it is the most important event. It is worth while to describe this
quarrel between Blake and Stothard, because it is really a symbolic
quarrel, interesting to the whole world of artists and important to
the whole destiny of art. It is the quarrel between the artist who is
a poet and the artist who is only a painter. In many of his merely
technical designs Blake was a better and bolder artist than Stothard;
still, I should admit, and most people who saw the two pictures would
be ready to admit, that Stothard’s _Canterbury Pilgrims_ as a mere
piece of drawing and painting is better than Blake’s. But this if
anything only makes the whole argument more certain. It is the duel
between the artist who wishes only to be an artist and the artist who
has the higher and harder ambition to be a man--that is, an archangel.
Or, again, it might be put thus: whether an artist ought to be a
universalist or whether he is better as a specialist. Now against the
specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or
the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really
important argument, and that, for some reason or other, is never
offered. People say that specialists are inhuman; but that is unjust.
People say an expert is not a man; but that is unkind and untrue. The
real difficulty about the specialist or expert is much more singular
and fascinating. The trouble with the expert is never that he is not
a man; it is always that wherever he is not an expert he is too much
of an ordinary man. Wherever he is not exceptionally learned he is
quite casually ignorant. This is the great fallacy in the case of what
is called the impartiality of men of science. If scientific men had
no idea beyond their scientific work it might be all very well--that
is to say, all very well for everybody except them. But the truth is
that, beyond their scientific ideas, they have not the absence of
ideas but the presence of the most vulgar and sentimental ideas that
happen to be common to their social clique. If a biologist had no
views on art and morals it might be all very well. The truth is that
a biologist has all the wrong views of art and morals that happen to
be going about in the smart set in his time. If Professor Tyndall had
held no views about politics, he could have done no harm with his views
about evolution. Unfortunately, however, he held a very low order of
political ideas from his sectarian and Orange ancestry; and those
ideas have poisoned evolution to this day. In short, the danger of the
mere technical artist or expert is that of becoming a snob or average
silly man in all things not affecting his peculiar topic of study;
wherever he is not an extraordinary man he is a particularly stupid
ordinary man. The very fact that he has studied machine guns to fight
the French proves that he has not studied the French. Therefore he will
probably say that they eat frogs. The very fact that he has learnt
to paint the light on medieval armour proves that he has not studied
the medieval philosophy. Therefore he will probably suppose that
medieval barons did nothing but order vassals into the dungeons beneath
the castle moat. Now all through the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries art, that is, the art of painting, suffered terribly from
this conventional and uncultured quality in the working artist. People
talk about something pedantic in the knowledge of the expert; but what
ruins mankind is the ignorance of the expert. In the period of which we
speak the experts in painting were bursting with this ignorance. The
early essays of Thackeray are full of the complaint, that the whole
trouble with painters was that they only knew how to paint. If they had
painted unimportant or contemptible subjects, all would have been well;
if they had painted the nearest donkey or lamp-post no one would have
complained. But exactly because they were experts they fell into the
mere snobbish sentimentalism of their times; they insisted on painting
all the things they had read about in the cheapest history books and
the most maudlin novels. As Thackeray has immortally described in the
case of Mr Gandish, they painted Boadishia and declared that they
had discovered “in their researches into ’istry” the story of King
Alfred and the Cakes. In other words, the expert does not escape his
age; he only lays himself open to the meanest and most obvious of the
influences of his age. The specialist does not avoid having prejudices;
he only succeeds in specialising in the most passing and illiterate
prejudices.
Of all this type of technical ignorance Stothard is absolutely typical.
He was an admirable instance of the highly cultivated and utterly
ignorant man. He had spent his life in making lines swerve smoothly and
shadows creep exactly into their right place; he had never had any time
to understand the things that he was drawing except by their basest and
most conventional connotation. Somebody suggested that he should draw
some medieval pilgrims--that is, some vigorous types in the heyday of
European civilisation in the act of accepting the European religion.
But he who alone could draw them right was especially likely to see
them wrong. He had learnt, like a modern, the truth from newspapers,
because he had no time to read even encyclopedias. He had learnt how
to paint armour and armorial bearings; it was too much to expect him
to understand them. He had learnt to draw a horse; it was too late to
ask him to ride one. His whole business was somehow or other to make
pictures; and therefore when he looked at Chaucer, he could see nothing
but the picturesque.
