HIS ART WORK
And now we must turn our attention to Blake's art-work--the fruit of his
life "of beautiful purpose and warped power," as Ruskin calls it--and the
expression of those strange thoughts, beliefs and visions, which were his
real world. My purpose is, to turn over, as it were, the leaves of his
books in the Print Room of the British Museum (the only copies available
to the general public, though several finer are contained in private
collections), and thus help to recall to the crowded mind of to-day's art
the living burning spirit of Blake which is inclosed in those covers.
After which we will pass on to a general description and review of his
drawings, engravings and water-colours in the British Museum, and then
consider his pictures in the National Gallery. A chapter will also be
devoted to the Exhibition of Works of Blake which were on view for six
weeks (January and February, 1904) at Messrs. Carfax's Rooms in Ryder
Street, for this exhibition contained many of his finest works, and
several which will not again be seen by the public for many a long day.
[Illustration: PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM "SONGS OF INNOCENCE," 1789]
In Blake's time there was little hope of success for an artist who did not
put himself under distinguished patronage and paint at the direction of
some dilettante nobleman. According to the autobiography of B. R. Haydon
the artist (a strange character if ever there were one!), who was in his
heyday when Blake was a very old man, nobody could expect to get on
without a large dependence on patrons, who would often dictate subjects
and treatment, and advance large sums to the painter, to meet his
necessarily large expenses (for great canvases cost great sums); and on
the strength of this, bind his creative imagination to the yoke of their
own petty slavery.
Blake, however, being conscious of his own high mission in art, and deeply
sensible of the divine obligation he was under to paint what he _must_,
had to forego the idea of working out his designs in large, for he was too
poor to pay for the necessary materials. Hence most of his work is
executed in very small space--in the leaves of the books we are about to
examine, and in water-colours and "frescoes" of very limited dimensions.
As we proceed it will be noted over and over again that designs some six
or seven inches square, and often less, are grand enough to be expanded
into large compositions and gallery pictures--indeed they would gain
considerably by so doing--for so much vitality and splendid strength seems
cramped in a confined area.
But that _size_ in pictures is no test of conceptive artistic genius needs
no demonstration, though it may be conceded to be a gauge of executive
ability. And it is in conception that Blake is pre-eminent.
Going quietly on in his chosen path, he has his little laugh at the crowd
of artists scrambling like chickens around the patrons, who mete out the
maize to this favourite Cochin or that admired bantam.
We find this doggerel in his Note-book:
O dear Mother Outline, of wisdom most sage,
What's the first part of painting? she said, Patronage.
And what is the second, to please and engage,
She frowned like a fury and said, "Patronage."
Of patronage during his life Blake had but little, save from Mr. Butts,
who, however, had nothing of the conventional patron about him. He merely
bought with reverent appreciation whatever Blake pleased to paint, never
suggesting alterations or improvements, never blaming or criticising, but
merely receiving in faith and love. For which Blake, as we know, "never
ceased to honour him." But let no man think that poverty did not hamper
Blake, though he chose it rather than the slavery that would have been the
price he would have had to pay for even a moderate income. He himself
writes in the Descriptive Catalogue: "Some people and not a few artists
have asserted that the painter of this picture would not have done so well
if he had been properly encouraged. Let those who think so reflect on the
state of nations under poverty, and their incapability of art. Though art
is above either, the argument is better for affluence than poverty _and
though he would not have been a greater artist, yet he would have produced
greater works of art in proportion to his means_."
