds with a dispassionateness to which Blake could never
attain.
What must strike any impartial reader of the _Discourses_ is the
extraordinary similarity of the aims of art there set forth with Blake's
own cherished views. Both give the supreme place to Michael Angelo and
extol Raphael. Both depreciate the Venetian and Flemish Schools. Both
reckon good drawing the foundation of great art. The difference between
them is mainly one of emphasis. Blake believed in impulse and instinct,
and Sir Joshua in theoretical and reasoned deliberation. Yet the
reasonable man writes: "If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical
deliberation on every occasion, before we act, life would be at a stand,
and art would be impracticable." And again: "I mean to caution you
against ... an unfounded distrust of the imagination and feeling in favour
of narrow, partial, confined, argumentative theories." Both extol the
grand style--with a difference. Reynolds's conception of the grand style
is derived from the laborious study of the excellencies of many masters.
When he attains to it, he is an epitome of those excellencies.
He reaches by this means his ideal, his heaven, and its contrary
immediately bounds into view, which he is too urbane to call hell, and
contents himself to designate as the real. Blake's ideal came to him with
overmastering force from his direct vision of the inward reality. Hence he
had no need of the false antithesis of the ideal and the real. Reynolds
extols Michael Angelo and degrades Hogarth. Blake loves both. In
conclusion we say, with only the _Discourses_[5] before us, the
differences between the two men are negligible in a world where two men
can never quite see eye to eye. It is when we turn from the _Discourses_
to Sir Joshua's accomplished works that we begin to understand what was
reasonable in Blake's furious resentment and attack.
Sir Joshua preached one thing and practised another. He sang the praises
of the Florentine, Roman, and Bolognese Schools, and painted for all the
world as if Rembrandt were his chief master.
"Instead of 'Michael Angelo'
Read 'Rembrandt,' for it is fit
To make mere common honesty
In all that he has writ."
Sir Joshua, after years of toil, painted Nelly O'Brien's petticoat, and we
marvel at the consummate workmanship. Blake, in spite of his faulty
technique and impatience of criticism, lifted the veil that hides the
heavens, and inspires us. We thank those who make us wonder: we owe
something deeper than thanks to those who inspire us. Blake was well aware
that his art was of a loftier kind than that of the President of the Royal
Academy. The one was reckoned the foremost painter of his age, the other
was pitied as a madman. And Blake felt he did right to be angry.
Let us return to Cromek.
While Blake was at work on his designs for Blair's _Grave_, he drew a
pencil sketch of _Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims_, which had always
attracted him. Cromek, hopping in and out to see how the Blair designs
were progressing, saw the sketch, and his brain immediately swarmed with
fertile ideas. He proposed that Blake should engrave his design, and he
would push it. But on second thoughts it occurred to him that the subject
was admirably suited to Stothard's genius. Leaving Blake with nothing but
a verbal agreement, he went straight off to Stothard, and proposed that he
should make a design on the subject, for which he would pay him sixty
guineas. Cromek undertook to find an engraver. Blake, who had been a
friend of Stothard for many years, went to visit him, and found him at
work on the _Canterbury Pilgrims_. Unsuspecting, he praised the work.
Afterwards he discovered the part that Cromek had played in the seeming
coincidence. At once he concluded that Stothard was privy to the deceit,
and he included him in his vehement indignation against Cromek, and the
lamb roared. With note-book at hand he jotted:
"A petty sneaking knave I knew--
O! Mr. Cromek, how do ye do?"
Stothard and Blake had been young together. It was he who had introduced
him to Flaxman. The friendship, of course, was not of the closest, for
they followed a very different track in art.
Flaxman and Blake had a common interest in Swedenborg as well as a supreme
regard for outline, but Stothard's was always an outward eye, never
inward. With a wife and many children, and everlastingly busy producing
his thousands of designs, it was not to be expected that he should dive
into inner causes. His contemporaries were content, and we too, that he
should see the effects in a graceful and poetic glow, and reproduce them
in soothing and graceful compositions. He peered into many times and many
countries, but he was happier when illustrating his contemporaries,
happiest when depicting the chequered career of Clarissa Harlowe.
Cromek was not wrong in thinking that Stothard would make a successful
picture of the _Canterbury Pilgrims_. He was famous at grouping, had an
eye for horses, and was willing to drudge at the British Museum to clothe
his figures correctly. There was some difficulty about the engraving,
which Cromek had first intended to entrust to Bromley. It passed
successively through the hands of Lewis Schiavonetti, Engleheart, Niccolo
Schiavonetti, and was finally done by James Heath. The result justified
Cromek's calculations. The _Pilgrimage to Canterbury_ was exhibited in all
the great towns of England, and also in Edinburgh and Dublin. It had the
most extensive sale of anything of the kind published within a hundred
years. Everyone bought it and exhibited it, according to Mrs Bray, in
their front parlour. It was reckoned Stothard's masterpiece. And when
Harlow painted Stothard's portrait, he placed in the background a curtain
just sufficiently drawn back to show the finest group of a picture in
which the whole grouping was excellent.
