_Blake’s removal to Felpham--Intercourse with Hayley--Return
to London--“Jerusalem”--Connection with Cromek--Illustrations
of Blair’s “Grave”--Illustration of Chaucer’s “Canterbury
Pilgrims”--Exhibition of his Works and “Descriptive Catalogue.”_
Blake was now about to make a change in his external environment,
which would have been momentous to any artist whose themes had been
less exclusively discerned by the inner eye. It is an extraordinary
fact, but there is absolutely no evidence that the poet who “made
a rural pen” had as yet ever seen the country beyond the immediate
neighbourhood of London. It is vain to speculate upon the precise
modification which might have been wrought in his genius by rural
nurture or foreign travel. Now he was actually to become a denizen
of the country for some years. An introduction from Flaxman had made
him acquainted with William Hayley, a Sussex squire and scholar, now
chiefly remembered as his patron and the biographer of Cowper, but
esteemed in his own day as one of the best representatives of English
poetry at what seemed the period of its deepest decrepitude, though
he is unaccountably omitted in Porson’s catalogue of the bards of
the epoch.[4] Hayley, having lost his son, a pupil of Flaxman, and
his friend Cowper within a week of each other in the spring of 1800,
resolved to solace his grief by writing Cowper’s life, and suggested
that Blake should live near him during the progress of the work to
execute the engravings by which it was to be illustrated. In August,
1800, Blake removed from Lambeth to Felpham, near Bognor, on the
Sussex coast, where Hayley occupied a marine villa, his own residence
at Eastham being let on account of the embarrassment of his affairs.
The cottage was not provided by him for Blake, but the rent was paid
by Blake himself. The change from Lambeth to a beautiful country of
groves, meadows, and cornfields, with sails in the distance,
Half lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea,
The shining sapphire-spangled marriage ring of the land,
affected Blake with enthusiastic delight. “Felpham,” he wrote to
Flaxman, “is a sweet place for study, because it is more spiritual than
London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates; her windows
are not obstructed by vapours; voices of celestial inhabitants are more
distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly seen, and my cottage
is also a shadow of their houses.” He continues: “I am more famed in
Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my brain are studies
and chambers with books and pictures of old, which I wrote and painted
in ages of eternity before my mortal life; and those works are the
delight and study of archangels. Why then should I be anxious about
the riches or fame of mortality?” It is clear that, notwithstanding
his theories of the deadness of the material creation, Blake valued
natural beauty as an instrument for bringing him into more intimate
connection with the visionary world. At first the desired effect was
fully produced. Blake began to compose, or rather, according to his
own account, to take down from supernatural dictation the _Jerusalem_,
the most important in some respects of his mystical writings. Walking
by the shore--the very shore where Cary was afterwards to encounter
Coleridge--he habitually met Moses and the Prophets, Homer, Dante,
and Milton. “All,” he said, “majestic shadows, gray but luminous, and
superior to the common height.” A description so fine, that some may
be inclined to deem it something more than a mere fancy. Unfortunately
he also fell in with a fairies’ funeral, a stumbling-block to the most
resolute faith. By and by, however, the dampness of the cottage proved
provocative of rheumatism, and, which was much more disastrous, the
mental climate proved unsympathetic. Hayley’s patronage of so strange
a creature as he must have thought Blake does him the highest honour.
