TIME SPEEDING AWAY

Engraved plate from Young’s “Night Thoughts,” published in 1797

As one turns the pages one is fain to exclaim of the artist that he breathed the fine thin air of the mountain tops, that indeed he lived “in the high places of thought.”

I have an impression that Blake drew much of his inspiration from watching the ever-changing cloud forms of the sky. We know that his designs gained actually very little from the beautiful natural scenery of Felpham, that indeed Nature seemed to close round him like a wall. “Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me,” he wrote in his MS. notes to Wordsworth. Strange words to come from a painter-poet. A top room in London with a good view of the sky were all the conditions which he found necessary for the expression of his genius. In the vastness of the heavens, clear and deeply blue, or peopled with glistening clouds, or set with large peaceful stars, which spread themselves before his upward gaze, Blake found that impetus to creation which most genius finds in nature or humanity.

He had set himself the task of probing the world of appearances, and revealing the world of spiritual causes. To say that he succeeded in representing this pictorially would be to assert that an impossibility had been achieved, but he got nearer to the goal than any other artist before or since, not even excepting D. G. Rossetti and G. F. Watts, whose affinity with Blake’s genius is as close as their manifestation of it is different.

The better to realize his aim Blake stripped his drawing of everything that was not essential to the idea he wished to represent. There is never a single redundant accessory. He never stayed his upward or outward flight to represent a lovely landscape, woman’s dainty dress, flashing jewels, bloomy fruit. Typical or merely suggested natural scenes under a great sky are the usual settings of the human forms who were to him, as to his master Michael Angelo, the only language coherent enough to express the innerness and the infinity of spirit.

He seldom chose to inclose his figures in interiors, and such drawings as he has left of places from which the sky cannot be seen are so rare as to startle when we come across them. It may be that from Blake Walt Whitman learned to say, “I swear I will never mention love or death inside a house.”

The sea fascinated his imagination, and he has left characteristic records of it. But for the most part that which he saw with his “corporeal eye” appeared to him as merely the type of what was unseen. He climbed along the jutting peninsula of sense to its farthest point, where, giddy with the immensity of the unsuspected forces revealed to him, he clung, neither angel nor mortal, but partaking to a certain degree of the conditions of both. When in this mystic condition of consciousness he focussed his mind on the “Night Thoughts,” the pencilled ideas resulting are liberal, spacious, empyrean.

But Blake’s most forcible and poetical thinking on the subject of Death is crystallized in the delicately gleaming drawings for Blair’s “Grave.”

True, the drawings are not reproduced in Cromek’s edition of the poem as they left Blake’s hand. The story of Cromek’s mean transaction has already been retold in these pages. Schiavonetti’s plates, beautiful and fluent in execution as they are, have lost that peculiar rugged character, that almost galvanic energy which stamp the original drawings with Blake’s hallmark. It must be borne in mind that engraving may alter original drawings much in the same way as does the transposition of a musical phrase from the original into a foreign key. The melody is the same, but the mood of it is different. It becomes dull instead of bright, or plaintive instead of triumphant. Schiavonetti’s transposing of Blake has made the designs more sweet and less strong, or perhaps less vehement. It is Blake in a new aspect, one so obviously beautiful that all the world admits its loveliness. It is Blake arranged for the many, not Blake for the intimate few!

DEATH OF THE STRONG, WICKED MAN, FROM BLAIR’S “GRAVE”

Engraving by L. Schiavonetti after design by Blake. Published 1808

The stanzas he wrote in dedication to Queen Charlotte form such a fitting introduction to the plates that we quote them:

The door of death is made of gold
That mortal eyes cannot behold,
But when the mortal eyes are closed
And cold and pale the limbs reposed,
The soul awakes and wond’ring sees
In her mild hands the golden keys.
The grave is heaven’s golden gate,
And rich and poor around it wait.
O Shepherdess of England’s fold,
Behold this gate of pearl and gold.

To dedicate to England’s Queen
The visions that my soul has seen,
And, by her kind permission bring,
What I have borne on solemn wing,
From the vast regions of the grave;
Before her throne my wings I wave,
Bowing before my sov’reign’s feet.
The grave produced these blossoms sweet,
In mild repose from earthly strife;
The blossoms of eternal life.

