William Blake: A Study of His Life and Art Work

THE NATIVITY

Tempera painting on copper. This reproduction is taken from
W. B. Scott’s etching from the original picture. It is undated

The technique is superior to most of Blake’s work in tempera, and is adequate, the rendering of light in the picture containing qualities nothing short of marvellous.

It was impossible to look at this “Nativity” without being moved. The event appeared to Blake entirely supernatural in effect as in cause. He seems to have attached no historical value to it, nor indeed to any of his Biblical subjects. They were to him merely symbols of eternal ideas, projected by the Holy Ghost into the world for its enlightenment, and of these ideas Christ was the chiefest; but every idea he thought capable of manifesting itself equally in diverse symbols. His mind had some of the contemplative and impersonal characteristics of the oriental, and by its original processes he was enabled to appreciate the true inwardness of Christianity as the western mind cannot do. Christianity was born in the East like the Star of its Epiphany, and has come to maturity in the West, but its most mystical secrets will be hid from us until it has returned again and bathed in the immemorial symbolism and true occultism of the East.

Being so unfortunate as not to obtain leave from the “Nativity’s” present owner to reproduce it in these pages, I have been obliged to take our illustration from the etching which William Bell Scott made after the original, and for which permission was courteously granted me by Messrs. Chatto and Windus. It is but the shadow of a shadow, for Bell Scott’s etching is only that, but it will serve to give some idea of the solemn beauty of the tempera painting.

Now let me recall another purely imaginative composition.

“The River of Life,” a water-colour picture, reminded me in its transparence and delicate brilliance of Blake’s earlier printed books.

It is a rhapsody of Heaven. The River of Life which flows through the City of God, and in which all new-born souls are dipped, is a mighty stream flowing between green banks, on which are situated the gleaming houses of the city. Groups of happy souls wander beside the clear pale waters, and with his back towards us the Saviour with two children (new-born souls) in either hand swims towards the river’s source, which is the Throne of God, typified by the sun. In its rays may be descried adoring angels, reminding us of Blake’s ardent words, which I have already quoted, “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!’”

Two angels—angels of the presence—remain suspended in flight above the stream on either side, playing on pipes, while a beautiful strong woman, clad in lemon-yellow robe, swoops down like a bird just above the surface of the stream with lithe strenuous body bent to meet the wind. She is a delicious creation, satisfying the aesthetic sense with completeness. The disposition of the figures in this picture, the decorative arrangement of the overhanging fruit-laden branches of the Tree of Life, the clear treble notes of colour, made one think of the rare and iridescent art of Japan. Blake’s mood when he painted “The River of Life” must have attained to a high and heavenly unity and joy.

“The Bard” is a picture of quite another order, and pitched in a very different key. Here is a twilight world of intellectual notions and poetic motives wafted hither and thither on the blast of the Bard’s frenzy. The Bard himself, a commanding figure, stands on a shelf of rock surveying the vortex, while he smites music from his harp. Below, a king and queen and their horses are overwhelmed in a Stygian stream. All is dark, with a strange gleam and shimmer here and there, like jewels and burnished silver seen through a purple veil. This was one of the pictures that appeared in Blake’s own exhibition in his brother’s shop, and his description in the celebrated catalogue is well worth quotation:

On a rock whose haughty brow
Frown’d o’er old Conway’s foaming flood,
Robed in sable garb of evil
With haggard eyes the Poet stood:
Loose his beard and hoary hair
Streamed like a meteor of the troubled air.
Weave the warp and weave the woof,
The winding-sheet of Edward’s race.

Thus the poet Gray; and Blake commented, “Weaving the winding-sheet of Edward’s race by means of sounds of spiritual music, and its accompanying expressions of spiritual speech, is a bold and daring and most masterly conception that the public have embraced and approved with avidity.

“Poetry consists in these conceptions, and shall painting be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile representations of merely mortal and perishing substances, and not be as poetry and music are, elevated to its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception? No, it shall not be so! Painting as well as poetry and music exists and exults in immortal thoughts.

“The connoisseurs and artists who have made objections to Mr. Blake’s mode of representing spirits with real bodies would do well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, the Apollo, which they admire in Greek statues are all of them representations of spiritual existences—of gods immortal—to the ordinary perishing organ of sight; and yet they are embodied and organized in solid marble. Mr. Blake requires the same latitude and all is well. King Edward and Queen Eleanor are prostrated with their horses at the foot of the rock on which the Bard stands—prostrated by the terrors of his harp, on the margin of the river Conway, whose waves bear up a corpse of a slaughtered bard at the foot of the rock. The armies of Edward are seen winding among the mountains.