He appears throughout, not only as a very kind man, but, what is less
usual in a literary personage, a very patient one. He actually
instructed Blake in Greek. His kindness and patience did not, however,
render him any the better poet; he was an elegant _dilettante_ at
the best, and Blake must have chafed at the obligation under which
he felt himself to illustrate his verses. One ballad of some merit,
however, “Little Tom the Sailor,” inspired Blake with a striking if
somewhat rude design, and he adorned Hayley’s library with ideal
portraits of illustrious authors. The engraving work which he had to
execute for Hayley’s life of Cowper was also little to his taste, but
there seems no valid reason to charge him with neglect of it. His own
self-reproach, indeed, ran in quite a different channel: he accused
himself most seriously of unfaithfulness to his high vocation as a
revealer and interpreter of spiritual things. Absence from town led him
to write frequently to his friend and patron Butts, and these letters
are invaluable indications not only of the frame of his mind at the
time, but of its general habit. “I labour,” he says, “incessantly, I
accomplish not one-half of what I intend, because my abstract folly
hurries me often away while I am at work, carrying me over mountains
and valleys, which are not real, into a land of abstraction where
spectres of the dead wander. This I endeavour to prevent; I, with my
whole might, chain my feet to the world of duty and reality. But in
vain! the faster I bind, the lighter is the ballast; for I, so far
from being bound down, take the world with me in my flights, and often
it seems lighter than a ball of wool rolled by the wind.… If we fear
to do the dictates of our angels, and tremble at the tasks set before
us, if we refuse to do spiritual acts because of natural fears or
natural desires, who can describe the dismal torments of such a state?…
Though I have been very unhappy, I am so no longer. I have travelled
through perils and darkness not unlike a champion. I have conquered and
shall go on conquering. Nothing can withstand the fury of my course
among the stars of God and in the abysses of the accuser.” In plain
English Hayley strongly advised Blake to give up his mystical poetry
and design and devote himself solely to engraving, and Blake looked
upon the advice as a suggestion of the adversary. We do not know what
Hayley said. If he thought that one of the _Poetical Sketches_ or the
_Songs of Innocence_ was worth many pages of _Urizen_ apart from the
illustrations, he had reason for what he thought. But Blake’s lyrical
gift had all but forsaken him; he was incapable of emitting “wood-notes
wild,” and the only way in which he could give literary expression to
the inspiration by which he justly deemed himself visited was through
his rhythmical form, which to Hayley may well have seemed monstrous.
It is highly probable that the pictorial part of Blake’s work found no
more favour with Hayley than the poetical; at all events it is very
certain that he greatly preferred his engraving, and wished Blake to
follow the art by which he had the best prospect of providing for
himself. Johnson and Fuseli, by Blake’s own admission, had given the
same advice; and an obscure line in one of his rather undignified
and splenetic epigrams against his well-intentioned friend may be
interpreted as meaning that Hayley had tried to bring his wife’s
influence to bear upon him for this end. In any case he lost temper
with Hayley, and wrote to Butts (July, 1803): “Mr. Hayley approves of
my designs as little as he does of my poems, and I have been forced
to insist on his leaving me in both to my own self-will; for I am
determined to be no longer pestered with his genteel ignorance and
polite disapprobation. I know myself both poet and painter, and it
is not his affected contempt that can move to anything but a more
assiduous pursuit of both arts.” Two months afterwards he returned
to London, but on better terms with Hayley; partly on account of the
latter’s generous conduct in providing for his defence against a charge
of using seditious language, trumped up against him by a soldier whom
he had turned out of his garden. “Perhaps,” he wrote to Butts, “this
was suffered to give opportunity to those whom I doubted to clear
themselves of all imputation.” The case was tried in January, 1804, and
terminated in Blake’s triumphant acquittal. An old man who had attended
the trial as a youth said that he remembered nothing of it except
Blake’s flashing eye.
[Illustration: _From Blake’s “America.”_]
The engravings executed by Blake for Hayley during his residence at
Felpham were six for the life and letters of Cowper; four original
designs for ballads by Hayley, including “Poor Tom,” and six engravings
after Maria T. Flaxman for Hayley’s _Triumphs of Temper_. He did some
work for Hayley after his return to town--engravings for the _Life of
Romney_, and original designs for Hayley’s _Ballads on Animals_--and
corresponded with him in a friendly spirit, but the intimacy gradually
died away.
Blake was profoundly influenced by his residence at Felpham in
one respect; he became acquainted with opposition, and distinctly
realised a power antagonistic to his aspirations. He was thus stung
into self-assertion, and became hostile to the artists whose aims and
methods he was unable to reconcile with his ideas. The first hints
of this attitude appear in the praises he bestows upon the work of
his own which chiefly occupied him at Felpham, the _Jerusalem_. “I
may praise it,” he says, “since I dare not pretend to be any other
than the secretary; the authors are in eternity. I consider it as the
grandest poem that this world contains. Allegory addressed to the
intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal
understanding, is my definition of the most sublime poetry.” Blake’s
allegory so effectually eludes both the reason and the understanding
that Messrs. Ellis and Yeats frankly tell us that it is not for a
moment to be supposed that their own elaborate interpretation will
convey any idea to the mind unless it is read conjointly with the poem;
and if such is the commentary what must the text be? If they are right
the confusion is greatly increased by a wrong arrangement, and by the
numerous interpolations which Blake subsequently introduced into the
poem, which, though nominally issued in 1804, was not, they think,
actually completed until about 1820. It suffers from being nearer prose
than any of his former books. “When this verse was dictated to me,” he
says, “I considered a monotonous cadence, like that used by Milton,
Shakespeare, and all writers of English blank verse, derived from the
modern bondage of rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of
the verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true orator such
monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself.”
