William Blake was the first writer of modern times to preach the
indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol. There had been
allegorists and teachers of allegory in plenty, but the symbolic
imagination, or, as Blake preferred to call it, 'vision,' is not allegory,
being 'a representation of what actually exists really and unchangeably.'
A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence,
a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many
possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and
belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the
other an amusement. It is happily no part of my purpose to expound in
detail the relations he believed to exist between symbol and mind, for in
doing so I should come upon not a few doctrines which, though they have
not been difficult to many simple persons, ascetics wrapped in skins,
women who had cast away all common knowledge, peasants dreaming by their
sheepfolds upon the hills, are full of obscurity to the man of modern
culture; but it is necessary to just touch upon these relations, because
in them was the fountain of much of the practice and of all the precept of
his artistic life.
If a man would enter into 'Noah's rainbow,' he has written, and 'make a
friend' of one of 'the images of wonder' which dwell there, and which
always entreat him 'to leave mortal things,' 'then would he arise from the
grave and meet the Lord in the air'; and by this rainbow, this sign of a
covenant granted to him who is with Shem and Japhet, 'painting, poetry and
music,' 'the three powers in man of conversing with Paradise which the
flood "of time and space" did not sweep away,' Blake represented the
shapes of beauty haunting our moments of inspiration: shapes held by most
for the frailest of ephemera, but by him for a people older than the
world, citizens of eternity, appearing and reappearing in the minds of
artists and of poets, creating all we touch and see by casting distorted
images of themselves upon 'the vegetable glass of nature'; and because
beings, none the less symbols, blossoms, as it were, growing from
invisible immortal roots, hands, as it were, pointing the way into some
divine labyrinth. If 'the world of imagination' was 'the world of
eternity,' as this doctrine implied, it was of less importance to know men
and nature than to distinguish the beings and substances of imagination
from those of a more perishable kind, created by the phantasy, in
uninspired moments, out of memory and whim; and this could best be done by
purifying one's mind, as with a flame, in study of the works of the great
masters, who were great because they had been granted by divine favour a
vision of the unfallen world from which others are kept apart by the
flaming sword that turns every way; and by flying from the painters who
studied 'the vegetable glass' for its own sake, and not to discover there
the shadows of imperishable beings and substances, and who entered into
their own minds, not to make the unfallen world a test of all they heard
and saw and felt with the senses, but to cover the naked spirit with 'the
rotten rags of memory' of older sensations. The struggle of the first part
of his life had been to distinguish between these two schools, and to
cleave always to the Florentine, and so to escape the fascination of those
who seemed to him to offer the sleep of nature to a spirit weary with the
labours of inspiration; but it was only after his return to London from
Felpham in 1804 that he finally escaped from 'temptations and
perturbations' which sought to destroy 'the imaginative power' at 'the
hands of Venetian and Flemish Demons.' 'The spirit of Titian'--and one
must always remember that he had only seen poor engravings, and what his
disciple, Palmer, has called 'picture-dealers' Titians'--'was particularly
active in raising doubts concerning the possibility of executing without a
model; and when once he had raised the doubt it became easy for him to
snatch away the vision time after time'; and Blake's imagination
'weakened' and 'darkened' until a 'memory of nature and of the pictures of
various schools possessed his mind, instead of appropriate execution'
flowing from the vision itself. But now he wrote, 'O glory, and O delight!
I have entirely reduced that spectrous fiend to his station'--he had
overcome the merely reasoning and sensual portion of the mind--'whose
annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last twenty years of my
life.... I speak with perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which
has passed upon me. Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him, I have
had twenty; thank God I was not altogether a beast as he was.... Suddenly,
on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures'--this was
a gallery containing pictures by Albert Dürer and by the great
Florentines--'I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my
youth, and which had for exactly twenty years been closed from me, as by a
door and window shutters.... Excuse my enthusiasm, or rather madness, for
I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or
graver in my hand, as I used to be in my youth.'
