"MAD, NAKED BLAKE"
I
Perhaps the best criticism ever uttered offhand about the art of
William Blake was Rodin's, who, when shown some facsimiles of Blake's
drawings by brilliant Arthur Symons with the explanation that Blake
"used literally to see those figures, they are not mere inventions,"
replied: "Yes. He saw them once; he should have seen them three or
four times." And this acute summing up of Blake's gravest defect is
further strengthened by a remark made by one of his most sympathetic
commentators, Laurence Binyon. Blake once said: "The lavish praise I
have received from all quarters for invention and drawing has generally
been accompanied by this: 'He can conceive, but he cannot execute.'
This absurd assertion has done and may still do me the greatest
mischief." Now comments Mr. Binyon: "In spite of the artist's protest
this continues to be the current criticism on Blake's work; and yet
the truth lies rather on the other side. It is not so much in his
execution as in the failure to mature his conceptions that his defect
is to be found." Again: "His temperament unfitted him for success in
carrying his work further; his want was not lack of skill, but lack
of patience." If this sounds paradoxical we find Symons admitting
that Rodin had hit the nail on the head. "There, it seems to me, is
the fundamental truth about the art of Blake; it is a record of vision
which has not been thoroughly mastered even as vision."
Notwithstanding the neglect to which Blake was subjected during
his lifetime and the misunderstanding ever since his death of his
extraordinary and imaginative designs, poetry, and vaticinations, it
is disquieting to see how books about Blake are beginning to pile
up. He may even prove as popular as Ibsen. A certain form of genius
serves as a starting-point for critical performances. Blake is the
most admirable example, though Whitman and Browning are in the same
class. Called cryptic by their own, they are too well understood by a
later generation. Wagner once swam in the consciousness of the elect;
and he was understood. Baudelaire understood him, so Liszt. Wagner
to-day is the property of the man in the street, who whistles him,
and Ibsen is already painfully yielding up his precious secrets to
relentless "expounding" torturers. As for Maeterlinck, he is become a
mere byword in literary clubs, where they discuss his Bee in company
with the latest Shaw epigram. "Even caviare, it seems, may become a
little flyblown," exclaims Mr. Dowden. Everything is being explained.
Oh, happy age! Who once wrote: "A hundred fanatics are found to a
theological or metaphysical statement, but not one for a geometric
problem"?
Yet we may be too rash. Blake's prophetic books are still cloudy
nightmares, for all but the elect, and not Swinburne, Gilchrist,
Tatham, Richard Garnett, Ellis, Binyon, Yeats, Symons, Graham
Robertson, Alfred Story, Maclagan and Russell, Elizabeth Luther Cary
and the others--for there are others and there will be others--can
wring from these fragments more than an occasional meaning or music.
But in ten years he may be the pontiff of a new dispensation. Symons
has been wise in the handling of his material. After a general and
comprehensive study of Blake he brings forward some new records
from contemporary sources--extracts from the diary, letters and
reminiscences of Henry Crabb Robinson; from A Father's Memoir of His
Child, by Benjamin Heath Malkin; from Lady Charlotte Bury's Diary
(1820); Blake's horoscope, obituary notice, extract from Varley's
Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828); a biographical sketch of Blake by J.
T. Smith (1828), and Allan Cunningham's life of Blake (1830). In a
word, for those who cannot spare the time to investigate the various
and sundry Blakian exegetics, Symons's book is the best because most
condensed. It is the Blake question summed up by a supple hand and a
sympathetic spirit. It is inscribed to Auguste Rodin in the following
happy and significant phrase: "To Auguste Rodin, whose work is the
marriage of heaven and hell."