And now Blake comes to close quarters with the subject that had haunted him all his life, the dark web on which he had woven so many bright, half-defined fancies.

Again we discern a point d’appui between him and Michael Angelo. The thoughts of neither of them were long away from death. Michael Angelo wrestled with the dark angel and brought away from the encounter the profound and intimate thoughts that he has enshrined in the Medici Tombs of San Lorenzo. Never has the human soul—save perhaps Beethoven’s—apprehended more closely the mystery, the terror, the mingled shrinking and awe of the grave, yet at the same time its hope, than he did in the Sacristy of the Medici Chapel. And in all plastic art, the only things to which these fateful sculptures may be likened in their qualities of rapt and sincere thinking, united to imagination and insight, are the designs, which Blake made to illustrate Blair’s “Grave.”

The great Florentine, it is true, wrought colossally in enduring marble before all the world, while the obscure Blake, two centuries later, traced out his thoughts on paper, his designs being known to comparatively few persons; but the conceptions of the two brains are allied, and the works of the two hands are own brothers.

Blair’s conventional and smooth verses in Blake’s case have nothing to do with the matter. They merely form the pegs on which he cast the great garment of his thoughts. Death—the Grave!—his intense and fervent spirit so brooded on the subject that the result is no mere illustration of Blair’s text, but invention. The poem in his handling has enlarged itself out of all knowledge, and turned to us an unfamiliar face, new and enriching conceptions. Blair merely indicated the track on which his pioneer spirit journeyed heedfully and musingly, through the dim country of Death. Piercing all conventions, all accepted theology, he would fain seize the very heart of the elusive mystery. “What is Death?” he asks; “let me peer into the grave unshrinkingly and see for myself.” And from the grave he brings this triumphant answer, “Death is Life, this Life only is Death; you have but to die to conquer Death”; or in Walt Whitman’s prosaic but arresting phrase, “To die is different from what anyone supposes, and luckier.”

We reproduce the most significant of the plates.

In “The Soul exploring the Recesses of the Grave,” we see a shuddering yet resolved man determinately bringing himself to the close contemplation of death. He remains above the vault on the hillside trying to pierce the moonlit earth with his limited human vision; but his imagination, his soul, penetrates where he cannot enter—yet!

In the likeness of a fair woman with a lamp, like the Greek Psyche, she tiptoes delicately into the arched hollow beneath the hill, and gazes alarmed but steadfast on a dead body wrapped in flickering flames. It is to be noted that the man whose soul regards death so closely is already on the mountain tops, he has “lifted up his eyes unto the hills,” and his figure set against the sky has an indefinable air of separateness from ordinary humanity.

The plate entitled “The Soul hovering over the Body reluctantly parting with Life” satisfies with a strange and unearthly delight. No Diana ever hung more yearningly above her Endymion than this beautiful and tender soul lingers, in loving reluctance to part, above the stiff human tenement she has just quitted. Presently she will take her darting flight through the window and over the mountains and up into the illimitable glory of the distant sunrise. There is the hush and the blessedness of a great silence on this dim silver dawn, suggesting the spiritual correspondence between it and the dawning life of the newly-released soul. Was it a recollection of that younger brother, Robert, so dearly loved, that taught Blake the pathetic dignity of the composed limbs, the sculptured calm of the dead face?

The “Death of the Strong Wicked Man” is a savage contrast to the peace, the musical pause, of the last-mentioned design.

In “Milton,” Blake writes:

Judge then of thyself; thy Eternal Lineaments explore,
What is eternal and what changeable, and what annihilable.

And he answers the question in the forms given to these passing souls, some being closely analogous to their mortal appearances, others changing even to sex, while others again have passed from age into a state of perpetual youth.

This latter is the case in the plate called “Death’s Door.” “Age on crutches is hurried by a tempest into the open door of the Grave, while above sits a young man—‘the renovated man in light and glory’—his beautiful young head thrown up to the sky, his mouth full of inspired song, his whole virile body expressing ideal beauty, rapture, glad new life.”