This letter may have been the expression of a moment's enthusiasm, but was
more probably rooted in one of those intuitions of coming technical power
which every creator feels, and learns to rely upon; for all his greatest
work was done, and the principles of his art were formulated, after this
date. Except a word here and there, his writings hitherto had not dealt
with the principles of art except remotely and by implication; but now he
wrote much upon them, and not in obscure symbolic verse, but in emphatic
prose, and explicit if not very poetical rhyme. In his _Descriptive
Catalogue_, in _The Address to the Public_, in the notes on Sir Joshua
Reynolds, in _The Book of Moonlight_--of which some not very dignified
rhymes alone remain--in beautiful detached passages in _The MS. Book_, he
explained spiritual art, and praised the painters of Florence and their
influence, and cursed all that has come of Venice and Holland. The
limitation of his view was from the very intensity of his vision; he was a
too literal realist of imagination, as others are of nature; and because
he believed that the figures seen by the mind's eye, when exalted by
inspiration, were 'eternal existences,' symbols of divine essences, he
hated every grace of style that might obscure their lineaments. To wrap
them about in reflected lights was to do this, and to dwell over-fondly
upon any softness of hair or flesh was to dwell upon that which was least
permanent and least characteristic, for '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.' Inspiration was to see the permanent and characteristic in all
forms, and if you had it not, you must needs imitate with a languid mind
the things you saw or remembered, and so sink into the sleep of nature
where all is soft and melting. 'Great inventors in all ages knew this.
Protogenes and Apelles knew each other by their line. Raphael and Michael
Angelo and Albert Dürer are known by this and this alone. How do we
distinguish the owl from the beast, the horse from the ox, but by the
bounding outline? How do we distinguish one face or countenance from
another but by the bounding-line and its infinite inflections and
movements? What is it that builds a house and plants a garden but the
definite and determinate? What is it that distinguished honesty from
knavery but the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty in the
actions and intentions? Leave out this line and you leave out life itself;
and all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out
upon it before man or beast can exist.' He even insisted that 'colouring
does not depend upon where the colours are put, but upon where the light
and dark are put, and all depends upon the form or outline'--meaning, I
suppose, that a colour gets its brilliance or its depth from being in
light or in shadow. He does not mean by outline the bounding-line dividing
a form from its background, as one of his commentators has thought, but
the line that divides it from surrounding space, and unless you have an
overmastering sense of this you cannot draw true beauty at all, but only
'the beauty that is appended to folly,' a beauty of mere voluptuous
softness, 'a lamentable accident of the mortal and perishing life,' for
'the beauty proper for sublime art is lineaments, or forms and features
capable of being the receptacles of intellect,' and 'the face or limbs
that alter least from youth to old age are the face and limbs of the
greatest beauty and perfection.' His praise of a severe art had been
beyond price had his age rested a moment to listen, in the midst of its
enthusiasm for Correggio and the later Renaissance, for Bartolozzi and for
Stothard; and yet in his visionary realism, and in his enthusiasm for
what, after all, is perhaps the greatest art, and a necessary part of
every picture that is art at all, he forgot how he who wraps the vision in
lights and shadows, in iridescent or glowing colour, having in the midst
of his labour many little visions of these secondary essences, until form
be half lost in pattern, may compel the canvas or paper to become itself
a symbol of some not indefinite because unsearchable essence; for is not
the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian a talisman as powerfully charged with
intellectual virtue as though it were a jewel-studded door of the city
seen on Patmos?
To cover the imperishable lineaments of beauty with shadows and reflected
lights was to fall into the power of his 'Vala,' the indolent fascination
of nature, the woman divinity who is so often described in 'the prophetic
books' as 'sweet pestilence,' and whose children weave webs to take the
souls of men; but there was yet a more lamentable chance, for nature has
also a 'masculine portion' or 'spectre' which kills instead of merely
hiding, and is continually at war with inspiration. To 'generalize' forms
and shadows, to 'smooth out' spaces and lines in obedience to 'laws of
composition,' and of painting; founded, not upon imagination, which
always thirsts for variety and delights in freedom, but upon reasoning
from sensation which is always seeking to reduce everything to a lifeless
and slavish uniformity; as the popular art of Blake's day had done, and as
he understood Sir Joshua Reynolds to advise, was to fall into 'Entuthon
Benithon,' or 'the Lake of Udan Adan,' or some other of those regions
where the imagination and the flesh are alike dead, that he names by so
many resonant phantastical names. 'General knowledge is remote knowledge,'
he wrote; 'it is in particulars that wisdom consists, and happiness too.