Well, then: it was Blake's poverty and independence that caused him to
work mainly on a small scale, and it was the fact that he was poet as well
as artist--his poetry springing from the same creative impulse as his
plastic art--that led him to merge the two gifts into a perfect union in
the creation of his beautiful and unique books. The process by which they
were executed is thus described by Gilchrist: "The verse was written and
the designs and marginal embellishments outlined on the copper with an
impervious liquid, probably the ordinary stopping-out varnish of
engravers. Then all the white parts or lights, the remainder of the plate
that is, were eaten away with aquafortis or other acid, so that the
outline of letter and design was left prominent, as in stereotype. From
these plates he printed off in any tint, yellow, brown, blue, required to
be the prevailing or ground colour in his fac-similes; red he used for the
letterpress. The page was then coloured up by hand in imitation of the
original drawing, with more or less variety of detail in the local hues."
To read this account when one has seen the product is like pondering the
receipt for a miracle. Gilchrist goes on to say, "He taught Mrs. Blake to
take off the impressions with care and delicacy." After, they were done up
in boards by her neat hands, "so that the poet and his wife did everything
in making the book--writing, designing, printing, engraving--everything
except manufacturing the paper: the very ink, or colour rather, they did
make. Never before, surely, was a man so literally the author of his own
book."
For the convenience of classifying in some sort of rough way, this chapter
will deal with the "Songs of Innocence," the "Book of Thel," the "Gates of
Paradise," the "Songs of Experience," also touching lightly on a very
different book, Mary Wollstonecraft's "Tales for Children," illustrated by
Blake.
The small octavo volume entitled the "Songs of Innocence"--with which the
"Songs of Experience," produced some years later, are also bound--will be
a revelation of beauty to all who have not seen it before, for there was
nothing like it before, and there has been nothing like it since. The
leaves of the Print Room copy, in all probability not a very early one,
have become slightly yellowed with age, but the colours remain rare and
delicate and iridescent as they were when they were first laid on, a happy
accident, for this has not been the fate of all Blake's coloured prints.
"Every page has the smell of April," says Mr. Swinburne happily. Linger
where you will, a gay and tender harmony pervades every leaf, the smile of
an inspired child looks up at you and flashes something intuitive and
precious into your soul. The colours are the colours of morning. The
limpidness of the verses, the felicity of the designs, recall special
morning moods in the morning of life. Hope, innocence, joy, and an
all-pervading sense of Divine nearness, are the characteristic notes
sounded. Both the draught and the song weave themselves into a spell, each
one distinct, each having its own charm, its own perfume.
The words without the embracing design, beautiful as they are, seem to
lose some of that delicate and aromatic fragrance diffused from them. And
the design without the words is an effect without a cause, and thus loses
its expressiveness. It is the union of the two that makes the celestial
singing, and, like antiphonal music, one part catches up, transforms and
augments the melody of the other, which, ringing silver clear, yet
half-hid and half-announced its entire significance.
Our illustrations, in which perforce the colour is left out, are the
palest, most spectral of shadows beside the glory of the original plates.
They can but be reminders or suggestions, and must be accepted as such.
Plate 2, represents a Shepherd, pipe in hand, following a cherubic vision,
his sheep in turn following him. The shepherd, be it remarked, has on a
vestment peculiar to Blake. It is indicated only by a line round the
ankles, wrists and neck, and a few rather realistic buttons, but it does
not hide the muscles and the modeling of the body at all. It is a kind of
glorified combination garment, but it is a matter of taste whether the
shepherd would not look as well unclothed entirely. The garment, too much
recalls the historic drawers which the outraged decency of the Vatican
obliged Pontormo to paint on the figures of Michael Angelo's "Last
Judgement" in the Sistine.
Whatever reason Blake may have had for investing his shepherd in this
apparel, we are sure at least that it was not because he worried himself
about propriety! such a concern was far indeed from him.
[Illustration: PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM "SONGS OF INNOCENCE," 1789]
After all, this matter of the combination garment is the merest
quibble. The design has all the enchantment of the spring in its pale
delicious tints, and the browsing sheep with the glint of gold on their
fleeces bring something of Argonautic romance into this vision of April.
The flamboyant title-page of the "Songs of Innocence," is a fine piece of
decorative design and colour.