No one but Michael Angelo could have drawn with strong felicitous hand the glorious youth atop of the grave as Blake has done. The whole allegory is so intellectually definite, so succinctly expressed that thought and its body form are here identical. But the strangest flower of his thoughts on the grave, blossoms in the picture called “The Re-Union of the Soul and the Body.” Descending like a bolt from the blue, cleaving the smoke ascending from the fires of consuming materialism, the soul embraces with passionate joy the strong male body, which struggles from the grave to enfold her. Cleansing and fusing fires flame around them. The beauty of the drawing—the melodious curves of the downward plunging “soul,” the delicious foreshortening of the leg, the swirl of the white drapery—has stricken into poetic lines the forcefulness of flight, the passion of re-union. This emotional conception moves the heart strangely. It is the promise of St. Paul here visibly consummated, that a spiritual body shall at last clothe the shivering unhoused soul.

THE SOUL RELUCTANTLY PARTING FROM THE BODY, FROM BLAIR’S “GRAVE”

Engraving by L. Schiavonetti after design made by Blake. Published 1808

“States change,” Blake wrote, “but Individual Identities never change nor cease.”

And now take last of all, but not least, the plate called the “Day of Judgment.” Nothing daunted by the long array of “Last Judgments” that have been executed from Orcagna to Michael Angelo, Blake must needs give his rendering of the subject; and an original one it is, though he can hardly avoid—even he!—the traditional disposition of the main parts of the picture.

But what freshness, what new life and new motives he has introduced into this subject, hoary with extreme age. The spirits ascending into Paradise are as lovely as heart and eye of man could wish. Orcagna’s conception of the beatified souls in Santa Maria, whose profiles Ruskin likened to “lilies laid together in a garden border,” is not more delightful in its artless way than is Blake’s. The children of wrath, snake-encircled, howling, and falling head foremost into the abyss, recall the terrors, the uncouth and wild imagination of “Urizen” and one of the plates in “America.” But here Schiavonetti’s graceful and civilizing hand has passed over each figure, and he has contrived in some indefinable way to smooth away the too austere and savage strength of this latest born of the “Dies illa” of art.

I have not mentioned the first plate, which represents Christ with the Keys of the Grave in his hand, because my function is chiefly that of praise. But I ought perhaps to point out, what is however painfully obvious, that Blake always failed in any attempt to represent Jesus. Whether he was hampered to a degree beyond his strength of liberation by the traditional likeness, the type ascribed to the Saviour, and so could not work in freedom, it is impossible to say authoritatively. But this traditional face of Christ, ploughed as it is into the heart and memory of humanity, probably arose and disturbed his own soul’s independent vision whenever he tried to fix his imagination on the ideal lineaments.

If this were the case, then indeed it is proved beyond question that Blake’s work is almost valueless when it is not dependent on his own naked perceptions, his inward recognition of facts, disregardful of all outward corroboration.

Blake’s next work in illustration was done for Dr. Thornton, who projected an English edition of Virgil’s “Pastorals” for the use of schools, with Ambrose Philips’ imitation of Virgil’s first eclogue. They were the first and the only woodcuts Blake ever did, and though they bear traces of an unpractised hand, “he put to proof art alien to the artists,” and showed his essential mastery of this means of expression in a manner which more than reconciles one to his slight defects of method.

Gilchrist is of opinion that the original designs were a little marred—lost somewhat in expression and drawing in transference to the wood; but Mr. Laurence Binyon, who has lately studied them closely, and has reproduced them with admirable truth, holds a different opinion. He writes, “Blake’s conceptions in these illustrations did not take their final form in the drawings; they were only fully realized on the block itself. Hence they have the character of visions called up as if by moonlight out of the darkened surface of the wood, and seem to have no existence apart from it.”

They instance the power Blake had in a remarkable degree of concentrating in a few types the essence of his subject. In these blocks it is pastoral life—flocks feeding in lonely stretches of country, the still peace of hills, the might of tempest—that he concentrates and expresses by the roughly executed but exquisitely felt little scenes which are the consummation of his insight into the large natural life of the earth.

BLAKE’S WOODCUTS, FROM HIS OWN DESIGNS, TO PHILLIP’S “VIRGIL’S PASTORALS.” 1821

Blake did in these woodcuts, what he could never have achieved, had he sought to do so, in any other of the branches of art practised by him,—namely, he gave truthful because extremely simple impressions of Nature as she appears in her rarer moods. Master as he was of linear design, he was too neglectful of tonic values to interpret with any delicacy the effects of landscape in water-colour or engraving. But here, the very nature and limitations of woodcutting, its necessary economy of means, enabled him for once to express effectively and adequately his great simple generalized impressions.

