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TRANSFERRED TO
EN£ ARTS LIBRARY
HARVARD
COLLEGE
LIBRARY
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
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The Art of
WILLIAM BLAKE
HIS SKETCH-BOOK
HIS WATER-COLOURS
HIS PAINTED BOOKS
BY
ELISABETH LLTTHER GARY
WITH NUMEROUS
ILLUSTRATIONS
NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
1907
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FA 4 1 1 ^ '-^^
Copyright, 1907, by
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
PitbHshed, November^ 1907
The PUmpton Press Norwood Mass. USA.
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A. M. J.
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NOTE
The preparation of any work on Blake involves much study
of materials accessible only through the kindness of private owners.
I owe to Mr. W. A. White of Brooklyn, New York, the privilege
of freely examining his collection of Blake's works, from which the
principal reproductions in the present volume have been made.
Without this assistance I should not have been able to get beyond
a first superficial impression of Blake's characteristics as an artist,
and in his case it is more than usually true that first impressions
are misleading.
I have to acknowledge the courtesy of the authorities of the
Boston Museum in furnishing me with photographs of the water-
colours by Blake in their possession, and I owe to the authorities
of the Metropolitan Museum a similar favour.
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE
I THE WHIRLWIND (Frontispiece).
EzekiePs Vision of the Cherubim and Eyed Wheels.
n DESIGN FOR "FIRE.''
From the Manuscript Sketch Book : Page ninety-one.
in "WOMAN PLUCKING MANDRAKE'' AND "FIRE."
Two sketches from the Gates of Paradise (octavo ed.).
IV "I FOUND HIM BENEATH A TREE IN THE GARDEN."
A page from the Manuscript Sketch Book.
V THE CRUCIFIXION.
From Jerusalem : Page seventy-six.
VI A DRAWING.
From Jerusalem : Page thirty-seven.
Vn THE LITTLE BLACK BOY.
From the Songs of Innocence: Page ten.
Vm THE LAUGHING BOY.
From page two of Songs of Innocence and Experience.
IX ILLUSTRATION FROM SONGS OF EXPERIENCE : Tagc thirty-two.
X TITLE PAGE OF SONGS OF INNOCENCE.
XI THE JOINT TITLE PAGE OF SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EX-
PERIENCE.
Xn SHE SHALL BE CALLED WOMAN.
From Original Water-colour in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Xm SKETCH FOR ADAM AND EVE.
From the Manuscript Sketch Book.
XIV TITLE PAGE OF THE BOOK OF THEL.
XV PAGE TWO OF THE BOOK OF THEL.
XVI DESIGN FOR THE ARGUMENT QF THE VISIONS OF THE DAUGH-
TERS OF ALBION.
From the Manuscript Sketch Book.
XVn ALBION: THE ARGUMENT.
XVm JOSEPH OF ARIMATHEA AMONG THE ROCKS OF ALBION.
(Early Engraving.)
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE
XIX THE ANCIENT OF DAYS.
From Europe : A Prophecy.
XX FAMINE.
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
XXI PESTILENCE — THE DEATH OF THE FIRST BORN.
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
YYn THE KING OF BABYLON IN HELL.
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
TYTTT THE TEMPTATION OF EVE.
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
XXIV FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS TO MILTON'S COMUS.
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
XXV FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS TO MILTON'S COMUS.
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
XXVI THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT.
From Original Water-colour in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
XXVn TITLE PAGE OF EUROPE: A PROPHECY,
XXVm PAGE FIVE OF EUROPE.
XXIX PAGE SEVEN OF EUROPE.
XXX PAGE NINE OF EUROPE.
XXXI PAGE TEN OF EUROPE.
XXXII PAGE FOURTEEN OF EUROPE.
XXXra TITLE PAGE TO AMERICA: A PROPHECT.
XXXIV FRONTISPIECE TO AMERICA.
XXXV PAGE SEVEN OF AMERICA.
(From coloured copy.)
XXXVI PAGE ELEVEN OF AMERICA.
(From coloured copy.)
XXXVn PAGE THIRTEEN OF AMERICA,
(From coloured copy.)
XXXVni TITLE PAGE OF THE BOOK OF AHANIA.
XXXIX DAVID AND GOLIATH.