The keynote of the whole scheme is set in the perfectly simple song, and
the page in which it is embodied, called "The Introduction." The poem is
written in brown, on a ground bright with tremulous colours which wane and
wax in prismatic variation. Rose shoots, bent in and out, make a trellis
up each side of the verses, and the result of the whole! well! you may
call it a slight thing if you like, but it is as joyous as childhood, and
strangely delightful! No songs ever written for children were as these
songs; in especial, perhaps, "The Lamb," of which the simplicity and
tenderness are of so delicate a quality that the poem cannot be handled
critically at all. It can only be felt.
The slightly richer and deeper tones of colour, and the premonitory note
of mysticism in the "Little Black Boy," afford a subtle charm:
And we are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
Who could have written this but Blake?
It is of lyrics such as this that Pater writes: "And the very perfection
of such poetry often appears to depend, in part, on a certain suppression
or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways
not distinctly traceable by the understanding, as in some of the most
imaginative compositions of William Blake."
"The Divine Image" is another equally lovely poem, with its sinuous
growth of ribbon-like leaves, climbing among the verses. The unmistakeable
figure of Christ at the root, raises a prostrate figure.
The verses, writ in golden brown, lie on a ground of palest blue,
thrilling to Tyrian purple.
"Holy Thursday," after the rainbow tints of many of the pages and the
luxuriance of their designs, is a Quaker-like and unpretending affair
altogether. It would seem to be the untouched impression as it was first
stereotyped off the plate; and is interesting for that reason.
There is hardly anything in the book more delicious than Plate 25, "Infant
Joy." A typical (rather than botanically correct) flower with a
flame-shaped bud, and a wind-tossed bloom, springs across a page dyed like
a butterfly's wing. In the cloven blossom a mother and her small baby sit
enthroned while an angel with wings like a "White Admiral" stands
entranced before the happy child.
"I have no name;
I am but two days old."
What shall I call thee?
"I happy am,
Joy is my name."
Sweet joy befall thee.
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old.
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while;
Sweet joy befall thee.
These are the spontaneous, gushing notes of the bird in springtime,
careless, unstudied but felicitously right, not to be corrected or even
touched, for each word must lie where it fell, just so and no other way.
[Illustration: PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM "SONGS OF INNOCENCE," 1789]
Plate 20, "Night," with its graceful lady tree growing up beside the
verses, is a beautiful shadowy design on a background in which blue and
green merge and deepen in a veil of evening mist and the poem is another
of those minute pieces of perfection, which, like delicate sea-shells,
were cast up out of the stormy ocean of Blake's mind.
In their own way, and with due regard to their special range and quality,
the "Songs of Innocence" are the most perfect things Blake ever did, for
he attempted no effect in song or design that his art was not adequate to
express, and his imagination lies over all like the haze of spring
sunshine. At that time the lyric poet in Blake was dominant, compelling
him to sing, while the mystic was hardly yet consciously awake in him.
But in the next book, "The Book of Thel," the mystic has stirred and
breathes through the poem. The story is veiled in a shining mystery, but
is still quite intelligible and pellucid in style, till just at the end,
when the sphinx riddle of this life, the paradox of the senses, the wonder
and terror of death, close round the consciousness of Thel, and dark
sayings are uttered darkly. Thel is the youngest of the daughters of the
Seraphim, but is herself a mortal. All her joy in her own beauty and that
of the natural world is destroyed by the thought that she must die, the
flowers must fade, the cloud will melt away, everything must change and
decay. The Lily of the Valley answers her gentle lamentation, telling her
that in this very change, the feeding of the lives of others with our own
life, lies the secret of an endless and blessed immortality. She herself
will hereafter "flourish in eternal vales." Thel assents to this--
Thy breath doth nourish the innocent lamb: he smells thy milky garments,
He crops thy flowers, while thou sittest smiling in his face,
Wiping his mild and meekin mouth from all contagious taints.