These pregnant suggestions of his induce a mood sympathetic with the deeper and subtler chords of pantheism.

In one of the most beautiful, but at the same time one of the simplest of the blocks, all the witchery and solemn charm of a remote pastoral neighbourhood is represented in a few typical rural images.

A solitary traveller journeys along a road winding deep between hills, in the last beams of the setting sun. Blake has endowed this darkened landscape with I know not what suggestions of watchful intentness. The wayfarer in some mysterious manner is in its power!

Hands unseen
Are hanging the night around him fast.

And again:

The place is silent and aware,
It has had its scenes, its joy and crimes,
But that is its own affair.

These words of Browning’s are singularly apt to express the delicate and profound hints in this little woodcut. The wonderful thing is that Blake could convey so much on a slip of paper about three inches by one and a half in size.

In all the plates we find this strange accent laid on Nature, her awareness, her sombre fateful moods, her listening, and the long patience of her endless waiting. The oft-repeated motive of the shepherding of flocks is treated in no glib or merely idyllic manner, but has the sort of holy peace that befits that most ancient and most gentle of all the occupations of men.

An appreciative critic has said anent these woodcuts, that they prove conclusively that “amid all drawbacks there exists a power in the work of the man of genius which no one but himself can utter fully.”

The truth of this remark must be felt by all Blake’s admirers with double force and poignancy when they think regretfully of Blair’s “Grave,” wherein the designs, being engraved by another hand than the father of them, have lost some indefinable note of character belonging to Blake’s personality.

And now we come to the greatest series of engravings on a religious subject that have appeared since Albrecht Dürer. The inventions to “Job” are the crown of glorious achievement on the strenuous and austere life of the artist-poet, and of all his work there is nothing so perfect in the dramatic development of the subject, the broad, forceful yet delicate execution, and the poetic sensibility which animates the entire series.

It appears that Blake’s lifelong friend, Mr. Butts, bought from him a series of twenty-one water-colour drawings or “Inventions” from the Book of Job.

(This set of drawings, be it remarked, together with twenty-two brilliant proof impressions on India paper of the engravings afterwards made from them, were sold to Mr. Quaritch on March 31st, 1903, at the sale of the Crewe collection of Blake’s works, for the sum of £5,600.)

I have seen one water-colour (presumably not one of the original set done for Thomas Butts, though probably a repliqua) of Satan pouring a vial containing the plague of boils on the prostrate body of Job. It is interesting to compare it with the final form the design assumed in the engraving (Plate 6 in the Book of Job) done for John Linnell. Owing to the courtesy of Sir Charles Dilke, to whom the picture now belongs, we have been enabled to reproduce it. It will at once be seen that, in the engraving the management of the light is more satisfactory, because it is comprehensible, than in the water-colour; while the cloud-forms are less conventional and rounder. The bat-like wings with which Satan is furnished in the painting have been sacrificed in the engraving. Job’s wife has been put into tone, whereas in the water-colour, the visible side of her, which ought to have been in dense shadow, was in full light. The whole design has been pulled together, gaining an impressiveness and unity altogether wanting in the earlier work. Blake’s passion for “determinate outline” (irrespective of its appearance in Nature), and contempt for truth of tone in colour, gives the water-colour a mapped-out definitive appearance in its background of scenery,—despite the magnificent qualities of imagination and draughtsmanship displayed in the treatment of the figures,—which somehow recalls the work of such masters as Paolo Uccello.

Mr. Linnell, deeply impressed with the lofty and imaginative character of the water-colours done for Mr. Butts, commissioned a complete set of engravings to be executed from them by Blake’s hand, for which he paid £150 in instalments of £2 to £3 weekly—the largest sum Blake had ever received for any one series.

On glancing through them it will at once be noticed that his style of engraving had undergone a change during the last period of his life.