Meanwhile Blake, determined to dispense with a professional advertiser,
engraved his own design, and put it up for sale at 28 Broad Street, the
house of his birth where his brother James carried on the business. But it
was not to stand alone. It was exhibited together with sixteen historical
inventions, eleven frescoes, seven drawings. Blake wrote a prospectus to
the _Canterbury Pilgrims_ and a _Descriptive Catalogue_ to the whole
collection. One or two people, notably Crabb Robinson, found their way to
the room; and while the praises of Stothard were being sung throughout the
land for a design that had originated from Blake, Blake was tasting the
bitter mortification of knowing that his attempt at self-advertisement and
appeal to the public had failed.
Although comparisons are odious, we may give ourselves the luxury of
comparing these two rival treatments of a fine subject.
Stothard's task was the easier of the two. His respect for and knowledge
of Chaucer were much less than Blake's, and from the outset he had no mind
to burden himself by attempting a servile copy of the poet. If the wife of
Bath was just enjoying her fifth husband, then obviously she was no longer
a pictorial subject, and Stothard took off as many years as the lady
herself could have wished.
His treatment of the religious types was even less faithful. The
protestantism of the eighteenth century regarded monks, friars, abbesses,
and nuns merely as odd curiosities of an odd past. Stothard had religious
feeling, as is evident in his picture _Confirmation_, which Landseer
admired so much, but for him a friar was the type of laziness, and the
monk of gluttony, and his only idea in portraying them was to make the
lines of their chins and stomachs as rotund as possible.
The idea of a pilgrimage was equally as remote from his mind. It was a
foolishness to be pardoned only because it afforded the artist such
excellent material for form and colour. But if Stothard had no wish to
understand Chaucer's types and point of view, he was overjoyed at the
chance of introducing so many horses, whose evolution from the Middle Ages
was negligible. He had an eye for a horse, and could not resist the
temptation of mounting his pilgrims on much finer horses than Chaucer
provided, or they, for the most part, could afford. Finally he painted a
pleasing background which Mrs Bray says was the Surrey Hills, and Blake
the Dulwich Hills, but in either case were not passed by the Pilgrims in
their journey from the Tabard Inn to Canterbury.
The picture, as Hoppner said, is a modern one--charming, even captivating,
and if it is not Chaucer, yet Stothard only took the liberty which Blake
was ready to take himself when it suited his purpose.
Blake, for his part, was enormously attracted by Chaucer. He saw in him a
first-rate example of the poetic genius that can pierce through to the
underlying reality of every kind of man, and embrace him with genial
warmth. He was observer and contemplator, and there was present just that
element of imagination which always produces something original and
creative.
The first happy result of Blake's capture by Chaucer was that he forgot
for a time his horrid symbolism. When he illustrated his own poems, he
drew his monstrous beasts without check, but now that there was no
possibility of mounting Urizen and Los with the rest of the Pilgrims, he
was driven to use Chaucer's symbolism, which time has proved to be
universal.
Blake's sympathy here equals that of the elder poet. Like him he sees the
fleshly weakness of the monks and friars, but he sees also, as Stothard
could not, their strength and significance. The cook, the manciple, and
the pardoner are low and coarse types affording the shade, but the parson,
the knight, the squire, the abbess, the Oxford student, and the yeoman are
bright types of human excellence that appear at all times, even in the
eighteenth century, as Blake knew, though in a different dress.
The host on his good stout horse rightly holds the central place. The
knight and squire lead the party as they ought. The religious types--monk,
friar, abbess, nun, three priests--are grouped together. The most
dignified figure is the parson--the person--seated on a wretched cob, for
he cannot afford a better; and near him, happy in his company, are the man
of law and the yeoman. The wife of Bath, the miller, and the cook are
different studies in sensuality. In the rear are the clerk of Oxenford and
Chaucer himself, the philosopher and the poet, the poet being more
prominent, since he with his poetic genius means more to us finally than
the philosopher. Last of all comes the reeve, whose position accords with
his office as steward.
Hence there is a spiritual significance in the picture. The pilgrims are
real Chaucerian people on a real pilgrimage, grouped by a compelling
spiritual kinship. The artist and poet are wedded. Yet the artist never
loses his individuality, because the poet is so universal that he allows
the artist to read his private experience into his own. The picture may
not at first be so attractive as that of Stothard, but when one has grown
accustomed to the exterior charms of the two pictures, there still remains
in Blake's a rich field for fertile gleaning, while when the eye has
become satiated with Stothard's sweetness there remains nothing else as
food for the spirit.