He wound with toilsome march his long array!

“Mortimer and Gloucester lie spellbound behind the King. The execution of this picture is also in water-colours or fresco,” he added finally. It was probably painted in water-colours with white of egg or glue on a medium of gesso. The gloomy glory of its colour was a thing to ponder on. Like the dim silvery splendour of a pearl seen in the twilight of deep-sea waters, so does it glint and gleam. In no picture has Blake brought home to us more directly the visible population of the world of his mind—its power and grandeur and mystery—than in the complex imagery of this great work.

The picture was probably painted in 1785, and was exhibited at the Royal Academy. It afterwards appeared again at Blake’s own exhibition in 1809. It is a sad thing that he so seldom dated the pictures which he executed for his staunch friend and supporter Mr. Butts. The pictures in the Exhibition, with a very few exceptions, were originally done for him, but few of them could have an authentic date affixed to them. All Blake’s original methods of working were here represented by splendid examples.

First there are the tempera pictures, or “frescoes,” as he termed them. He would never paint in oil-colour, because he thought and wrote that “oil, being a body itself, will drink, or absorb very little colour, and changing yellow, and at length brown, destroys every colour it is mixed with, especially every delicate colour. It turns every permanent white to a yellow or brown putty, and has compelled the use of that destroyer of colour, white lead, which when its protecting oil is evaporated will become lead again,” and he hotly affirmed the opinion that “oil became a fetter to genius and a dungeon to art.” This being so, he evolved a method of painting in water-colours, stiffened with white of egg or dilute glue, on a ground prepared with whiting or plaster and laid on copper or board.

When the “fresco” was finished he varnished it with a preparation of glue. In his old age Linnell lent him a copy of Cennino Cennini’s “Trattato della pittura,” and he was delighted to find that the method he had always employed in his tempera pictures was very like that of the old sixteenth-century painter.

Occasionally his pictures acquired the mellow harmony, the indescribable deep, yet faded tenderness of the old masters’ tempera pictures, as for instance that entitled “Bathsheba at the Bath seen by David.” There is nothing supernatural or weird here, save the flowers which grow around the pool, and they are like the strange mysterious blooms that appear to one in dreams. Bathsheba, nude and beautiful, with her two childish attendants, one on either side, somehow recalls the work of Masaccio and Filippino Lippi in the Chapel of the Carmine at Florence, perhaps because it is so nobly naturalistic in treatment.

Another beautiful tempera is “The Flight into Egypt.” It was painted in 1790—the year of the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Holman Hunt developed in his magnificent picture of the same subject a poetic motive first used by Blake. The great may take from the great without shame. The angelic spirits of the martyred Innocents flutter around the Mother and Child, while the ass on which they ride is followed by angels with great gloomy wings, like night made visible and beneficent. The Virgin’s little delicate face looks wistfully from the dim picture like one of Gentile da Fabbriano’s small jewel-clear miniatures, and a crescent moon shines vaguely silver through the darkness. This is a picture of high and tender imaginative quality, more in the spirit of old masters like Fra Angelico, it must be admitted, than characteristically Blakean in expression.

There are three other methods used by Blake, of which one—the printed or engraved outline, filled in with hand-wrought water-colour—is so familiar to us from the examples studied at the British Museum, that we need not linger to describe it again. At the British Museum we have also seen many of Blake’s “colour-printed” designs, but not any nearly as fine as the two pictures entitled “Hecate” and “Lamech and his two Wives” of the exhibition. The process, according to the younger Tatham’s account, was as follows: “Blake when he wanted to make his prints in oil, took a common thick millboard and drew, in some strong ink or colour, his designs upon it strong and thick. He then painted upon that in such oil colours and on such a state of fusion that they would blur well. He painted roughly and quickly, so that no colour would have time to dry. He then took a print of that on paper, and this impression he coloured up in water-colours, repainting his outline on the millboard when he wanted to take another impression; and each having a sort of accidental look, he could branch out so as to make each one different. The accidental look they had was very enticing.”

The depth and grandeur of tone obtained in “Hecate” are unique, and, united to the sombre majesty of the composition, form a most satisfying work to eye and intellect. Looking closely at the technique, the colour is seen to be collected in little pin-head dots all over the ground, in a manner that clearly points to its having been impressed while yet wet, with some carefully roughened surface, but just what means were used to obtain this effect must always remain a mystery.

THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT

Tempera painting. Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. W. Graham Robertson

The finest example of the process is, however, “Lamech and his two Wives,” in which the tragic nature of the subject is deepened by the colour-printing, here most successfully handled.

Pure water-colour, sometimes delicately outlined with the pen, was Blake’s fourth mode of working, and the exhibition had a goodly array of this class of work. We have mentioned “The River of Life,” perhaps the most beautiful example extant, but several others, noticeably “Oberon, Titania, and Puck with fairies dancing” and “The Wise and Foolish Virgins,” were very lovely. The first represents Blake in a rare mood, his mysticism in abeyance, and his temper one of aesthetic abandon. We are so little accustomed to think of him as an artist of varied and wide appeal, that this rhythmic dance, which acted on the spectator like music, surprised. It has in it the delirious joy of elemental things. The fairies’ delicate muslins are fetched out like mist in the greenwood; butterflies’ wings and petals of flower adorn their dainty heads. Puck has wings on the back of his hands (a new and delightful idea this!), and the rapid graceful movements of the dance do not seem to be arrested by their embodiment in a painting. Though this phase of Blake is distinctly novel, even strange to us, it is entirely delightful. There is no stress, no repelling yet attractive mystery as in the “Hecate” here. It is just pure “joie de vivre.”

“The Wise and Foolish Virgins” is much more characteristic of him. The wise virgins in the foreground are ranged in a row, their lamps by their sides. Their bodies and faces are smitten with a cold unearthly white light, presumably, but not obviously, thrown by the lamps. The modelling of their forms is most careful. Behind them, issuing from a small hut, the foolish virgins, in wild confusion, implore oil for their lamps. The landscape in which the scene is laid is anything but Eastern. Dark, intensely green downs undulate and swell to meet the sky. A lurid light defines the horizon, and in the swathed masses of gray cloud above, an angel blowing a trump (suggesting a Last Judgement) wings his fateful way. It may easily be urged (and the prosaic mind which only rejoices in the precise and neat imitation of what it can see is sure to exclaim) that here is a defiance of all artistic rules, a pitiable inability to copy the most ordinary natural phenomena, proclaiming Blake a wilful “poseur” or an unobservant madman. “Here,” they exclaim, “is little atmosphere, no distance, no attempt at truth of tone, and no comprehensible rendering of the light.”

Blake rendered it as he did because he chose; because his masterly sense of style (that is, the treatment best suited to the representation of the idea, his subjective vision) required it to be so painted and thus only, because he considered himself free to take from Nature just what he needed for his purpose, and never felt himself obliged to make an entire and wholly truthful representation of her. To emphasize the light on the figures of the foreground, he overcharged the colour in the sky and the downs behind, and by this treatment obtained an effect productive of strange and solemn emotion in the beholder.

Nature was to him shadow or reminiscence only, and here he has defiantly subordinated the truth of the landscape to the spiritual truth of his subject.

OBERON, TITANIA AND PUCK WITH FAIRIES DANCING

Water-colour. Undated. Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. A. A. de Pass

The most significant types were revealed in his soul, and owned a relationship to the visible creation only in so far as this relationship was necessary to render his art-work intelligible to the world. His decorative sense approved of the white virgins set so statue-pale against the dark green of the downs. The suddenness of the contrast, the livid and supernatural effect, were part of his deliberate intention. So does the white fire of an intense spiritual alertness contrast with the opaque darkness of natural physical life. For this scene, taken from the parable of Jesus, is only another of those types which Blake regarded in so wide and catholic a sense, and which by his treatment he has lifted above all merely historical association into a realm of pure spiritual symbolism.

The pleasure derived from the examination of his collected pictures is rather that of a profound intellectual excitement than a purely aesthetic satisfaction. The climax of this excitement is reached before the two pictures called, respectively, “Elohim creating Adam” and “Satan triumphing over Eve.” How different is Blake’s conception of the former subject to Michael Angelo’s, and yet, widely different as they are, somehow we know them to be related. Elohim, in the vortex of the winds, lifts a face pale with awe and power, as he calls into being from the clay below him a figure scarcely human yet, and stamped with the stamp of terrestrial creeping mortality. A snake binds one leg, and there is no other suggestion of life about this half-developed repelling organism. But presently Elohim will breathe into the clay, and then this thing (which somehow recalls Mrs. Shelley’s “Frankenstein” to my shuddering fancy!) will arise and live.