*In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
XL PAGE THIRTEEN OF THE MANUSCRIPT SKETCH BOOK.
XLI PAGE NINE OF THE MANUSCRIPT SKETCH BOOK.
XLH PAGE EIGHTY-FIVE OF THE MANUSCRIPT SKETCH BOOK.
XLin SKETCH FOR NEBUCHADNEZZAR.
From the Manuscript Sketch Book.
XLIV NEBUCHADNEZZAR.
Fh>m the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi
PLATE
XLV THE WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY.
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
XLVI ILLUSTRATION TO DANTE: CANTO V.
XLVII ABRAHAM PREPARING TO SACRIFICE ISAAC.
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
XLVIII THE GOOD AND EVIL ANGELS.
From Original Drawing owned by Mrs. Payne Whitney.
XLIX MOSES ERECTING THE BRAZEN SERPENT.
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
L THE GHOST OF ABEL.
LI ILLUSTRATION TO THE BOOK OF JOB: PAGE TWENTY-SIX.
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
A PROPER form for a memorial to Blake's genius would
be, no doubt, the reproduction by the most appropriate
processes of all extant designs by him whether in the
shape of sketches or fully developed drawings and paintings. In
this way only could be brought together for consultation by the
student of his work data now scattered over England and America,
in the possession of museums and private owners, or occasion-
ally in the market with an ever rising price attached to even
the most meagre and least characteristic examples.
Such a task naturally would belong to one of the societies to
whose intelligently dedicated efforts we owe the preservation and
accessibility in reproductions of the great etchers and engravers of
the past; and there is little doubt that in the course of time it will
be undertaken. Meanwhile, many of Blake's engravings and
printed books have been reproduced in whole or in part and with
varying degrees of success, and these fragmentary attempts to fix
the shadow of his accomplishment, unworthy of its substance as
the result often may seem to his admirers, are useful in prepar-
ing the way for the final collection, and in familiarizing the public
with his methods of design, his style in pictorial description, the
drama of his themes, the mingled Romantic and Classic strains
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2 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
by which he awakens in the mind the often dissociated emotions
of awe and joy. No one ever has better understood the imaginative
effects of architecture in decorative design and of majestic propor-
tions; no one has more completely realized the gentle charm of
rural scenes in contrast with these, the blitheness of childhood
and the dignity of age. No one has more clearly understood the
relation between a decorative design and the space it is to fill, no
one has more fervently experienced the sense of the unseen world or
been able more definitely to translate this sense into visual images.
All this we can learn from even imperfect reproductions of his
work; and in the case of the present book the inclusion of a number
of illustrations from his sketch-book offers a chance to observe the
working of Blake's mind before his artistic idea has become fixed.
The resonance and brilliancy of his colour and the crispness of his
line, it is needless to say, can be found only in the works that issued
from Blake's own hand. Whether he was concerned with a water-
colour drawing, a coloured print, or a line-engraving he gave it the
stamp of his technical superiority which must from necessity evap-
orate in the process of reproduction. His indomitable personality
cannot so be lost, and the more we see of Blake at even second or
third hand the more coherent, original, and powerful does his
art appear.
In his Descriptive Catalogue of 1809 he declares that "the
merit of a Picture is the same as the merit of a Drawing. The
dauber daubs his Drawings; he who draws his Drawings draws
his Pictures. There is no difference between Raphael's Cartoons
and his Frescoes, or Pictures, except that the Frescoes, or Pictures,
are more finished."
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 3
This represents the ftame of mind in which he undertook all
his artistic work; the sane careful conscientious temper of the
genuine artist who is never guilty of slurring execution in the name
of inspiration. Blake's sketches are those of a fine craftsman in
control of his instrument and of his own mind. To study them
is inevitably to reach the conclusion that a delicately balanced
intellect has been at work upon them. A number of these sketches
are in the Print Room of the British Museum, but the most signifi-
cant and interesting are to be found in the Manuscript Book from
which we reproduce half a dozen pages.
No one familiar with Rossetti's life and also an admirer of
Blake can fail to read with peculiar interest that passage in Mr.