Both in art and life general masses are as much art as a pasteboard man is
human. Every man has eyes, nose and mouth; this every idiot knows. But he
who enters into and discriminates most minutely the manners and
intentions, the characters in all their branches, is the alone wise or
sensible man, and on this discrimination all art is founded.... As poetry
admits not a letter that is insignificant, so painting admits not a grain
of sand or a blade of grass insignificant, much less an insignificant blot
or blur.'
Against another desire of his time, derivative also from what he has
called 'corporeal reason,' the desire for a 'tepid moderation,' for a
lifeless 'sanity in both art and life,' he had protested years before with
a paradoxical violence. 'The roadway of excess leads to the palace of
wisdom,' and we must only 'bring out weight and measure in time of
dearth.' This protest, carried, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds, to
the point of dwelling with pleasure on the thought that 'The _Lives of the
Painters_ say that Raphael died of dissipation,' because dissipation is
better than emotional penury, seemed as important to his old age as to his
youth. He taught it to his disciples, and one finds it in its purely
artistic shape in a diary written by Samuel Palmer, in 1824: 'Excess is
the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark, embalming spice of the finest
art. There are many mediums in the _means_--none, oh, not a jot, not a
shadow of a jot, in the _end_ of great art. In a picture whose merit is to
be excessively brilliant, it can't be too brilliant, but individual tints
may be too brilliant.... We must not begin with medium, but think always
on excess and only use medium to make excess more abundantly excessive.'
These three primary commands, to seek a determinate outline, to avoid a
generalized treatment, and to desire always abundance and exuberance, were
insisted upon with vehement anger, and their opponents called again and
again 'demons' and 'villains,' 'hired' by the wealthy and the idle; but in
private, Palmer has told us, he could find 'sources of delight throughout
the whole range of art,' and was ever ready to praise excellence in any
school, finding, doubtless, among friends, no need for the emphasis of
exaggeration. There is a beautiful passage in 'Jerusalem' in which the
merely mortal part of the mind, 'the spectre,' creates 'pyramids of
pride,' and 'pillars in the deepest hell to reach the heavenly arches,'
and seeks to discover wisdom in 'the spaces between the stars,' not 'in
the stars,' where it is, but the immortal part makes all his labours vain,
and turns his pyramids to 'grains of sand,' his 'pillars' to 'dust on the
fly's wing,' and makes of 'his starry heavens a moth of gold and silver
mocking his anxious grasp.' So when man's desire to rest from spiritual
labour, and his thirst to fill his art with mere sensation and memory,
seem upon the point of triumph, some miracle transforms them to a new
inspiration; and here and there among the pictures born of sensation and
memory is the murmuring of a new ritual, the glimmering of new talismans
and symbols.