“The Canterbury Pilgrimage,” which he had executed fifteen years previously, exhibited the old hard and dry manner of engraving which he had adopted from Basire in its most accentuated form. (For the convenience of classification I have included that picture among the loose drawings, engravings, and water-colours for consideration in a later chapter, but it would be well for the student to look at it now, the better to appreciate the freedom, grace and power of the engravings in the “Job” series.)

On one of the many pleasant days Blake spent with Linnell at North End, Hampstead, the latter showed him some choice engravings of Marc Antonio and his pupil Bononsoni, and from this latter’s work Blake suddenly apprehended the possibilities, the scope, that lay for him in the engraver’s art. In the school of Basire much of the work was accomplished by a laborious and indiscriminate process of cross-hatching.

It is true that Blake by the sheer force of his genius had made this style answer in a manner to his needs of expression, but it was work performed in an unnecessarily confined technique.

When he came to study the Italian school of engraving he found to his delight that every stroke was made to tell. Nothing blotchy or muddled, no careless cross-hatching, no “lozenges or dots” were admitted, and Blake quickly appreciated the wider range of effects obtainable by this Italian manner, and engrafted its main principles on to his own characteristic style. Of that characteristic style, as we know, the beauty of outline, the care for its preservation whenever possible, was the main principle. And here in the school of Marc Antonio and Bononsoni he found that principle adopted as the basis of beauty in engraving, every other consideration being made subservient to it. The conflict and want of unity of effect, resultant on making compromises with other principles of art,—such as subtlety of modelling, delicate distinctions in values, imitation of textures, intricacy of detail,—had not disturbed the dignity of the Italian school, which consciously sacrificed variety and a wide range of effects in order to keep the work of the burin as broad and simple as possible, the outline always being insisted on as the chief subject of alterations, while the shading and modelling were comprehensively indicated by long curved lines, close together, only crossing and intersecting in the darkest parts. The beauty and freedom of the “Job” engravings are a revelation of the final grace and power achieved by Blake through his appreciation of the legitimate functions of an art pre-eminently concerned with line.

PLATE II FROM “THE BOOK OF JOB”

Engraving, published March, 1825

The Book of Job is one of the world’s great epics. It voices man’s need of belief in God; it is the cry of one pierced to death with the arrows of misfortune, yet asserting with passionate faith, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” Earthquake, famine, bereavements, pestilence cannot eradicate from man the deep-rooted assurance that God not only exists, but is just and loving, and the Book of Job is the supreme poetical expression of this fundamental belief.

As such, it welded itself into Blake’s imagination, and the designs he made to illustrate it are worthy in all respects to be set alongside the ancient tragic text.

Plate 1 represents Job, his wife, and their sons and daughter kneeling around them, praising God at the rising of the sun. Their flocks and herds surround them, and a noble tree—on which their musical instruments are hung—overshadows them; in the background, at the base of rocky hills, a Gothic cathedral is daringly set, to typify the soul of worship made visible. “Thus did Job continually.” The border that surrounds the finely-wrought plate is very slight but decorative and thoughtful. An altar with a flaming sacrifice upon it is indicated, with these words inscribed upon its front:

The letter killeth,
The Spirit giveth Life,
It is spiritually discerned.

While, above, the words,

Our Father which art in Heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name,

set the keynote to the whole work.

Plate 2 contains no less than twenty-three figures, and two scenes are being enacted simultaneously.

Job and his wife still sit beneath the tree with their children, but above them we see the heavens open and God giving power to Satan, who strides like Urizen through flame, to test the uprightness of His servant Job. “This was the day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them to present himself before God.” The border is exquisite, light as gossamer, and containing in its fine web-like lines beautiful suggestions. Angels with heads bent beneath Gothic tracery receive the flame and smoke that are the thought-sacrifices of two shepherds, who mind the sleeping flocks in their fold. The next two plates are (3) the Destruction of the Children of Job, and (4) the reception of the news by Job and his wife.

Plate 5 is one of the finest of the series. Job and his wife, sitting on the ruins of their home, give of their straitened means to the blind and halt, while “the angels of their love and resignation,” as Gilchrist sympathetically terms them, hallow and beautify the scene. But above, the Almighty sits enthroned, with an expression almost remorseful, and the angels shrink away in horror, for He has given Satan leave to try Job to the uttermost, only reserving his life. “Behold he is in thy hand, but save his life.” Satan, with face averted from the sublime spectacle of Job in his affliction, has concentrated the fires of God into a phial which he is about to pour on his head.