That is all very well, she seems to say, _you_ help to revive and nourish
many creatures, but what do I do? I shall fade away like a little shining
cloud. The lily then calls down a cloud, which appears in the bright
likeness of a radiant youth in mid-air. The cloud tells her that when he
passes away in an hour's time, "It is to manifold life, to love, and peace
and raptures holy." He will wed the Dew, and linked together in a golden
band they will "bear food to all our tender flowers."
But Thel complains that she does nothing for any living thing,
Without a use this shining woman lived,
Or did she only live to be at death the food of worms.
Then the "cloud reclined upon his airy throne" tells her that even that
would prove her of great use and blessing, for
Everything that lives
Lives not alone nor for itself,
and in token of the truth of what he says he calls the helpless worm,
which appears to Thel as "an infant wrapped in the Lily's leaf."
This lowest form of created life is cradled in a mother's love to Thel's
surprise. The Clod of Clay appears to comfort its weeping babe and tells
the wondering "beauty of the Vales of Har," that being herself the meanest
of all things, yet nevertheless she is the bride of Him "who loves the
lowly," and is the mother of all his children.
Whereat Thel weeps to find life and love everywhere, even where she
expected nothing but coldness and horror. Then "matron Clay," invites Thel
to enter her house, saying that it is given her to enter and to return. So
Thel entered into the secret regions of the grave, and passed on "till to
her grave-plot she came and there she sat down, and heard a voice of
sorrow" speak from out it. It is a wild blood-stilling cry that rises to
her terrified ears, shrieking of the senses, their limits, their precious
and their poisoning gifts--these only avenues through which life may be
enjoyed, and by which eternity must be coloured.
Nothing answers! there _is_ no answer? It is the old Faust riddle that has
occupied the minds of thinkers since the beginning of time. It fretted
Blake into a state of painful excitement. "The Virgin started from her
seat, and with a shriek fled back unhindered till she came into the Vales
of Har."
The designs, of which there are but five, have still the serene and
delicate air which belongs to Blake's youthful work. The colour is pure
and thin, the outlines printed in faint Italian pink, and the effect of
all is of things seen through a haze, which the sunshine is beginning to
penetrate.
A delightful impression of rain-washed, wind-swept morning is given by the
frontispiece, in which Thel--a motive of perfect poetic
grace--contemplates the wooing of the fairy Dew, whose home is in the
calyx of the flowers, by the Cloud. Above their heads is a patch of blue
sky, across which the title is written, while birds and angels wing their
happy flight in the ethereal expanse. Exquisite also is the pale vision of
the lily of the valley bowing before Thel. And the cloud, and the clod of
the earth bending over Baby Worm, are alive with Blake's peculiar quality
of imagination. The tail-piece represents a serpent of pale green hue
coiling and rearing across the page. One naked infant drives him with
reins, while two more ride joyously upon his back.
About the same time Blake wrote a poem called "Tiriel," which will be
found in the Aldine edition of his poetical works. It was never engraved
in a book by him, and has little poetic beauty, being for the most part
full of clamorous rage, dire slaughterings and cruel revenge, but he made
some water-colour drawings illustrating the text.
The Print Room does not possess a copy of the "Marriage of Heaven and
Hell," which appeared in 1790, but the Reading Room has one which can be
viewed in the large room set apart for rare books.
None of Blake's prose writings, in sustained thought and power, are equal
to it. It is an armoury containing flashing rapiers, whose thrusts reach
home as suddenly as they are withdrawn again. The glitter of steel in
sunlight is suggested by many of its aphorisms. I cannot forbear quoting
one or two, in reading which one would seem to hear the very voice of
Blake:
"He whose face gives no light shall never become a star."
"The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy
sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the
eye of man."
"Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity."
"He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence."
"How do you know but ev'ry bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five."
"Damn braces; bless relaxes."
"Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."
"All deities reside in the human breast."
"Joys impregnate, sorrows bring forth."
"Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth."
"To create a little flower is the labour of ages."
"Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without
improvement are roads of genius."
[Illustration: PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM THE BRITISH MUSEUM COPY OF
THE "MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL," PRODUCED 1790]
The aphorisms are followed by five "Memorable Fancies," wild dreams full
of paradoxes, and allegories both spiritual and grotesque. The designs to
this book are very fine, but I cannot help thinking that this particular
copy was not coloured by Blake's hand. In comparison with the one formerly
belonging to Lord Crewe, which in all respects is magnificent, the Library
copy is coloured too crudely, to be in the least characteristic of Blake.
Particularly unlike him are the heavy gray shadows disfiguring the nude
figures. There is no impasto work here as in the Crewe copy, but the
colour is put on with no uncertain or unpractised hand, though in a manner
unlike Blake. Far more delightful are the renderings of several of these
plates as seen in the small "Book of Designs." They are worked up with the
utmost care and finish, and the distinctive qualities of Blake's colour,
the unmistakable impress of his hand, are there exhibited in their highest
manifestations. The sense of mystery, innate to their conception, is
preserved, nay, accentuated! whereas the Library copy, through its
unpleasant, and I cannot but think un-Blakean passages of colour, has lost
in some places this romantic and inimitable quality. The title-page alive
with leaping flames, a nude woman bathing, salamander-like, in fire, the
heaving body of a patterned water-snake writhing in foamy water, and a
male figure seated on a mound prophetic of the design presently to be
consummated in "Death's Door," are among the most notable of the pictures
in the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell." Many of the pages are faintly
tinted, while delicate suggestive ornaments cling about the writing.
In 1791 Blake designed and engraved for Johnson six plates to "Tales for
Children," by Mary Wollstonecraft. The book is in the Print Room, somewhat
yellow and musty. In no sense is it attractive, and it would find small
favour with the modern child. The fact is that Blake worked in dire
constraint when illustrating homely scenes of actual life. He had no
pleasure in the invention of accessories. In his art all is left out that
may be, and the bare, the sparse, the elemental, and the austerely
beautiful alone receive his attention, but always adjusted to meet the
requirements of his own rigid sense of harmony in composition.
Then again single vision, "the vision of Bacon and Newton," concerned only
with actual appearances, did not seem to him worth the transcribing. He
could only work with freedom when the fact could be treated as merely the
symbol of an idea. So that in these plates the homely domestic scenes he
tries to represent have a cold and ghastly appearance. They are like
nothing we have ever seen, because Blake was so curiously unobservant of
details not interesting to him that he simply did not _know_ about them
when he came to draw them. His work is only of a high order when his
imagination is excited. His spiritual insight not being called into play
renders many of these engravings weak, dull and archaic-looking.
There are among them suggestions of the terrible, and of significances
beyond this world however. They form grim and foreign accompaniments
enough to the milk-and-water stories, and are about as suitable as the
Orcagna frescoes in the Pisan Campo Santo would be to adorn the walls of a
child's nursery. We willingly shut up the book and turn to one produced
two years later called the "Gates of Paradise." The title-page says it was
designed, engraved and published by Blake, but adds Johnson's name too.
But we know that the book is all Blake, and it is probable that Johnson
gave his name to the venture through a kindly, perhaps pitying, desire to
help Blake with the public.
"The Gates of Paradise" it is called, though no glory of colour, no
beautiful angels, no city of gold, such as the title might lead us to
expect, are displayed in its pages. Indeed, to some the first glance may
bring disappointment.
These elemental and direct designs, sixteen in number, are very rough,
even rudimentary, as engravings. But they are true art-work, for they
concentrate and express conceptions and ideas of a rare order, and with a
piercing directness that drives them home to our most intimate, most
central consciousness.
