William Butler Yeats in his Ideas of Good and Evil has said some
notable things about Blake. He calls him a realist of the imagination
and first pointed out the analogy between Blake and Nietzsche. "When
one reads Blake it is as though the spray of an inexhaustible fountain
of beauty was blown into our faces." And "he was a symbolist who had
to invent his symbols." Well, what great artist does not? Wagner
did; also Ibsen and Maeterlinck. Blake was much troubled over the
imagination. It was the "spirit" for him in this "vegetable universe,"
the Holy Ghost. All art that sets forth with any fulness the outward
vesture of things is prompted by the "rotten rags of memory." That
is why he loathed Rubens, why he seemingly slurs the forms of men
and things in his eagerness to portray the essential. Needless to
add, the essential for him was the soul. He believed in goading the
imagination to vision--though not with opium--and we are led through
a dream-world of his own fashioning, one in which his creatures bear
little correspondence to earthly types. His illustrations to the
Book of Job, to Dante, to Young's Night Thoughts bear witness to the
intensity of his vision, though flesh and blood halts betimes in
following these vast decorative whirls of flame bearing myriad souls in
blasts that traverse the very firmament. The "divine awkwardness" of
his Adam and Eve and the "Ancient of Days" recall something that might
be a marionette and yet an angelic being. To Blake they were angels;
of that there can be no doubt; but we of less fervent imagination may
ask as did Hotspur of Glendower, who had boasted that he could "call
spirits from the vasty deep." "Why, so can I, or so can any man. But
will they come when you do call for them?" quoth the gallant Percy. We
are, the majority of us, as unimaginative as Hotspur. Blake summoned
his spirits; to him they appeared; to quote his own magnificent
utterance, "The stars threw down their spears, and watered heaven with
their tears"; but we, alas! see neither stars nor spears nor tears,
only eccentric draughtsmanship and bizarre designs. Yet, after Blake,
Doré's Dante illustrations are commonplace; even Botticelli's seem
ornamental. Such is the genius of the Englishman that on the thither
side of his shadowy conceptions there shine intermittently pictures
of a No Man's Land, testifying to a burning fantasy hampered by human
tools. He suggests the supernatural. "How do you know," he asks, "but
every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed
by your senses five?" Of him Ruskin has said: "In expressing conditions
of glaring and flickering light Blake is greater than Rembrandt." With
Dante he went to the nethermost hell. His warring attributes tease and
attract us. For the more human side we commend Blake's seventeen wood
engravings to Thornton's Virgil. They are not so rich as Bewick's,
but we must remember that it was Blake's first essay with knife and
box-wood--he was really a practised copper engraver--and the effects
he produced are wonderful. What could be more powerful in such a tiny
space than the moon eclipse and the black forest illustrating the
lines, "Or when the moon, by wizard charm'd, foreshows Bloodstained in
foul eclipse, impending woes!" And the dim sunsets, the low, friendly
sky in the other plates!
Blake's gospel of art may be given in his own words: "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." He abominated the nacreous flesh
tones of Titian, Correggio, or Rubens. Reflected lights are sinful.
The silhouette betrays the soul of the master. Swinburne in several
eloquent pages has instituted a comparison between Walt Whitman and
William Blake. (In the first edition of "William Blake: A Critical
Essay," 1868.) Both men were radicals. "The words of either strike
deep and run wide and soar high." What would have happened to Blake if
he had gone to Italy and studied the works of the masters--for he was
truly ignorant of an entire hemisphere of art? Turner has made us see
his dreams of a gorgeous world; Blake, as through a scarce opened door,
gives us a breathless glimpse of a supernal territory, whether heaven
or hell, or both, we dare not aver. Italy might have calmed him, tamed
him, banished his arrogance--as it did Goethe's. Suppose that Walt
Whitman had written poems instead of magical and haunting headlines.
And if Browning had made clear the devious ways of Sordello--what then?
"What porridge had John Keats?" We should have missed the sharp savour
of the real Blake, the real Whitman, the real Browning. And what a
number of interesting critical books would have remained unwritten.
"Oh, never star was lost here but it arose afar." What Coleridge wrote
of his son Hartley might serve for Blake: "Exquisitely wild, an utter
visionary, like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle of
his own making. He alone is a light of his own. Of all human beings I
never saw one so utterly naked of self." Naked of self! William Blake,
unselfish egoist, stands before us in three words.