PLATE V FROM “THE BOOK OF JOB,” 1825

Engraving

The border is symbolically woven with writhing snakes and thorn-set brambles, among which quick darting flames find their way upwards.

And then follow Plates 6, 7, 8, the workings of the Evil One, the coming of the three friends to Job, and Job raising himself in agony and uttering the frantic words, “Lo, let the night be solitary and let no joyful voice come therein, let the day perish wherein I was born.” This suggests “thoughts beyond the reaches of the soul.” Then follows the Vision of Eliphaz—very terrible and grand—and Plate 10, “The Just Upright Man is laughed to scorn,” in which Job’s attitude, the dignity of his grief and faith, are magnificent. “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him,” is expressed in every line of the noble, piteous figure.

Plate 11—“With Dreams upon my bed thou scarest me and affrightest me with Visions”—has something mediaeval in the grotesqueness and ingeniousness of the horrors depicted. Orcagna’s devils, Dürer’s “Death and Satan” are not more terrible than Job’s tormentors. The words engraved in the border contain all the condensed pain of the race of man, as well as the faith which alone makes it possible to be endured.

And then to all this “storm and stress” succeeds Plate 12, with its suggestions of returning peace and the everlasting calm of the stars. “Lo, all these things worketh God oftentimes with Man to bring back his Soul from the pit to be enlightened with the light of the living!” says the inspired young man to Job, who with the seal of a great suffering set on his face—but a suffering of which the bitterness is past—sits listening intently as one who suddenly receives light in his soul. The sonorous penetrating words fall on the senses like the music of rain-drops on a thirsty land, and the design grows out of them like a true organic form of which the shape is innate. Oh! the peace of that night sky, and the gentle radiance of the stars set in its depth!

The border is here specially beautiful. “Look upon the heavens, and behold the clouds which are higher than thou”—words that found a responsive echo in the heart of Blake—is the verse inscribed on the robe of a sleeping old man. The border is quick with winged thoughts, floating upwards from his head, in the shape of small men and women, linked in a sinuous succession, which finally reaches a sky, also set with stars, whose clouds have verses written upon them that contribute to a full understanding of Job.

Plate 13, “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind,” continues the gracious and softening influences of the last design. Job and his wife, with tremulous eager hope, look up into the mild face of God, who, clothed and enwreathed by a whirlwind of which Blake only could have suggested the marvellous vortex, stretches His arms in blessing above them. The three friends are prostrated and overwhelmed beneath the force of the blast that encloses God.

And now we come to Plate 14, than which nothing can be imagined more beautiful. “When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy,” are the words beneath and around the border; the six days of creation are indicated in six delicate medallions, which may in their turn have suggested the noble series of paintings, of ample scope and poetic imagining, which Sir Edward Burne-Jones executed.

PLATE XIV FROM “THE BOOK OF JOB,” 1825

Engraving

But the main design—God, the centre of the universe, from whom issues Day and Night, the listening rapt group of Job, his wife, and the comforters, and, above all, the glorious rejoicing ranks of angels—is beautiful almost beyond expression. It is noticeable that on either side appears the arm alone of an angel outside the picture, thus cleverly suggesting the idea of an infinity of this heavenly host. Mrs. Jamieson, in her “Christian Art,” says, “The most original and, in truth, the only new and original version of the scripture idea of angels which I have met with is that of William Blake, a poet-painter, somewhat mad as we are told, if indeed his madness were not rather ‘the telescope of truth,’ a sort of poetical clairvoyance, bringing the unearthly nearer to him than others.

“His adoring angels float rather than fly, and with their half-liquid draperies seem about to dissolve into light and love; and his rejoicing angels—behold them!—sending up their voices with the morning stars, that ‘singing in their glory move!’”

The picture has the thrill, the immensity of music in it, and I never look at it without recalling the motive of the last movement of the Choral Symphony.

It resolves all the human suffering, all the incoherent and striving emotions, all the diverse and multiform forces of the Book of Job, into a final harmony and triumph of beauty.