Either you will feel their power and charm, and come under the subtle
spell at once, or else you will glance through them unmoved, and perhaps
contemptuously, and wonder what people can profess to see in this rude and
Gothic draughtsmanship. If this latter is the case, then Blake has nothing
to say to such an one, for it is no use to expect a literal and exact
interpretation tacked on to all his designs. Blake must and will be
discerned intuitively by his true lovers, and few words will suffice to
indicate the track of his thoughts to such; to others, all the explanation
in the world would never reveal him, for, to use his own phrase, "the
doors of their perception" are not sufficiently cleansed to admit his
conceptions.
The frontispiece gives us a reminiscence of Thel. A chrysalis, like a
swaddled baby, lies on a leaf, while on the spray above a caterpillar--the
emblem of motherhood--watches over it. Underneath is inscribed,
significantly enough, the words, "What is man?" Blake's thoughts were
never long away from this subject. To find an answer to the question was
his deepest preoccupation and concern, and the following designs are all
variations on this one dominant theme. Plate No. 1 represents a woman
gathering babies like flowers from among the clustering ivy at the foot of
a tree. In glad haste she plucks up one more to put with the others
already lying, like St. Elizabeth's roses, in the folds of her apron. The
child is found symbolically at the root of what Mr. Swinburne thinks is
the tree of physical life, embedded in the earth from which all things
issue, and to which all things return. The next four plates are
embodiments of the four elements, which in Blake's thoughts always teemed
with "spiritual correspondences"--according to the Swedenborgian phrase.
"Water" seems to be an emblem of folly and instability, and is embodied in
the form of a man seated on the very roots of the tree of physical life,
his feet set upon no firm earth, but upon the sand at the verge of the
water. The foolish, helpless face, and hands spread out on knees, and the
driving rain that descends with pitiless energy on all, go far to convey
the idea of the perpetual flux and flow, the "unshapeableness" of the
element "Water." A gnome-like man in a crevice represents "Earth." He is
inclosed, bound down, weighted with clay. Sitting on a high white cloud
amid the starry spaces of the sky, "Air" sits in form like a naked man,
pressing his hands to his forehead in fear and giddiness at the vast
immensity unrolled before his eyes.
"Blind in fire with shield and spear," a man strides in Plate 5. Is this
fire an emblem of the fierce elemental fires of Desire and Hatred--both of
which are blind?
Plate 6 is entitled "At length for hatching ripe he breaks the shell," and
a delicious cherub having broken the egg proceeds to climb out of it into
the sunlit air. Symbol of the material life which forms a concrete
circumference around the soul of eternal man, the eggshell is broken, when
"at length for hatching ripe," the veil of death is rent by the liberated
spirit.
[Illustration: "I WANT! I WANT!"
Engraving from the "Gates of Paradise," 1793]
In Plate 7 and its successors Blake takes us back again to incidents
characteristic of the life of man on earth.--"Alas!" exhibits a boy
wantonly catching and killing bright little loves, which flutter across
his path like butterflies. Plate 8 is a youth throwing barbed darts at
an old man who sits on ruins sword in hand.
"My son, my son, thou treatest me
But as I have instructed thee,"
writes Blake, suggesting the numerous cases of friction and cruel offence
which must result from the education of the human soul in selfishness and
vainglory.
There is nothing in the series to equal the colossal daring of "I want, I
want." Just a little cross-hatching, a little rough spluttering work with
the burin, and we have this bit of marvellous irony. A group of tiny
pigmies on a spit of land have reared an enormous ladder against the moon,
and are about to start on their journey through star-bespread darkness to
the pale crescent so far above them. Mr. Swinburne says that this was
originally an ironical sketch satirizing the methods of Art study pursued
by "amateurs and connoisseurs"--"scaling with ladders of logic the heaven
of invention," and presuming to measure, reach and gauge the intangible
ideal. But in this series Blake has expanded the meaning of the design
into the passionate yearning and aching desire of man after things
spiritual.