Against this sort of sound technical artist, another type of artist has
been eternally offered; this was the type of Blake. It was also the
type of Michael Angelo; it was the type of Leonardo da Vinci; it was
the type of several French mystics, and in our own country and recent
period, of Rossetti. Blake, as a painter among other things, belongs
to that small group of painters who did something else besides paint.
But this is indeed a very inadequate way of stating the matter. The
fuller and fairer way is this: that Blake was one of those few painters
who understood his subject as well as his picture. I have already
said that I think Stothard’s picture of the _Canterbury Pilgrims_ in
a purely technical sense better than his. Indeed, there is nothing
to be said against Stothard’s picture of the _Canterbury Pilgrims_,
except that it is not a picture of the _Canterbury Pilgrims_. Blake
(to summarise the whole matter as simply as it can be summarised) was
in the tradition of the best and most educated ideas about Chaucer;
Stothard was the inheritor of the most fashionable ideas and the worst.
The whole incident cannot be without its moral and effect for all
discussions about the morality or unmorality of art. If art could be
unmoral it might be all very well. But the truth is that unless art is
moral, art is not only immoral, but immoral in the most commonplace,
slangy, and prosaic way. In the future, the fastidious artists who
refuse to be anything but artists will go down to history as the
embodiment of all the vulgarities and banalities of their time. People
will point to a picture by Mr Sargent or Mr Shannon and say, “See, that
man had caught all the most middle class cant of the early twentieth
century.”
[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE TO “AMERICA”]
We can now recur, however, to the general relations of Blake with his
later patron. In a phrase of singular unconscious humour Mr Cromek
accused Blake of “a want of common politeness.” Common politeness
certainly can hardly be said to have been Blake’s strong point. But
Cromek’s politeness was certainly an uncommon sort of politeness.
One is tempted to be thankful that it is not a common sort. Cromek’s
notion of common politeness was to give the artist a guinea a drawing
on the understanding that he should get some more for engraving them,
and then give the engraving to somebody else who cost him next to
nothing. Blake, as we have said, resented this startling simplicity
of swindling. Blake was in such matters a singular mixture of madness
and shrewdness in the judgment of such things. He was the kind of man
whom a publisher found at one moment more vague and viewless than
any poet, and at the next moment more prompt and rapacious than any
literary agent. He was sometimes above his commercial enemy, sometimes
below him; but he never was on his level; one never knew where he was.
Cromek’s letter is a human document of extraordinary sincerity and
interest. The Yorkshire publisher positively breaks for once in his
life into a kind of poetry. He describes Blake as being “a combination
of the serpent and the dove.” He did not quite realise, perhaps, that
according to the New Testament he was paying Blake a compliment. But
the truth is, I fancy, that the painter and poet had been one too many
for the publisher. I think that on any occasion Cromek would have
willingly forgiven Blake for showing the harmlessness of the dove. I
fancy that on one occasion Blake must have shown the wisdom of the
serpent.
From the mere slavery of this sweater Blake was probably delivered by
the help of the last and most human of his patrons, a young man named
John Linnell, a landscape painter and a friend of the great Mulready.
It is extraordinary to think that he was young enough to die in 1882;
and that a man who had read in the Prophetic Books the last crusades
of Blake may have lived to read in the newspapers some of the last
crusades of Gladstone. This man Linnell covers the last years of Blake
as with an ambulance tent in the wilderness. Blake never had any ugly
relations with Linnell, just as he had never had any with Butts. His
quarrels had wearied many friends; but by this time I think he was too
weary even to quarrel. On Linnell’s commission he began a system of
illustrations to Dante; but I think that no one expected him to live to
finish it.