It was during and after the writing of these opinions that Blake did the
various series of pictures which have brought him the bulk of his fame. He
had already completed the illustrations to Young's _Night Thoughts_--in
which the great sprawling figures, a little wearisome even with the
luminous colours of the original water-colour, became nearly intolerable
in plain black and white--and almost all the illustrations to 'the
prophetic books,' which have an energy like that of the elements, but are
rather rapid sketches taken while some phantasmic procession swept over
him, than elaborate compositions, and in whose shadowy adventures one
finds not merely, as did Dr. Garth Wilkinson, 'the hells of the ancient
people, the Anakim, the Nephalim, and the Rephaim ... gigantic
petrifactions from which the fires of lust and intense selfish passion
have long dissipated what was animal and vital'; not merely the shadows
cast by the powers who had closed the light from him as 'with a door and
window shutters,' but the shadows of those who gave them battle. He did
now, however, the many designs to Milton, of which I have only seen those
to _Paradise Regained_; the reproductions of those to _Comus_, published,
I think, by Mr. Quaritch; and the three or four to _Paradise Lost_,
engraved by Bell Scott--a series of designs which one good judge considers
his greatest work; the illustrations to Blair's _Grave_, whose gravity and
passion struggle with the mechanical softness and trivial smoothness of
Schiavonetti's engraving; the illustrations to Thornton's _Virgil_, whose
influence is manifest in the work of the little group of
landscape-painters who gathered about him in his old age and delighted to
call him master. The member of the group, whom I have already so often
quoted, has alone praised worthily these illustrations to the first
_eclogue_: 'There is in all such a misty and dreamy glimmer as penetrates
and kindles the inmost soul and gives complete and unreserved delight,
unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They are like all this wonderful
artist's work, the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain, and the glimpse
which all the most holy, studious saints and sages have enjoyed, of the
rest which remains to the people of God.' Now, too, he did the great
series, the crowning work of his life, the illustrations to _The Book of
Job_ and the illustrations to _The Divine Comedy_. Hitherto he had
protested against the mechanical 'dots and lozenges' and 'blots and blurs'
of Woollett and Strange, but had himself used both 'dot and lozenge,'
'blot and blur,' though always in subordination 'to a firm and determinate
outline'; but in Marc Antonio, certain of whose engravings he was shown by
Linnell, he found a style full of delicate lines, a style where all was
living and energetic, strong and subtle. And almost his last words, a
letter written upon his death-bed, attack the 'dots and lozenges' with
even more than usually quaint symbolism, and praise expressive lines. 'I
know that the majority of Englishmen are bound by the indefinite ... a
line is a line in its minutest particulars, straight or crooked. It is
itself not intermeasurable by anything else ... but since the French
Revolution'--since the reign of reason began, that is--'Englishmen are all
intermeasurable with one another, certainly a happy state of agreement in
which I do not agree.' The Dante series occupied the last years of his
life; even when too weak to get out of bed he worked on, propped up with
the great drawing-book before him. He sketched a hundred designs, but left
all incomplete, some very greatly so, and partly engraved seven plates, of
which the 'Francesca and Paolo' is the most finished. It is not, I think,
inferior to any but the finest in the Job, if indeed to them, and shows in
its perfection Blake's mastery over elemental things, the swirl in which
the lost spirits are hurried, 'a watery flame' he would have called it,
the haunted waters and the huddling shapes. In the illustrations of
Purgatory there is a serene beauty, and one finds his Dante and Virgil
climbing among the rough rocks under a cloudy sun, and in their sleep upon
the smooth steps towards the summit, a placid, marmoreal, tender, starry
rapture.
All in this great series are in some measure powerful and moving, and not,
as it is customary to say of the work of Blake, because a flaming
imagination pierces through a cloudy and indecisive technique, but because
they have the only excellence possible in any art, a mastery over artistic
expression. The technique of Blake was imperfect, incomplete, as is the
technique of well-nigh all artists who have striven to bring fires from
remote summits; but where his imagination is perfect and complete, his
technique has a like perfection, a like completeness. He strove to embody
more subtle raptures, more elaborate intuitions than any before him; his
imagination and technique are more broken and strained under a great
burden than the imagination and technique of any other master. 'I am,'
wrote Blake, 'like others, just equal in invention and execution.' And
again, 'No man can improve an original invention; nor can an original
invention exist without execution, organized, delineated and articulated
either by God or man ... I have heard people say, "Give me the ideas; it
is no matter what words you put them into;" and others say, "Give me the
designs; it is no matter for the execution."... Ideas cannot be given but
in their minutely appropriate words, nor can a design be made without its
minutely appropriate execution.' Living in a time when technique and
imagination are continually perfect and complete, because they no longer
strive to bring fire from heaven, we forget how imperfect and incomplete
they were in even the greatest masters, in Botticelli, in Orcagna, and in
Giotto.
The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits are as the more
phantastical errors in their lives; as Coleridge's opium cloud; as
Villiers De L'Isle Adam's candidature for the throne of Greece; as Blake's
anger against causes and purposes he but half understood; as the
flickering madness an Eastern scripture would allow in august dreamers;
for he who half lives in eternity endures a rending of the structures of
the mind, a crucifixion of the intellectual body.