What can be said of the ears that could find Shakespeare’s and Milton’s
blank verse monotonous? The truth is that Blake’s originally exquisite
perception of harmony had waned with his lyrical faculty, and he scoffs
at what he is no longer able to produce. Yet the general grandiose
effect of _Jerusalem_ is undeniable. Little as we can attach any
definite idea to it, it simultaneously awes and soothes like one of the
great inarticulate voices of nature, the booming of the billows, or
the whisper of the winds in the wood. Occasionally we encounter some
beautiful little vignette like this:--
She creates at her will a little moving night and silence,
With spaces of sweet gardens and a tent of elegant beauty,
Closed in by sandy deserts, and a night of stars shining;
A little tender moon, and hovering angels on the wing,
And the male gives a time and revolution to her space
Till the time of love is passed in ever-varying delights:
For all things exist in the human imagination.
This seems an illustration of what we have said of the dependence
of Blake’s poetry upon his pictorial imagination, for it is clearly
nothing but a magnificent expansion of the midsummer night idyl of the
glowworm shining for her mate, “with her little drop of moonlight,” as
Beddoes beautifully says.
In artistic merit _Jerusalem_ is fully equal to any of Blake’s works.
There is less of the grotesque than in the others, and even more of the
impressive. Much, however, depends upon the colouring, which varies
greatly in different copies. Mr. Gilchrist warns us that it cannot
be judged aright if we have not seen the “incomparable” copy in the
possession of Lord Crewe. “It is printed in a warm reddish-brown, the
exact colour of a very fine photograph; and the broken blending of
the deeper lines with the more tender shadows--all sanded over with a
sort of golden mist peculiar to Blake’s mode of execution--makes still
more striking the resemblance to the then undiscovered handling of
Nature herself.” The general character of the design is excellently
described by Gilchrist. “The subjects are vague and mystic as the poem
itself. Female figures lie among waves full of reflected stars: a
strange human image, with a swan’s head and wings, floats on water in a
kneeling attitude and drinks; lovers embrace in an open water-lily; an
eagle-headed creature sits and contemplates the sun; serpent-women are
coiled with serpents; Assyrian-looking, human-visaged bulls are seen
yoked to the plough or the chariot; rocks swallow or vomit forth human
forms, or appear to amalgamate with them; angels cross each other over
wheels of flame; and flames and hurrying figures wreathe and wind among
the lines.” It may indeed, like Blake’s other productions of the kind,
be described as a gigantic arabesque, imbued with a passion and pathos
not elsewhere attempted in this branch of art.
[Illustration: _Design from “Milton.” By W. Blake._]
The subject of _Milton_, from which one of our illustrations
is selected, is, in Mr. Swinburne’s words, the incarnation and
descent into earth and hell of Milton, who represents redemption
by inspiration. Something similar, as we have seen, is the idea of
Blake’s fine mystical book, _Thel_, and the pilgrimage through a
lower sphere is also found in the oldest Assyrian poetry. The book,
like _Jerusalem_, is dated 1804, but, like its companion, must have
been composed at Felpham. Nothing save actual and present contact with
country scenes could have inspired such a passage as this, the crown of
all Blake’s unrhymed poetry:--
Thou hearest the nightingale begin the song of spring:
The lark sitting upon his earthly bed, just as the sun
Appears, listens silent: then springing from the wavy corn-field loud
He leads the choir of day: trill, trill, trill, trill:
Mounting upon the wings of light into the great expanse;
Re-echoing against the lovely blue and shining heavenly shell:
His little throat labours with inspiration, every feather
On throat and breast and wings vibrates with the effluence divine:
All nature listens silent to him, and the awful sun
Stands still upon the mountain looking on this little bird
With eyes of soft humility, and wonder, love, and awe.