* * * * *
HIS last sickness fell upon him very slowly, and he does not
seem to have taken much notice of it. He continued perpetually his
pictorial designs; and as long as they were growing stronger he seems
to have cared very little for the fact that he was growing weaker
himself. One of the last designs he made was one of the strongest
he ever made--the tremendous image of the Almighty bending forward,
foreshortened in a colossal perspective, to trace out the heavens with
a compass. Nowhere else has he so well expressed his primary theistic
ideas--that God, though infinitely gigantic, should be as solid as
a giant. He had often drawn men from the life; not unfrequently he
had drawn his dead men from the life. Here, according to his own
conceptions, he may be said to have drawn God from the life. When he
had finished the portrait (which he made sitting up in his sick-bed)
he called out cheerfully, “What shall I draw after that?” Doubtless
he racked his brain for some superlative spirit or archangel which
would not be a mere bathos after the other. His rolling eyes (those
round lustrous eyes which one can always see roll in his painted
portraits) fell on the old frail and somewhat ugly woman who had been
his companion so long, and he called out, “Catherine, you have been
an angel to me; I will draw you next.” Throwing aside the sketch of
God measuring the universe, he began industriously to draw a portrait
of his wife, a portrait which is unfortunately lost, but which must
have substantially resembled the remarkable sketch which a friend drew
some months afterwards; the portrait of a woman at once plain and
distinguished, with a face that is supremely humorous and at once harsh
and kind. Long before that portrait was drawn, long before those months
had elapsed, William Blake was dead.
[Illustration: PRELUDIUM (1793)]
Whatever be the explanation, it is quite certain that Blake had more
positive joy on his death-bed than any other of the sons of Adam. One
has heard of men singing hymns on their death-beds, in low plaintive
voices. Blake was not at all like that on his death-bed: the room
shook with his singing. All his songs were in praise of God, and
apparently new: all his songs were songs of innocence. Every now and
then he would stop and cry out to his wife, “Not mine! Not mine!”
in a sort of ecstatic explanation. He truly seemed to wait for the
opening of the door of death as a child waits for the opening of the
cupboard on his birthday. He genuinely and solemnly seemed to hear
the hoofs of the horses of death as a baby hears on Christmas eve the
reindeer-hooves of Santa Claus. He was in his last moments in that
wonderful world of whiteness in which white is still a colour. He would
have clapped his hands at a white snowflake and sung as at the white
wings of an angel at the moment when he himself turned suddenly white
with death.
* * * * *
AND NOW, after a due pause, someone will ask and we must
answer a popular question which, like many popular questions, is really
a somewhat deep and subtle one. To put the matter quite simply, as the
popular instinct would put it, “Was William Blake mad?” It is easy
enough to say, of course, in the non-committal modern manner that it
all depends on how you define madness. If you mean it in its practical
or legal sense (which is perhaps the most really useful sense of all),
if you mean was William Blake unfit to look after himself, unable to
exercise civic functions or to administer property, then certainly the
answer is “No.” Blake was a citizen, and capable of being a very good
citizen. Blake, so far from being incapable of managing property, was
capable (in so far as he chose) of collecting a great deal of it. His
conduct was generally business-like; and when it was unbusiness-like
it was not through any subhuman imbecility or superhuman abstraction,
but generally through an unmixed exhibition of very human bad temper.
Again, if when we say “Was Blake mad?” we mean was he fundamentally
morbid, was his soul cut off from the universe and merely feeding on
itself, then again the answer is emphatically “No.” There was nothing
defective about Blake; he was in contact with all the songs and smells
of the universe, and he was entirely guiltless of that one evil element
which is almost universal in the character of the morbidly insane--I
mean secrecy. Yet again, if we mean by madness anything inconsistent
or unreasonable, then Blake was not mad. Blake was one of the most
consistent men that ever lived, both in theory and practice. Blake may
have been quite wrong, but he was not in the least unreasonable. He was
quite as calm and scientific as Herbert Spencer on the basis of his own
theory of things. He was vain to the last degree; but it was the gay
and gusty vanity of a child, not the imprisoned pride of a maniac. In
all these aspects we can say with confidence that the man was not at
least obviously mad or completely mad. But if we ask whether there was
not some madness about him, whether his naturally just mind was not
subject to some kind of disturbing influence which was not essential to
itself, then we ask a very different question, and require, unless I am
mistaken, a very different answer.