In much the same way the last motive of Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony” rings forth after the tentative, subtle and passionate music of the preceding movements like a shout of joy, the cry of a faith which says—not, “I have heard, I have learnt, I believe,” but, “I know! absolutely and for ever!”

Plate 15 shows God pointing out the works that His hand has fashioned. “Behemoth” and Leviathan, in a circular design very Gothic in character, appear below. And to this succeeds Plate 16, “Satan Falling.”

Plate 17, in which God appears blessing Job and his wife, while the false comforters hide their diminished heads with an almost comic fright, is distinguished by another of those fine effects of light for which Blake had so great an aptitude. The sun, which forms the nimbus of God’s head, emits strange prismatic rays, very beautiful and weird. “Also the Lord accepted Job” shows us Job with his wife and friends offering a fire on an altar before a great sun, which, like God’s halo in the previous picture, flashes the same strange light. The design is calm and solemn, and has an exquisite decorative feeling. Immediately below the altar, on some steps which form part of the border, Blake has touchingly and humbly laid his own palette and brushes, as if to indicate that, like Job, his work had been offered and accepted by the Lord.

In Plate 19 Job and his wife are seated beneath a fig-tree in a field of standing corn, gratefully receiving offerings from a father and mother and their two beautiful daughters.

“Everyone also gave him a piece of money.” The border contains, as usual, amid its palm leaves and angelic figures, verses relating to and assisting the chief motive of the picture.

For pure melodious beauty perhaps there is no plate like 20. “There were not found women fair as the daughters of Job in all the land, and their father gave them inheritance among their brethren.” Job is seated in a dim rich chamber, on whose walls are wrought paintings illustrating the trials he has experienced. Around him are grouped three beautiful daughters, who listen rapt while he relates to them God’s dealings with him.

This is a rare example of Blake’s choosing an interior with no opening out into the beyond. It is quaint and beautiful, but we are so accustomed to seeing Blake’s figures set in the open air with the sky above them, that this closed-in chamber, exquisitely wrought and fantastic as it is, seems a thing foreign to his usual methods, his elective affinity for the great expansive types of God’s universe. I think the reason he chose an interior in this instance was that we might be shut in and enclosed within the mind of Job as it revealed itself to his daughters. Instinctively we know that Blake’s true lover Rossetti must have cared for this plate with quite special fervour, so close is the analogy between its hidden mysterious richness and the wonderful painted interiors in which he set his women, and from which he developed such a high degree of romantic suggestion and atmosphere. A lute and harp amid trailing vines, grape-laden, form a border to Blake’s design, as delicate as the illuminated tracery in a mediaeval Hour-Book. In the final plate—“So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning”—the hole of the great tree that has figured in so many of the designs is surrounded by a crowd of persons, with Job, his wife and beautiful daughters in the midst. All play on instruments of music, while sheep and lambs and (it must be admitted) a most Gothic-looking sheep-dog repose in the immediate foreground. The ancient and fantastic instruments, the rapt upraised faces, the beautiful girls, recall the old Florentine singing galleries—cantorias as they are called—the one by Donatello and the other by Luca della Robbia, now in the Museo del Duomo at Florence. In neither has the joy of praise, the delight in making music, found more complete expression.

Blake’s “Book of Job” is a holy thing. The full compass of his orchestral nature exerted itself for this final effort. All his long sacrifices, deprivations, passionate sorrows and sacred joys, his burning aspirations and his steadfast faith, found their true meaning, their perfect consecration in the blossoming of this supreme flower on his tree of life. It was Blake’s offering to God, like the Sacred Host, reserved and offered up in his own hands on the altar of his storm-weary heart.

CHAPTER XI

Out of forty-one exhibits, twenty-five were subjects from the Bible, three were single plates repeated from Blake’s “Prophetic Books,” one was an Indian ink drawing illustrating a scene in his poem “Tiriel,” three were purely imaginative compositions, the keys to which were to be sought in themselves, and seven were illustrations to the poets (three of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” one of a scene in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and three sketches to illustrate Gray, Young, and Blair). Mainly, then, the exhibition might be said to have dealt with Biblical subjects, though good specimens of all kinds of Blake’s work rendered it representative of his genius in its various phases.