Michael Angelo chose the right moment, the body made beautiful but languid, and God’s finger applied like a magnet to the limp hand through which the fiery currents of life are just beginning to flow in thrilling gushes into the perfect body. But Blake, with a more curious care for the earlier part of the process of creation, a more meditative and less dramatic sense, invites us to dwell on, not the final perfect beauty of created man, but his partial evolution from the dark earth to which he will one day return. The accidental character of the body of man, the universal nature of the Spirit of God, without whose inspiration there is no beauty nor comeliness—these are thoughts on which he mused while painting this great and terrible picture.

The death-weary figure of Eve in the companion picture was a haunting thing. Overcome by the serpent’s wiles, Eve lies prostrate in the tightening coils, and the cruel flat head is pressed upon the white breast, whose power to resist is quite gone. The struggle is over, the delicate body is relaxed, the little head has fallen back piteously, and the eyes are closed, for no blue heavens smile comfort down on her who lies so low in the dust. Satan in clouds of terror triumphs above her, and her overthrow is complete.

A little sketch in pencil, ink and wash, called “Satan, Sin and Death,” has a human figure (strangely enough that of Satan), finely posed, and drawn with infinite power. The vigorous torso, slender hips, fine and muscular legs, are classic in their heroic proportions, but it must be admitted that the inspiration of the sketch as a whole is below Blake’s level.

I must notice a very fine and highly-finished water-colour, called “The Judgment of Paris.” The subject was a congenial one to Blake, who entertained the most original notions about classic legend and literature. He wrote in the Descriptive Catalogue:

“The Artist (Blake) having been taken in vision into the ancient republics, monarchies, and patriachates of Asia, has seen those wonderful originals called in the sacred scriptures the Cherubim, which were sculptured and painted on walls of temples, towers, cities, palaces, and erected in the highly-cultivated States of Egypt, Moab, Eden, Arum among the rivers of Paradise—being the originals from which the Greeks and Hetruvians copied Hercules Farnese, Venus of Medicis, Apollo Belvedere, and all the grand works of ancient art....

“No man can believe that either Homer’s Mythology or Ovid’s was the production of Greece or Latium; neither will anyone believe that the Greek statues, as they are called, were the invention of Greek artists; perhaps the Torso is the only original work remaining, all the rest being evidently copies, though fine ones, from the greater works of the Asiatic patriarchs. The Greek muses are daughters of Mnemosyne or Memory, and not of Inspiration or Imagination, therefore not authors of such sublime conceptions.”

In this ingenious way did Blake seek to justify his admiration for the old pagan art, the old pagan mythology. They were recollections of symbols and ideas given by God to the ancient patriarchs of the Old Testament, and from them had filtered through to the civilization of Greece and Rome. To Blake it all amounted to this, “God hath not left Himself without witnesses,” and he vehemently protested against any race, age, or religion arrogating to itself the authorship of ideas which should only be ascribed to God.

So that the “Judgment of Paris” is treated like the biblical subjects, as a spiritual parable. When the apple of desire is given to mere sensual beauty instead of to moral or intellectual beauty, Love, the winged spirit, flies away, and Discord, the malformed demon, arrives. The three goddesses’ forms, delicate as reeds, pure as Blake’s austere imagination, and modelled with tender care for their lovely limbs, hands and faces, awaken in us a great wonder at the technique he could command when he chose. One of the tenderest and most beautiful of Blake’s slightly tinted drawings, “The Vision of Queen Katherine”—we are enabled to reproduce through the kindness of its present owner, Sir Charles Dilke. The composition is of exceeding harmony, the delicate outlines being suave, fluent, gracious, to a singular degree. Sweetness and tenderness are its predominant characteristics, and it is without a rival among Blake’s works in this respect, saving perhaps for the picture, “And when they had sung an hymn they ascended unto the Mount of Olives.”

Katherine, sick unto death, has been soothed to sleep by music:

Cause the musicians play me that sad note
I named my knell, whilst I sit meditating
On that celestial harmony I go to,

she had asked. Griffith and Patience sit beside her, unconscious of the vision that is blessing her sleep. Katherine, beautiful and crowned, “makes in her sleep signs of rejoicing, and holdeth up her hands to heaven.” Angels of diminutive but exquisite forms float in circles above her, and two are holding a crown of laurels over her head. Many pictures—the Indian ink drawing called “The Deluge,” an infinite waste of stormy sea; “The Entombment,” a picture of solemn intensity and originality; and others deserve description and comment, but space does not allow.