When all Philistine mistakes are set aside, when all mystical ideas
are appreciated, there is a real sense in which Blake was mad. It
is a practical and certain sense, exactly like the sense in which
he was not mad. In fact, in almost every case of his character and
extraordinary career we can safely offer this proposition, that if
there was something wrong with it, it was wrong even from his own best
standpoint. People talk of appealing from Philip drunk to Philip sober;
it is easy to appeal from Blake mad to Blake sane.
When Blake lived at Felpham angels appear to have been as native to
the Sussex trees as birds. Hebrew patriarchs walked on the Sussex
Downs as easily as if they were in the desert. Some people will be
quite satisfied with saying that the mere solemn attestation of such
miracles marks a man as a madman or a liar. But that is a short cut of
sceptical dogmatism which is not far removed from impudence. Surely we
cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a
bang, turning the key of the mad-house on all the mystics of history.
To call a man mad because he has seen ghosts is in a literal sense
religious persecution. It is denying him his full dignity as a citizen
because he cannot be fitted into your theory of the cosmos. It is
disfranchising him because of his religion. It is just as intolerant
to tell an old woman that she cannot be a witch as to tell her that
she must be a witch. In both cases you are setting your own theory of
things inexorably against the sincerity or sanity of human testimony.
Such dogmatism at least must be quite as impossible to anyone calling
himself an agnostic as to anyone calling himself a spiritualist. You
cannot take the region called the unknown and calmly say that though
you know nothing about it, you know that all its gates are locked. You
cannot say, “This island is not discovered yet; but I am sure that
it has a wall of cliffs all round it and no harbour.” That was the
whole fallacy of Herbert Spencer and Huxley when they talked about the
unknowable instead of about the unknown. An agnostic like Huxley must
concede the possibility of a gnostic like Blake. We do not know enough
about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.
If, then, people call Blake mad merely for seeing ghosts and angels,
we shall venture to dismiss them as highly respectable but very
bigoted people. But then, again, there is another line along which the
same swift assumption can be made. While he was at Felpham Blake’s
eccentricity broke out on another side. A quality that can frankly
be called indecency appeared in his pictures, his opinions, and to
some extent in his conduct. But it was an idealistic indecency. Blake’s
mistake was not so much that he aimed at sin as that he aimed at an
impossible and inhuman sinlessness. It is said that he proposed to his
wife that they should live naked in their back garden like Adam and
Eve. If the husband ever really proposed this, the wife succeeded in
averting it. But in his verse and prose, particularly in some of the
Prophetic Books, he began to talk very wildly. However far he really
meant to go against common morality, he certainly meant (like Walt
Whitman) to go the whole way against common decency. He professed
to regard the veiling of the most central of human relations as the
unnatural cloaking of a natural work. He was never at a loss for an
effective phrase; and in one of his poems on this topic he says finely
if fallaciously--
“Does the sower sow by night
Or the ploughman in darkness plough?”
[Illustration: A PROPHECY (1793)]
But his speculations went past decorum and at least touched the idea
of primary law. In some parts of the Prophetic Books (written in the
period which may fairly be called a paroxysm) he really seems to be
preaching the idea that sin is sometimes a good thing because it leads
to forgiveness. I cannot think this idea does much credit to Blake’s
power of logic, which was generally good. The very fact of forgiveness
implies that what led up to it was evil. But though the position is
hardly rational, it is quite unfair to say that it is insane. It is no
sillier or more untenable than a hundred sophistries that one may hear
at every tea-table or read in every magazine. A little while ago the
family of a young lady attempted to shut her up in an asylum because
she believed in Free Love. This atrocious injustice was stopped; but
many people wrote to the papers to say that marriage was a very fine
thing--as indeed it is. Of course the answer was simple: that if
everyone with silly opinions were locked up in an asylum, the asylums
of the twentieth century would have to be somewhat unduly enlarged. The
same common-sense applies to the case of Blake. That he did maintain
some monstrous propositions proves that he was not always right,
that he had even a fine faculty for being exceedingly wrong. But it
does not prove that he was a madman or anything remotely resembling
one. Nor is there any reason to suppose that he was carried into any
practice inconsistent with his strong domestic affections. Indeed, I
think that much of Blake’s anarchy is connected with his innocence. I
have noticed the combination more than once, especially in men of Irish
blood like Blake. Heavy, full-blooded men feel the need of bonds and
are glad to bind themselves. But the chaste are often lawless. They
are theoretically reckless, because they are practically pure. Thus
Ireland, while it is the island of rebels is also the island of saints,
and might be called the island of virgins.