William Rossetti's biography of his brother which refers to the
Blake Manuscript Book. It will be remembered that this book
was offered to Rossetti, then a boy of nineteen, by an attendant in
the British Museum for the sum of ten shillings, and that Rossetti,
whose pockets were "in their normal state of depletion," applied
to his brother for the money, purchased the book, and later
copied out the verse contained in it, while his brother "did the
like for the prose." Beside these literary contents, consisting of
notes for poems, epigrams, and copy for Blake's Advertisement
and his Additions to the Catalogue for the year i8lOj the pages
of the book are strewn with drawings, mostly sketches for designs
which appear in Blake's illustrated or illustrative books. To
an artist like Rossetti, the Rossetti of 1847, this acquisition was
not merely a tonic to the imagination but a lesson of the highest
importance in the use of an artist's tools. He learned from
it how a conception presented itself to Blake's visualizing mind,
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4 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
what its essentials were, what was the first expression of the
idea and what were the details to be introduced after the first
"arrows of desire" had reached their mark. Its yellow leaves
bear the trace of the eager investigations made by that ardent
Italian household into the origins of an art that they were well
fitted to appreciate. We see, however, almost nothing of Blake's
influence in Rossetti's work. In an occasional early design, such
as the illustration to Coleridge's Genevievey with its contrasting
curved and straight lines producing an architectonic effect, we
may trace characteristics of Blake's space composition, but the
suggestion might have come to him as well from a Gothic or
mediaeval source, and as for that complete realization of swift
motion in which Blake has no superior, and in modern art no equal,
I can think of but one design of Rossetti's in which it is attempted :
the 1850 compartment of The Salutation of Beatricey in which an
angel is flying over a field of lilies. It fairly may be assumed that
the effect upon Rossetti of Blake's unintermittent flame of intel-
lectual energy was negligible except so far as it stimulated his
mind in the direction of his original tendencies and fattened his
vocabulary with soothing invective against the Correggio type of
artist. His interest in Blake continued keen, however, as his aid
in preparing Gilchrist's Life of 1863 amply proves. In the sup-
plementary chapter which contains his more important contributions
to that Lifey he says among other things :
"He (Blake) felt his way in drawing, notwithstanding his love
of a * bold determinate outline,' and did not get this at once. Copy-
ists and plagiarists do that but not original artists, as it is common
to suppose; they find a diflGlculty in developing the first idea. Blake
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 5
drew a rough dotted line with a pencil, then with ink, then colour,
filling in cautiously, carefully. At the same time he attached very
great importance to * first lines,' and was wont to affirm: * First
thoughts are best in art, second thoughts in other matters.'" The
Manuscript Book gives us an opportunity for comparison of
Blake's "first lines" with later forms of the same design in a number
of instances. I have studied its complicated pages at first hand,
and have found in the rough drafts of Blake's powerful conceptions
not only the freshness and vigour associated with initial impulses,
but a certain sureness of execution that suggests intensity of con-
viction rather than caution, and that brings to mind Blake's own
pronouncement: "Let a Man who has Made a drawing go on &
on & he will produce a Picture or Painting, but if he chooses to leave
off before he has spoil'd it he will do a Better Thing." I do not
know of any drawings that Blake spoiled in the process of devel-
oping their possibilities, although he refers in his letters to many
such, but the designs in the Manuscript Book make it clear that
his original intention was extremely definite, that in these cases at
least there was little error mixed with his tentative experiments,
and that the "minutely appropriate execution" which he lavished
on his ideas, with him, as with artists less opulently endowed with
executive force, led now and then to a weakened version of his
mental picture. That he was inclined to guard himself at every
turn against such catastrophe, realizing the constant danger of its
occurrence, is shown by a sentence in one of his letters to Dr.
Trusler, a prospective patron.