Plate 10 is a study of the sea. A water-colour in washes of Indian ink of
very similar composition is in existence, and was on exhibition at Ryder
Street in 1904. The water-colour evidently suggested by this plate is the
finer work, but it is a marvellous evidence of Blake's power, that the
tiny plate of the "Gates of Paradise" (1-5/8 in. by 2 in. only in size)
should be capable of representing so infinite a waste of stormy waters.
One frantic arm reaches up to Heaven from out the foamy crest of the
waves, a minute later to be submerged,--"In Time's ocean falling,
drowned." That is its significance! No cries of "Help!" will be heard; Man
_must_ be overwhelmed by Time.
In the eleventh plate an old man in spectacles ruthlessly clips the wings
of a bright boy who wrestles and struggles under the cruel hands. Thus
does Age, full of worldly experience and material philosophy, clip the
wings of the aspiring soul of Youth.
Walled in by the divisions and materialisms into which Man has fallen
through the creation of the generative nature, we see human souls
despairing, and full of lassitude, enclosed in depths of icy dungeons, in
the twelfth plate. This plate was afterwards taken as the basis of the
design Blake made of Count Ugolino and his sons in the tower at Pisa in
his Dante series.
In Plate 13 comes the promise of life. A man stretched on his bed with his
family watching beside him, suddenly has a vision of "The Immortal Man
that cannot die." After that all is different, and in Plate 14 "the
traveller hasteth in the evening" of life to his journey's end, serenely
cheerful, even anxious to shake off mortality, that he may realize his
glorious vision the sooner.
But the way to Immortality is through the Gate of the Grave. So in Plate
15 we have the picture of Death's Door, to which our traveller has arrived
at last. This early design embodying Blake's favourite conception was
destined to be enlarged and sublimed into one of the most magnificent
inventions of Christian Art. This is the first hint of the perfect final
work, and on that account, as well as for its own intrinsic significance
here, of the greatest interest.
Death's Door being opened, the Worm is seen at work in Plate 16. Who shall
say how Blake has contrived to make the pale, hooded woman under the
tree-roots so symbolic an image of the Worm? There is that about her at
which the recoiling flesh shudders and sickens.
[Illustration: THE DELUGE
From W. B. Scott's Etching of Blake's undated Indian Ink Drawing, by kind
permission of Messrs. Chatto and Windus]
Yet here, below the dim, twisted roots of the Tree of Physical Being,
whence the embryo Man was plucked like a mandrake, is the house of the
worm. "I have said to the worm, thou art my mother and my sister," quotes
Blake enigmatically, beneath this leprous dream of mortality. But the
enigma has a solution, for the worm at least destroys that body of
generative and divided nature to which it is itself so nearly akin, and
which has cramped and imprisoned eternal Man while on earth. So that we
may be grateful to the worm in the end, for
Weaving to dreams the sexual strife,
And weeping over the web of life.
I have quoted an illuminating phrase here and there from the lines which
Blake wrote and called the Keys of the Gates of Paradise. These, however,
are but fugitive hints and thoughts suggested by the plates, and not in
any real sense "keys" at all. Blake leaves each man to unlock the
innermost mystery of those designs for himself. They are steeped all
through in his own peculiar hues of thought, subjective to the very verge
of the subjectivity allowable to art, but each of them exhibits that
pictorial sense without which, however poetical and rare the meaning
expressed, they could have no _raison d'etre_--no artistic right to exist.
They induce the mood which assists us to their sympathetic comprehension.
After the "Gates of Paradise," Blake began the production of the London
"Prophetic Books," but we will consider these in the next chapter, and
will conclude this early phase of Blake's work in book making by the
consideration of the "Songs of Experience," which appeared in 1794--five
years later than the "Songs of Innocence."
Again we take up the little book which was the first we handled in the
Print Room, for the "Songs of Experience" are bound with the "Songs of
Innocence." The Museum copy bears the double title on the first page as
well as the two separate ones, which occur appropriately before each book.