Such a passage shows how greatly Blake might have gained as a poet had
he been more intimate with external nature. Very splendid lines might
be quoted from “Milton,” such as “A cloudy heaven mingled with stormy
seas in loudest ruin,” but they are glowing light upon a black core of
obscurity. Mr. Housman’s judgment applies to it as to all the works of
its class. “They are the sign chiefly of a beautiful nature wasted for
lack of equipment in formulating disputatively what grew out of his
better work with all the thoughtlessness and glory of a flower.”[5]
[Illustration: _From Blake’s “America.”_]
Several lyrical poems printed in Blake’s works may be assigned to this
date. Some, such as “The Crystal Cabinet” and “The Mental Traveller,”
are extremely mystical; others, such as “Mary,” are of simply human
interest; others, such as “Auguries of Innocence,” seem little remote
from nonsense. “The Everlasting Gospel” expresses his profoundest ideas
with startling crudity. None are wholly unmelodious, but the old
bewitching melody has gone from all, unless from the lines introductory
to “Milton”:--
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green;
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
[Illustration: _Portrait of William Blake. From the engraving by L.
Schiavonetti, after T. Phillips, R.A._]
Blake, who had settled at 17, South Molton Street, Oxford Street, was
in the meantime dealing with a very different patron from Hayley,
Robert Cromek, a “stickit” engraver turned print-seller, who tricked
if he did not actually defraud him, but who is entitled to the credit
of having recognised his genius, and of having brought forward works
of his more adapted to attract public notice than anything he had
yet done. These were the twelve illustrations to Blair’s _Grave_,
full of Blake’s peculiar genius and at the same time intelligible to
all. They had been executed in 1804 and 1805. Cromek, who afterwards
admitted that they were worth sixty guineas, obtained them for twenty
from the artist, who had intended to publish them himself. It had been
understood that Blake should have engraved them, but Cromek, wisely
from his own point of view, but wrongfully as regarded Blake, intrusted
the task to Schiavonetti. As a frontispiece, they were accompanied
by a portrait of Blake from a drawing by Phillips, also engraved by
Schiavonetti, which we have reproduced. Thanks to Cromek’s judicious
engineering, and the popularity of the poem illustrated, the adventure
proved a considerable success. “It is the only volume with Blake’s
name on the title-page,” says Mr. Gilchrist, “which is not scarce.”
The publication took place in 1808. In the interval Cromek, calling
upon Blake, had seen a pencil sketch of a design for the procession of
Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims. Failing to obtain a finished drawing
from the artist, who resented his previous treatment, he proposed
the subject to Stothard, withholding as apart from all questions of
Stothard’s “frigid and exemplary” character would be most natural
for him to do, all mention of Blake’s drawing. Stothard accepted the
commission; his elaborate oil picture was exhibited in 1807 with great
success, but at the cost of a breach with Blake, who went so far in
his denunciation, not only of Cromek’s underhand dealing but of the
defects which he found in Stothard’s work, that when he afterwards
sought a reconciliation Stothard remained impervious. Determined to
vindicate his superiority, Blake completed, exhibited, and engraved his
own fresco. The exhibition, accompanied by a remarkable “descriptive
catalogue,” to which we shall return--was not the success it might
have been in the hands of the shrewd Cromek. The exhibition room was
watched by Blake’s brother James, whom Crabb Robinson asked whether
he should be allowed to come again free in consideration of having
bought four copies of the descriptive catalogue. “As long as you live,”
answered the overjoyed custodian. The success of the engraving was
proportionate to that of the exhibition; though it might have been
otherwise if the roughness of the original design had been smoothed
down by the deft Schiavonetti. “Blake’s production,” says Mr. Rossetti,
“is as unattractive as Stothard’s is facile; as hard and strong as
Stothard’s is limp; one face in Blake’s design means as much on the
part of the artist, and takes as much scrutiny and turning over of
thought on the part of the spectator, as all the pretty _fantoccini_
and their sprightly little horses in Stothard’s work.” The engraving of
the _Pilgrimage_ in Gilchrist’s biography evinces the justice of this
criticism; though Ellis and Yeats rightly add that Blake has given all
his personages the eyes of visionaries. “A work of wonderful power and
spirit, hard and dry, yet with grace,” says Charles Lamb. The original
fresco was purchased by Elijah’s raven, the ever-ready Butts.