After stating the titles of one or two compositions which he had
in mind to make, he adds that he cannot "previously describe in
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6 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
words" what he means to design, for fear that he should "evapo-
rate the spirit" of his invention. He continues, characteristically,
however, " But I hope that none of my designs will be destitute of
infinite particulars which will present themselves to the contem-
plator." Judging from the drawings in the Manuscript Book the
spirit of his invention took on form with an ease that could be the
result only of the most vivid inner vision, and while his desire to
improve the execution frequently brought about changes that in-
creased in minor points the beauty of the design — he said himself
in a letter to Hayley, concerning some delayed proofs, "I could
not think of delivering the twelve copies without giving the last
touches which are always the best" — his first touches are wholly
free from the fetters of indecision or timidity. Among other draw-
ings are studies for The Gates of Paradise. Mr. White owns two
printed copies of this little volume, one of them a duodecimo con-
taining the plates in an early state before the lettering, the other a
large octavo containing the last revisions of the text and the plates
in what probably is their final form. These two editions have been
described by Mr. John Sampson in his valuable edition of Blake's
Poetical Worksy where the Manuscript Book is also described, but
as Mr. Sampson had chiefly to do with Blake's literary product,
the drawings have been left for further discussion. The variations
between the sketches in the Manuscript Book and the finished
designs in the printed books are exceedingly interesting, as are
also the diflferences between the earlier and later editions of the
printed work. In the splendid design for Fire^ to take a conspic-
uous example, we have three distinct stages of development. First,
the rough pencil sketch in the Manuscript Book, in which the
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 7
direction of the lines of the body, the spirited action of the head
and the charming curves of the rising flames contrasting with and
supplementing the curve of the extended arms show how thoroughly
the decorative instinct ruled the artist's mind from the first, and
also how the vitality of his subject was captured in the initial
drawing. In the printed version the figure is reversed, the earlier
impression representing it as rather slender — one of the "long
spindle-nosed rascals'' for whom Blake has expressed his abhor-
rence in one of his vehement notes. The modelling of the body
in this edition is as cursory as possible, consisting of a few widely
separated, coarse lines. The face has high, broad cheek-bones,
and the eyes as in the sketch are open and uplifted.
In the later edition the background has been reworked, intro-
ducing the effect of light back of the figure, which has been extended
at the sides to gain the appearance of greater stoutness, while a
few indications of the scales with which Blake usually clothes
his demons are seen. The modelling is rich and full, with stippled
dots and fine lines added to the original rough shading; the dark
contour line on the right side of the body is strengthened, the head
has been given a squarer shape by the work on the adjoining back-
ground, the features are considerably changed and the eyes are
closed. In this instance the last touches have certainly greatly
improved the later print in comparison with the earlier, increasing
the vigour of the representation and giving an aspect of power
and decision to the composition. Comparing the final version with
the sketch in the Manuscript Book, however, the gain is less obvious.
Although the print has a force of execution that is lacking in the
drawing, the latter has a kind of spiritual energy ,"a light adequacy
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8 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
of statement, which has melted out of the firmer execution. The
figure that rises from the flames in the drawing seems naturally to
float upward as a part of the impalpable element, while in the print
it has become definitely corporeal and the imagination is more
positively taxed to entertain the idea. This may seem to be a
meticulous distinction but it is one constantly encountered in the
diflferent versions of Blake's work, precisely because his imagination
was so surcharged with the conception he was about to express
that it gave abounding life to the first form found for it, and to
keep this vitality unimpaired and undiminished required the exercise
of consummate skill in the reworking of the design.
A notable instance of Blake's effort to recapture the first bloom
of his impression may be found in the design for the text: "I have
said to corruption, thou art my father; to the worm, thou art my
mother and my sister." In the pencil sketch in the Manuscript
Book the head with its Egyptian quality is sunk in mystery. The
swathed form has the appearance of a mummy and the death-like
compression and rigidity of the figure are eloquent of Blake's
control over the spiritual atmosphere of his compositions. In the
small edition of the printed design much of this effect is lost. The
"hard determinate outline" of the graver has dissipated the soft
mist of enchantment evoked by the flowing pencil line, and the
face is commonplace and uninteresting in its blank marionette
stare. In the large paper edition, however, the wonder has almost
been wrought and by technical means entirely independent of those
by which the first eflFect was gained. Nothing more emphatically
illustrates Blake's emphatic assurance that execution is only the
result of invention. In place of copying his first eflFect, which
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 9
apparently depended upon the veiled tenderness of the pencil line,
he translated into terms of engraving the noble mystery of his
conception and executed afresh his imagined figure with a success
equal if not similar to that attained in his first impetuous trans-
lation of it on the page of his sketch book.