From the old Byzantine mosaicists through art’s early springtime to her full summer in the Renaissance, and even since then, no class of subjects has so deeply occupied the mind of painters as sacred history. There are no incidents left untreated in the New Testament, and the Old has had a large meed of attention, yet we find a painter of such unique and peculiar genius as William Blake expending his strength and invention on this well-worn field of motives. But with results so new, so different from anything ever achieved before, that our interest and delight were stimulated in proportion to our susceptibility to Blake’s influence. I am not saying that this new treatment of Biblical subjects, of the Gospel story, is finer than the work of the old masters of the golden age of Italy. Nor do I rank it lower. “The ages are all equal,” Blake says himself, “but genius is always above its age.” The great point is that it is entirely different, and that it exhibits a total disregard for traditional treatment. Blake only found it possible to see these subjects from his own point of view—one never before attained by any artist. And as objects seen from different outlooks vary in colour, profile, and proportion, so as to be sometimes quite unrecognizable, so do these religious pictures of Blake’s appear startlingly alien to any we have ever seen before. Or as he puts it himself, “If perceptive organs vary, objects of perception seem to vary too.”

Looking round the characteristic and representative collection, the ingenuous student realized that the predominant effect of this art on his mind was one of strangeness. It seemed to him unconnected with the past, unrelated to the present, an art set apart, unique, somewhat disquieting, which took him into Blake’s visionary world, opposed in every sense to the natural world of daily experience. This visionary world of Blake’s, was minutely discriminated by him, however, and was no formless region of emasculating dreams.

The amazing vigour of his conceptions, and the flat contradiction which they impose on the orthodox and traditional images which most people’s minds unconsciously harbour, added a sense of shock to that of strangeness. Inquiring yet further into the causes of this impression one discovered the truth of W. B. Scott’s assertion, that Blake’s genius was unaided by its usual correlative, talent—that facility which enthrones the idea in its appropriately wrought shrine, dowers it with its organically perfect form. Greatly as Blake disliked it to be said, the truth was apparent among these collected works of his, that his execution was seldom equal to his invention. As proof of the strangeness, the independence of his work, we may quote the water-colour drawing of the “Three Maries with the Angel at the Sepulchre” (date 1803), in which the holy women shrink terrified from the angel, with all the shuddering horror that humanity feels at the manifestations of the spiritual world. A small colour-print from “Urizen”—called here “The Flames of Furious Desire”—with which we are already very familiar, must have augmented the impression of unique imagination and strangeness to those who had no previous acquaintance with Blake’s work.

The furious raging, the vital majesty of the water-colour called “Fire,” the delicate and curious imagination in “Satan watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve,” with many others must have contributed to this effect; but the final strangeness and most curious beauty were to be found in “The Nativity,” “The River of Life,” and “The Bard.” In these, Blake’s highest and most mystic qualities are manifest, and his divergence from all preconceived ideas startlingly apparent. “The Nativity” is a small tempera picture painted on copper without the usual foundation of gesso that Blake first laid on the plate. Small patches of tempera have been dislodged, showing little gleaming bits of copper, but happily this has occurred mainly at the top part of the picture in the gloom of the roof of the stable. All the long succession of Nativities from Giotto to Correggio (“the soft and effeminate and consequently most cruel demon,” as Blake termed him) seem not to have touched his imagination. Most artists carry an “infused remembrance” of great pictures in their mind, and can seldom divest themselves of the subtle influence emanating therefrom. But Blake’s picture is not in any sense a composition which even unconsciously has been built up with the aid of memory. Imagination has here become vision, the uncovering of the veritable image; and Blake has faithfully copied what his entranced consciousness beheld.

Mary, white as the lilies of her annunciation, has fallen back fainting into the arms of Joseph, while above her prostrate body, “a mist of the colour of fire” would seem to have gradually taken form and become incarnate in the exquisite beauty of the infant Jesus. Light as thistledown and shining like a star, so that the whole chamber—with the terrified Joseph, the white mother, the oxen feeding—are all illuminated by its intense radiance—this apotheosis of divinity in childhood takes flight to the outstretched arms of St. Elizabeth, who sits on the floor with a quaint little St. John praying in her lap. The open window through which is discerned the star in the East, takes the imagination out into the night of limitless mystery.