We must now return to the illustrations to Blair’s _Grave_, which are
not only the most popular of Blake’s works, but among his greatest.
He showed in general more vigour in dealing with the conceptions
of another than with his own, the latter imbibing an element of
fanciful grace from the gentle spirit which produced them. Hence _The
Soul Exploring the Recesses of the Grave_, reproduced from _Thel_,
though one of the most poetical of the designs, is one of the least
powerful. His rendering of Blair’s thoughts is marvellously direct and
impressive, whether the passion depicted be joy, as in _The Reunion
of the Soul and the Body_ (given here), or horror, as in _The Death
of the Strong Wicked Man_, or an intermediate shade, as in _The Soul
hovering over the Body_. None of these and few of the series, once
seen, will easily be forgotten. The most famous, and deservedly so,
is the marvellous one, a combination of two designs in _America_ and
_The Gates of Paradise_, where the aged man, impelled by a strong
wind, totters towards the portal of the sepulchre, on the summit of
which sits the rejuvenated spirit, personified by a strong youth,
rejoicing in his deliverance, but dazzled by the as yet unwonted
light. In all these designs the element of seemly, yet slightly
formal and conventional grace which Blake had learned from Stothard,
is very conspicuous. The least successful, as seems to us, is _The
Last Judgment_, where Blake appears as a minor Michael Angelo, but
this work as engraved differs widely from his description of the work
as exhibited. It may well be believed that the modified version was
distinguished by great splendour of colouring.
Other works of this period were two small frescoes exhibited at the
Academy in 1808, _Christ in the Sepulchre_ and _Jacob’s Dream_; the
“ornamental device” engraved (by Cromek) along with the frontispiece
to Malkin’s _Father’s Memoirs of his Child_, a graceful and pathetic
composition; three illustrations to Shakespeare, one of which, the
highly imaginative conception of the appearance of the Ghost to Hamlet,
is engraved in Gilchrist’s biography; _The Babylonian Woman on the
Seven-headed Beast_ (1809) reproduced here; a continuous series of
designs produced for Mr. Butts, to be mentioned more fully hereafter;
and the pictures displayed along with _The Canterbury Pilgrims_ at
its exhibition (1809). We must now devote some attention to Blake’s
appearance as an æsthetic writer in the _Descriptive Catalogue_ he put
forth on this occasion, with which his other principal deliverances on
the subject of art may be advantageously grouped.
[Illustration: _The Reunion of Soul and Body. From Blair’s “Grave,”
illustrated by W. Blake._]
Blake’s _Descriptive Catalogue_ and his _Appeal to the Public_ to judge
between himself and his rivals in the department of engraving, are a
singular mixture of gold and clay. The dignity which characterised
his demeanour in life forsakes him as soon as he takes the pen into
his hand, and he reviles Stothard, Woollett, and others in a
strain inconsistent with self-respect on his own part, even had his
criticism been well founded. As a matter of fact, it seems to have had
no foundation, and assuredly has not affected the reputation of his
antagonists in the smallest degree. At the same time it is impossible
not to be moved by his earnestness. He is evidently contending for
principles of great importance to himself, and through the mist of his
confused and ungrammatical expression we seem to catch glimpses of high
and serious truth. A refreshing contrast is afforded by the passages
devoted to Chaucer, which are truly admirable for their felicitous
insight into the old poet. “For all who have read Blake,” justly say
Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, “Chaucer is something more than the sweet
spinner of rhyming gossip that he seems to most.” Like Ruskin, and
indeed all men of creative power, Blake is on much safer ground when
he extols than when he censures. To much the same period belongs a
remarkable paper on his _Last Judgment_, published by Gilchrist from
his MS. Nothing of his admits us so fully into the sanctuary of his
mind. “_The Last Judgment_,” he begins, “is not fable or allegory, but
vision. Fable, or allegory, is a totally distinct and inferior kind of
poetry. Vision, or imagination, is a representation of what actually
exists, really and unchangeably.” Then follows an extremely graphic and
vivid description of the painting, interspersed with profound remarks,
such as “Man passes on, but states remain for ever; he passes through
them like a traveller, who may as well suppose that the places he has
passed through exist no more as a man may suppose that the states he
has passed through exist no more; everything is eternal.” “I have seen,
when at a distance, multitudes of men in harmony appear like a single
infant.”[6] “In Hell all is self-righteousness; there is no such
thing there as forgiveness of sin. He who does forgive sin is crucified
as an abettor of criminals.” “Angels are happier than men and devils,
because they are not always prying after good and evil in one another,
and eating the tree of knowledge for Satan’s gratification.” “_The Last
Judgment_ is an overwhelming of bad art and science.” Finally, in words
that state his own case as respects his reputed delusions, he says: “I
assert for myself that I do not behold the outward creation, and that
to me it is hindrance and not action. ‘What!’ it will be questioned,
‘when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat
like a guinea?’ Oh! no! no! I see an innumerable company of the
heavenly host, crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!’ I
question not my corporeal eye, any more than I would question a window
concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it.”