The exhibition was an occasion of much illumination to Blake’s admirers, and the thoughts on his art which it gave rise to may be happily summarized in a passage from Heine’s “Salon”:

“Art attains its highest value when the symbol, apart from its inner meaning, delights our senses externally, like the flowers of a selam, which without regard to their secret signification are blooming and lovely, bound in a bouquet.”

THE VISION OF QUEEN KATHERINE,
FROM SHAKSPERE’S “HENRY VIII.”

Slightly tinted pencil drawing, executed in 1807 for Mr. Butts.
Reproduced by kind permission of Sir Charles Dilke

“But is such concord always possible? Is the artist so completely free in choosing and binding his mysterious flowers? Or does he only choose and bind together what he must? I affirm this question of mystical un-freedom or want of will. The artist is like that somnambula princess who plucked by night in the garden of Bagdad, inspired by the deep wisdom of love, the strangest flowers, and bound them into a selam, of whose meaning she remembered nothing when she awoke. There she sat in the morning in her harem, and looked at the bouquet de nuit, musing on it as over a forgotten dream, and finally sent it to the beloved Caliph. The fat eunuch who brought it greatly enjoyed the beautiful flowers without suspecting their meaning. But Haroun al Raschid, the commander of the faithful, the follower of the Prophet, the possessor of the ring of Solomon, he recognized the deep meaning of the beautiful bouquet; his heart bounded with delight; he kissed every blossom, and laughed till tears ran down his long beard.” We may not be followers of the Prophet, nor rejoice in long beards or magic rings, yet I dare assert that in entering into the meaning, the deep “Innigkeit” of the selam which Blake presented to us, we have entered on a new phase of spiritual and artistic life not less intensely delightful than the joy experienced by the Prophet.

CHAPTER XII

Turning to Blake’s picture, we find he has catered for the mind, but, having done that, he has denied us the one thing of which Stothard is so prodigal—beauty. In his restless search beneath the surface with which beauty obviously is concerned, for the things of the spirit and the intelligence underlying the appearance, Blake has here lost sight of art’s first principle, beauty in the whole, as the result of the parts. The composition in its entirety is not beautiful. It has no harmony. It is an accretion of separate parts, made out without reference to the picture’s final unity. These parts, although some are beautiful in themselves, are not intimately related to each other, and contribute so little towards a general predominant scheme that the effect of discord is produced, and the multitudinous meanings and intentions with which each figure is fraught over-weight the composition and confuse the beholder; the simple reason of all this being, that the first obligation of the painter, his sense of harmony and balance, has been ruthlessly violated. Perhaps Blake’s sense of style—about which I imagine he never reasoned, it being innate and intuitive—deserted him on this one occasion, because anger was making havoc in his heart and blinding his eyes. The conditions under which he worked, it will be remembered, must have been destructive to all concentration and artistic isolation of mood. Still, as I have said, though sadly wanting as a whole, there is beauty of an intricate and curious sort in the details.

Look on the wide expanse of swelling downs over-arched by the tragic splendour of an evening sky. Here the thought, as ever with Blake, is lifted up above the accidents, into the eternal and the infinite. But Stothard’s gentle hills and bowery trees shut out such vistas, and he concerns himself scarcely at all about the sky, which is merely the background on which to throw up the graceful heads of his graceful unintelligent folk.

The characteristic group of children with their mother and grandfather, which Blake has set beside the gateway of the Tabard Inn, has great beauty as a single motive. No labour has been spared to make all faithful to the Chaucerian conception: the curious semi-Gothic gateway, the crowding pigeons, the barbaric splendours of the wife of Bath, the mediaeval figure of the knight, whose face reminds one somewhat of the supposed portrait of Cimabue in the Chapel of the Spaniards in Santa Maria Novella; all have been wrought with painful care. The work is an illustration of Blake’s principle enunciated in his notes on Reynolds’ “Discourses” and elsewhere that “Real effect is making out of parts, and it is nothing else but that.”