Into this first plate, with its kindling title flashing across the
page--"Songs of Innocence and Experience showing two contrary states of
the human soul"--Blake has wrought some of that intense and passionate
feeling which makes the work so valuable as much psychologically as
artistically.
Two energetic and expressive figures, a male and a female, symbolize
Innocence and Experience, while flames of Desire and Aspiration burn
fiercely around them, leaping up to lick the letters of the title, which
lie on a ground of flickering and fainting colour.
In the "Songs of Innocence," the marriage of the poems and designs was
complete, and matter and form (poetic and artistic) attained an almost
complete identity.
Here, however, the case is somewhat different, the task to be accomplished
not being so easily achievable, for the mood is less lyrical and more
mystic.
Experience is a hard teacher concerned only with this material life and
its limited conditions, and sets itself against the Innocence which
retains, in Plato's phrase, "recollections of things seen" by eternal man
before generation here. Experience has nothing to do with vision, but only
with facts, and it deals with the results of concrete experiment; never
with the flashing spark of heaven-sent inspiration.
Thus the "Songs of Experience" are of far less simple mood and single
utterance than their bright forerunners. Something of the remorselessness
of experience has passed into these lyrics--for lyrics they still are,
though Blake has lost the spontaneity and felicitous gush of melody which
came from him so naturally, so rightly, six years previously.
[Illustration: PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM "SONGS OF EXPERIENCE,"
1794]
Of one--not spontaneous certainly, but created little bit by little bit
with unerring judgement and rich fancy, struck out like the embossed
design on a shield, each blow, each delicately graduated tap and touch,
bringing out in clearer relief the magnificence of the heraldic images--of
this poem, "The Tyger," it is impossible to speak too enthusiastically. It
is a grand piece of chased metal work, and Blake has done nothing better.
The fierce swift rhythm, imitative of the padding footfalls,
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
called out Lamb's critical admiration, and no one was ever better
qualified than Lamb to appreciate our painter and poet. It is matter for
regret that he came across so little of Blake's work in either kind,
though we shall find him presently with something to say anent the
engraving of the "Canterbury Pilgrimage."
One wishes (profanely no doubt) that our artist had seen fit to make the
tiger that illustrates the British Museum copy, yellow and black, rather
than blue and bistre and red, which colours seem to have no natural
relation to the animal. Is it possible that this page was coloured by Mrs.
Blake's hand in these weird parti-hues?
The "Songs of Experience" are pitted like a dark contrast against the
sun-kissed radiance of the "Songs of Innocence."
One state of mind opposes itself aggressively against the contrary state
of mind. One set of impressions is recorded in opposition to the
impressions of sometimes the same things, sometimes their correlatives
taken from a widely divergent stand-point. Thus the Lamb in the "Songs of
Innocence" finds its contrast in the Tiger of the "Songs of Experience."
Infant Joy is set against Infant Sorrow, the ordered beauty and sweetness
of one Holy Thursday is the reverse of the despairing cry of pain uttered
in the other Holy Thursday. The Divine Image emits its celestial radiance
against the cynical brilliance of the Human Abstract, and that other
distorted Divine Image.
It is interesting to know that Blake issued the "Songs of Innocence and
Experience" at the modest price of from thirty shillings to two guineas at
first. Later in life he received four guineas for each copy, and during
his last years Sir Thomas Lawrence insisted on paying twelve guineas and
Sir Francis Chantrey twenty for copies.
At Messrs. Sotheby's sale of the Crewe Collection of Blake's works on
March 31st of last year (1903) the price reached for a very perfect copy
containing the four title-pages, was L300. The sum would have been wealth
to Blake, but it is the world's way, consecrated now by immemorial
tradition, to lay its laurels of reward and appreciation only at the
_dead_ feet of its great men.
[Illustration: PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM "SONGS OF INNOCENCE," 1789]