[Illustration: _The Babylonian Woman on the Seven-headed Beast. From a
water-colour drawing by W. Blake. British Museum._]
Blake’s conception of the sun may be compared with Dante’s vision of
the angels with the cloud:--
Then lifting up mine eyes, as the tears came,
I saw the Angels, like a rain of manna,
In a long flight flying back heavenward;
Having a little cloud in front of them,
After the which they went, and said, “Hosanna!”
And if they had said more, you should have heard.
An earlier acquaintance with Dante would undoubtedly have exerted a
great influence upon Blake.
Not the least interesting part of Blake’s catalogue is his description
of the pictures accompanying his _Canterbury Pilgrims_, which include
the strange patriotic allegories of _Nelson guiding Leviathan_ and
_Pitt guiding Behemoth_, the latter of which is now in the National
Gallery; _Satan calling up his Legions_; _The Bard_, described by
Rossetti as “a gorgeous piece of colour tone”; an idyll, charming in
conception whatever it may have been in execution, representing goats
nibbling the vine leaves that form the sole drapery of savage maidens;
and Arthur’s battle of Camlan, whence only three--the strongest, the
most beautiful, and the ugliest of champions--escaped with their lives.
This picture Seymour Kirkup thought Blake’s best, and Allan Cunningham
his worst. Kirkup, Mr. Swinburne tells us, remembered to the last
“the fury and splendour of energy there contrasted with the serene
ardour of simply beautiful courage, the violent life of the design,
and the fierce distance of fluctuating battle.” Blake’s estimate of
his powers, as conveyed in his descriptions of his works, certainly
does not err on the side of modesty; perhaps he thought with Goethe
that “Nur die Lumpen sind bescheiden.” It is a more serious matter that
the descriptions are crammed with statements far more significant than
Blake’s visions of a condition of mental disorder, such as that the
Greek marbles are copies of the works of the Asiatic patriarchs; that
no one painted in oil, except by accident, before Vandyke; that ancient
British heroes dwell to this day on Snowdon “in naked simplicity”:
a species of Welsh Mahatmas, as it would appear. It would have been
a judicious emendation if any one had suggested the substitution of
“lying spirits” when the artist spoke of himself as “molested by
blotting and blurring demons.”
More important than these idle extravagances, though extravagant
enough, are the annotations on Reynolds’s discourses, written a few
years afterwards. To read Blake’s abuse of this great artist with
any patience, one must remember that his expressions require to be
translated out of his peculiar dialect into ordinary speech; as when,
for example, he says that Correggio is a most effeminate and cruel
demon, he only means that he is a bad model for artists to follow.
Yet there is a great and serious truth lying at the bottom of Blake’s
declamation, and his protest against the apparent tendency of Reynolds
to inculcate the feasibility of manufacturing genius by study was not
uncalled for. What he did not sufficiently remember was that the number
of artists capable of what Plato calls divine insanity, must always be
very small, and that Reynolds’s precepts may be very serviceable for
the rank and file of the great army. As his denunciation of Reynolds
was partly prompted by personal grievances (not the less real, if
the apparent paradox may be excused, for being imaginary), it is the
more to his honour to find him breaking out into genuine admiration
whenever, in Swedenborg’s phrase, the dry rod blossoms as Reynolds
affirms a truth. It is also pleasant to receive Samuel Palmer’s
assurance that Blake’s splenetic outbreaks in print astonished those
accustomed to his catholicity of criticism in conversation.