Perhaps the strangest trait the engraving exhibits in comparison with Stothard’s is that it looks so antique. It might have been executed a hundred years earlier than the other picture, so wilfully grotesque and archaic is it. Yes, wilfully is the word, for Blake wished to make his procession as stiff and quaint and rich as the stately Chaucerian language that first painted the scene, forgetting perhaps that the two arts of poetry and painting achieve the same end through widely different conditions, and according to processes contiguous, but non-interchangeable. The want of ease, of careless and familiar naturalism in the engraving, may recall to those who look for it the splendid and ceremonious language of the old story-teller. The description written by Blake of his own design (it will be found in Gilchrist) shows how he loved and understood Chaucer, and, we may add, how very loosely the poem was grasped, and with what want of truth to the original it was represented by his rival. Lamb said of the engraving itself that it was “a work of wonderful power and spirit, hard and dry, yet with grace,” and the Descriptive Catalogue—a copy of which was given him by Crabb Robinson—pleased him greatly; the part devoted to an analysis of the characters in the “Canterbury Pilgrimage” he found to be “the finest criticism of Chaucer’s poem he had ever read.”

Savagely powerful as it is, the engraving is merely an interesting and not a vital utterance of Blake. The tempera picture from which it was engraved was bought by Mr. Butts, but has been lost sight of now for many years. Stothard’s oil painting of the same subject is in the National Gallery.

Turning to the other original single engravings of Blake in the Print Room, we find several of interest. There is that early one, designed and engraved in 1780, which has been called “Glad Day,” and is the expression of a mood oftener felt in Blake’s early manhood than in the ensuing years of chafing complexity and multitudinous emotions. I have wondered whether it be not the pictorial embodiment of the vision which he saw of the “Spiritual Sun on Primrose Hill,” described by him to Crabb Robinson.

Among the original engravings here may be seen the broadsheet of “Little Tom the Sailor,” executed by Blake for Hayley while at Felpham in 1800, for a charitable purpose.

Hayley’s verses and Blake’s designs were bitten in with stopping-out varnish on the pewter plate of the original from which the prints are taken.

In the designs setting out the misfortunes of a poor widow and the heroism of her little son he has given us one theme of natural scenery—a winding path, a little wood surmounted by bare folded downs—testifying to the invasion which the obvious beauty of Felpham had made on his artistic consciousness; while the other illustration represents the tragic moment when little Tom on the wreck is about to be drowned; over the trough of deep sea the spiritual form of his father appears ready to receive and embrace his soul. Mrs. Blake’s hand unfortunately has coloured the Print Room copy.

And now let us turn to the pen-and-ink etchings to Dante, designed and executed for Mr. Linnell between the years 1824 and 1827, the year of Blake’s death.

There are seven of them, wrought by the pen, which had become so deliberate, careful and delicate in execution during these last years of his life.

Let us linger over two of them for a moment.

Among the many pictures of Paolo and Francesca that exist, was there ever seen anything like this of Blake’s imagining?

You may prefer others—Ary Scheffer’s, Dante Rossetti’s, or Mr. G. F. Watts’—you may object that this one has not grappled with the passionate love-motive of the story, that it has omitted the note of yearning, of beloved pain, with which Dante’s conception is fraught. The austerity of a mind which theorized much on the subject of love—the love of man and woman—but knew actually very little of its vehemence, its trouble, and its languorous sweetness, forbade Blake to focus in the figures of Paolo and Francesca the ideal tragedy of those “whom love bereav’d of life.”

The scene as a whole—that second circle of the Inferno, in which

The stormy blast of hell
With restless fury drives the spirits on,
Whirl’d round and dashed amain
With sore annoy—

was what arrested his imagination. Here, in his rendering of the subject, the blast has torn upward in a visible ribbon-like vortex from the surface of the waters, bearing within it, as images in a crystal, the innumerable figures of the world’s great lovers. From a spit of land, Paolo and Francesca, fluttering “light before the wind,” appear in a single tongue of flame, and Dante lies stretched upon the ground—“through compassion fainting.” Virgil is seen irradiated by the effulgent light which trembles around the disc wherein the immortal kiss—that which Rostand calls “l’instant d’infini”—is poetically represented.