* * * * *
BUT when we have reached this point--that this ugly element in
Blake was an intrusion of Blake’s mere theory of things--we have come,
I think, very close to the true principle to be pursued in estimating
his madness or his sanity. Blake the mere poet, would have been decent
and respectable. It was Blake the logician who was forced to be almost
blackguardly. In other words, Blake was not mad; for such part of him
as was mad was not Blake. It was an alien influence, and in a sense
even an accidental one; in an extreme sense it might even be called
antagonist. Properly to appreciate what this influence was, we must see
the man’s artistic character as a whole and notice what are its biggest
forces and its biggest defects when taken in the bulk--in the whole
mass of his poetry, his pictures, his criticism and his conversation.
Blake’s position can be summed up as a sufficiently simple problem.
Blake could do so many things. Why is it that he could do none of them
quite right?
Blake was not a frail or fairy-like sort of person; he had not the
light unity, the capering completeness of the entirely irresponsible
man. He had not the independence, one might almost say the omnipotence,
that comes from being hopelessly weak. There was nothing in him of Mr
Skimpole; he was not a puff of silver thistledown. He was not a reed
shaken in the wind in Jordan. He was rather an oak rooted in England,
but an oak half killed by the ivy. The interesting question of
spiritual botany is--What was the ivy that half killed him? Originally
his intellect was not only strong but strongly rational--one might
almost say strongly sceptical. There never was a man of whom it was
less true to say (as has been said) that he was a light sensitive
lyrist, a mere piper of pretty songs for children. His mind was like
a ruined Roman arch; it has been broken by barbarians; but what there
is of it is Roman. So it was with William Blake’s reason; it had
been broken (or cracked) by something; but what there was of it was
reasonable. In his art criticism he never said anything that was not
strictly consistent with his first principles. In his controversies,
in the many matters in which he argued angrily or venomously, he never
lost the thread of the argument. Like every great mystic he was also a
great rationalist. Read Blake’s attack upon Stothard’s picture of the
_Canterbury Pilgrims_, and you will see that he could not only write
a quite sensible piece of criticism, but even a quite slashing piece
of journalism. By nature one almost feels that he might have done
anything; have conducted campaigns like Napoleon or studied the stars
like Newton. But something, when all is said and done, had eaten away
whole parts of that powerful brain, leaving parts of it standing like
great Greek pillars in a desert. What was this thing?
[Illustration: A FEMALE DREAM (1793)]
* * * * *
MADNESS is not an anarchy. Madness is a bondage: a
contraction. I will not call Blake mad because of anything he would
say. But I will call him mad in so far as there was anything he _must_
say. Now, there are notes of this tyranny in Blake. It was not like the
actual disease of the mind that makes a man believe he is a cat or a
dog; it was more like the disease of the nerves, which makes a man say
“dog” when he means “cat.” One mental jump or jerk of this nature may
be especially remarked in Blake. He had in his poetry one very peculiar
habit, a habit which cannot be considered quite sane. It was the habit
of being haunted, one may say hag-ridden by a fixed phrase, which gets
itself written in ten separate poems on quite different subjects, when
it had no apparent connection with any of them. The amusing thing is
that the omnipresent piece of poetry is generally the one piece that is
quite incomprehensible. The verse that Blake’s readers can understand
least seems always to be the verse that Blake likes best. I give an
ordinary instance, if anything connected with Blake can be called
ordinary.
The harmless Hayley, who was a fool, but a gentleman and a poet (a
country gentleman and a very minor poet), provoked Blake’s indignation
by giving him commissions for miniatures when he wanted to do something
else, probably frescoes as big as the house. Blake wrote the epigram--
“If Hayley knows the thing you cannot do,
That is the very thing he’ll set you to.”
And then, feeling that there was a lack of colour and warmth in the
portrait, he lightly added, for no reason in particular, the lines--
“And when he could not act upon my wife,
Hired a villain to bereave my life.”