THE CIRCLE OF THE LUSTFUL

Fine Indian ink pen drawing, in the Print Room, 1825-6.
Francesca da Rimini, Canto V. of the “Inferno”

As usual, the force, the unusualness of the conception, rather than its ideal beauty are the points we notice first. But closer study attests to its beauty too. Mere literary interest would give the picture no real claim to artistic regard. But Blake felt the drawing of each bounding line as a thing of beauty in itself, having an aesthetic element of its own, apart from its representative or symbolic use. In that coil of entangled fates, what manifold themes of pure sensuous beauty are to be found! For instance—just at the leap and bend of the circle—appears a woman with arms extended in the fluent wind, like a bird in flight, and a man’s embrace encircles her neck—a man whose face she kisses rapturously. Leaping, floating, falling, the multitudinous figures are borne onward by the resistless force of that terrible blast; and, however foreign or antipathetic this embodiment of Dante’s vision may seem to us, we are bound to admit that its imaginative scope is of a temper characteristic not only of Blake, but of the Florentine himself. An aspect of Dante’s conception is developed and emphasized here in a manner which has not been attempted in any other picture of the subject.

The other pen-and-ink drawing from the “Inferno” represents Dante and Virgil in the Circle of the Traitors, with the head of Bocca degli Abati breaking through the lake of ice at the foot of Dante. Blake has given strangely passionless faces to his Dante and Virgil, but the pure simple lines of their figures are severely congruous with the scene, and the iceberg, formed of shadowy frozen figures to the right, is powerfully suggested by a few lines of sufficient economy. The picture is another of those unique embodiments from which, once seen and dwelt on, the modern imagination can never release itself. Gustave Doré’s sensational rendering of the same scene seems to me to acknowledge an inspiration at this source.

The other five designs to Dante merit a description and attention which space does not allow us to give them here. They are of great power, but whether the unflinching realization of the terrible imaginings of Dante is permissible in pictorial art—where the visual representation attacks the emotions and intellect with a poignancy that words, however forcible, can never attain—is a question the discussion of which may provide food for argument to critics of the school of Lessing. For my own part, I incline to the opinion that they overstep the bounds of terror authorized in art, and approach the confines of the horrible in the treatment of the main motive of each design—“Admirably horrid,” Mr. W. M. Rossetti pronounces them. The unwavering truth to Dante’s detailed descriptions is beyond question, however.

The inmost sanctuary of an artist’s mind is far more accessible through his pencil sketches than through his final consummated pictures and designs. There is something so intimate, so personal in these manifestations of himself, that in regarding them I have something of the feeling of one who listens unseen to a man thinking aloud. Nothing convinces one of the labour, the thought, the balancing, the rejections, the careful choice, that go to make up a picture like the study of the sketches made for it.

The peculiarity of Blake’s pencil sketches is their vehemence, and the absence in them of all hesitation. He seems from the first moment of conception to know exactly what he means to do, and rough, almost hieroglyphic, as the first shadow of his idea may appear at first sight, we have only to compare it with the design or picture which eventually resulted from it, to see that all the rapid “short-hand” lines of the sketch, block out accurately the disposition of the main parts of the design, the final attitude of the figures therein, without as a rule any real variation from the first idea having taken place in the working out.

This testifies more than anything else to the distinctness of the vision seen by Blake, and his eager passionate discernment of it. Among such sketches of clearly apprehended vision is that for “The Soul exploring the recesses of the Grave,” the final design of which we are already very familiar with. It is executed with a broad-ended chalk pencil, in quick unhesitating lines. There is not a single touch that cannot be traced, that is not an essential development, in the finished picture, so that we know Blake saw it all from the first, complete then in his mind’s eye as on the day when he finished the detailed drawing for the engraver.

Another sketch of the same order is one which, although it does not belong to any public collection, is so important as to excuse a reference to it here. Through the great kindness of Mr. Frederick Shields, to whom it belongs, I am enabled to reproduce it. The two motives of the picture in Blair’s “Grave,” called “Death’s Door,” had been favourite ones with Blake, and used by him separately in “The Gates of Paradise,” “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” and “America,” before he combined them so felicitously in the noble design which ranks among his best works. The sketch by Blake belonging to Mr. Shields would seem to represent the moment when he first realized the power and significance and beauty to be obtained by their incorporation in one design. Of this conception it must be admitted that it grew in Blake’s mind after the first flashing vision of it, and was not from the beginning discernible in all the splendour to which it was eventually developed.

Here is another beautiful and careful sketch of a female figure diving through the air. The force of her perpendicular flight, the attitude of one leg (the left, not the right, however) recall the “Reunion of the Soul and the Body,” but this figure is undraped, and the arms are extended downwards, and indeed the differences are so numerous that it cannot be regarded as a sketch for that picture. In all probability it is a preliminary study for one of the numerous figures in the “Last Judgment” which he executed for the Countess of Egremont in 1807.

Looking at the terse expressive little drawing, we are reminded of Blake’s “golden rule of art”—“that the more distinct, sharp, and wiry the boundary line, the more perfect the work of art.” Ah! but how he played with his line! “Wiry” at least it never was, say what Blake would! He never “painted” it, but felt his way along with sympathetic accuracy. And with what infinite inflexions of tenderness and strength did his pencil impress itself on the paper, indicating by that rare quality of touch more than form and modelling—almost, one had said—the very nature of the flesh of the figures he drew.

Speaking of Blake’s drawings, the manner in which he drew the muscular form of the male leg is very noticeable and strangely characteristic of him. Another line he felt very tenderly was the curved sweep of a woman’s back from shoulder to indented waist, and downwards to delicate ankles and heels.

UNDATED PENCIL SKETCH FOR “DEATH’S DOOR”

Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. Frederic J. Shields

Let us linger a minute over another of what I may call Blake’s shorthand sketches in the Print Room collection. It is undoubtedly the first idea for the picture entitled “The Spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan, in whose wreathings are enfolded the nations of the earth.” The finished picture appeared in Blake’s own exhibition in 1809; it is now in the possession of T. W. Jackson, Esq., of Worcester College, Oxford.

In the sketch, “Nelson” is drawn symbolically as a young sea-god, nude and commanding. He stands firmly on a coil of Leviathan’s body, which rearing and circling surrounds him like a frame. We can just distinguish the human forms caught in the serpent’s toils, and its great mouth is in the act of devouring a man. The mouth is bridled, and the reins held by Nelson’s hand. The symbolism is easy enough to understand and requires no explanation.

A carefully shaded and conscientious drawing of a naked man with arms upraised testifies to the fact that Blake did work from the model sometimes. But how cold such work appears—valuable and necessary as it is—compared with the passionate half-defined sketches, the mood of which transfers to us something of the high pleasure that Blake himself felt in making these burning transcripts from his imagination or visions.

I had much ado to make out the subject of the pen-and-wash sketch of a woman and man with a group of people on their knees in a cornfield. In the distance a thunder-cloud emits a lightning flash. Mr. Shields tells me that he and Dante Gabriel Rossetti spent an evening trying to decipher a larger and more definite sketch of the same idea, and finally decided that it was an illustration of the following verses (1 Sam. xii. 16-19): “Now therefore stand and see this great thing which the Lord will do before your eyes. Is it not wheat harvest to-day? I will call unto the Lord and he shall send thunder and rain; that ye may perceive and see that your wickedness is great, which ye have done in the sight of the Lord, in asking you a king. So Samuel called unto the Lord, and the Lord sent thunder and rain that day; and all the people greatly feared the Lord and Samuel.”

Among the many other sketches which space does not permit me to comment on, are two very beautiful studies in red chalk, showing Blake to be a master of line indeed. Of his engravings after designs by Stothard, Romney, Flaxman, Hogarth, examples of which the Print Room possesses, it is not necessary to speak, for this book is not concerned with engraving or any other technical branch of art. Its purpose is merely to examine into, and if possible lay bare, the nature of the artistic impulse that makes the work of Blake—as we may all know it in our public collections—so rare and so precious a thing. But though we shall not concern ourselves with these engravings, as they contribute nothing to our purpose, it is interesting to look at the numerous copies which our artist made from prints of Michael Angelo’s frescoes on the roof of the Sistine, from drawings after the antique, and from Cumberland’s “Designs for Engravings.” These latter are pen drawings of Greek figures—similar to those represented on old black and yellow vases—and display the Greek ideal of form, so beautiful yet so passionless and un-individual, when compared with the figures of the great Florentine, in which the soul with all its struggles is apparent. Copying such diverse work faithfully—“for,” wrote Blake, “servile copying is the great merit of copying”—must have made him think, compare, choose. Goethe says that his study of the ancient classic literature convinced him “that a vast abundance of objects must lie before us ere we can think upon them,—that we must accomplish something, nay, fail in something, before we can learn our own capacities and those of others.” And this was much more the case with Blake and his art than might be supposed. It was not ignorance of other ideals, of other methods of thought and work, that caused him to take the artistic path he did; it was definite choice, the ratification of his innate, strongly individualistic tendencies, resulting from comparing them with the characteristic principles of art exhibited in other ages, other masters. Blake in fact copied a good deal; he himself writes in his notes on Reynolds, “the difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal, the good one really does copy a great deal.”