Occasionally the subject appears in more than one version in
the Manuscript Book. The design for Air is drawn, for example,
both in sepia and in pencil on the same page. A seated figure
with the elbows on the knees and the hands clasped above the
head is seen against a background of cloud. In the sepia sketch
a considerable portion of the body shows between the chin and the
knees. This part of the figure is in deep shadow. The pencil
sketch shows the head lowered so that the chin rests on the right
knee, the left elbow is dropped between the knees, and the upper
part of the body is hidden.
In the small-paper copy of The Gates of Paradisey the lines are
very rudely engraved, but the position of the figure follows that of
the pencil sketch. The cloud is more varied in outline, billowing
out to the left until it reaches the edge of the plate at the lower
left comer. Some locks of hair that are not seen in either the pencil
or the sepia sketch fly up from under the clasped hands, adding
to the aspect of terrified distraction. The top of the left shoulder
and the left upper arm which show in the pencil sketch but not
in the sepia are obliterated.
In the large-paper edition the left shoulder and upper arm
again show, darkly shaded with cross-hatching so that they tell
against the sky, which is also darkly shaded with horizontal lines.
A little more of the hair is shown, and the chin rests on the right
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lo THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
knee as in the pencil sketch. The bounding lines are darkened
and more are added more fully to model the legs and arms. The
arrangement of the light and shade in the cloud forms is changed
to give more impressively the effect of continuity in line and mass
to the general composition. The face is unlike any other version
— additional lines about the eyes soften the look of terror con-
spicuous in the earlier print, and the corners of the mouth are
changed to a milder curve. In the sepia and pencil sketches and
in the earlier printed version the right shoulder is a round knob;
in the later print the muscle connecting it with the back is shown,
making a continuous curved line that passes back of the head.
The caption in the large-paper edition has the inserted line "On
Cloudy Doubts and Reasoning Cares." The design as it appears
in my own copy of Gilchrist's Life is a sorry example of the evil
done by poor reproduction, the pale shadows, the blotches and
blurred outline almost destroying the original significance. To
pass from the Manuscript Book sketches to the small printed
edition, from that to the later edition, and finally to the Gilchrist
version is to appreciate the desirability of seeing an artist's work
grow under his hands in order to know the idea in his mind, and
the absolute necessity of seeing originals if we are to judge accu-
rately the merit of his execution.
Another design, the different states of which show many vari-
ations, is the one depicting a woman plucking a mandrake (Plate
I of the series). In the Manuscript Book the sketch is quite fully
worked out in sepia retouched with pen and ink. The woman's
figure is long and slender and exceedingly spirited in action, as
though she had been running in her eagerness to reach the spot
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE n
and had stooped to the mandrake almost before slackening her
speed. Her flying hair lends to this effect of swift motion hardly
checked. In the sketch the tree beneath which the mandrake
child is growing occupies less room in the design than is the case
in the printed books, and cuts more decoratively across the space.
More of the child's body shows, also, and there are suggestions of
other little mandrake children growing as in a flower-bed. The
woman's left arm is re-drawn, or, to speak more accurately, a
second left arm is drawn in a somewhat different position, hanging
straighter down and coming closer to the knee. This second
position is adopted in both of the printed versions, which in several
details differ greatly from one another. The earlier impression
shows the woman's figure with less work on it, the face in particular
being very crudely modelled and unpleasant in line, with an ex-
pression that goes far toward justifying Swinburne's description
of it — "half blind with fierce surprise and eagerness, half smiling
with foolish love and pitiful pleasure"; the left leg is also ugly in
drawing, the long impetuous outline being broken by a fold of
the drapery which conceals the contour and interrupts its continuity
half-way between the knee and the ankle. In the later impression
the figure is much more vigorously defined, though still missing
the lithe grace and energy of the sketch; the muscular development
is more strongly indicated, and the left leg is freed from the en-
croaching drapery and its outline is now continuous. The foot is
worked into a much more beautiful form and the face has become
attractive, although slightly blurred and without the graciousness
of expression found in the sketch. The head has become quite
classic in shape and the hair has been drawn into a Greek knot
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12 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
instead of flying loose as in the sketch. These changes and others,
many of them so minute as to be almost imperceptible and quite
indescribable, show Blake working toward that "clearness and
precision" which he said were his chief objects in painting, and
toward perfection of execution. His art, he most truly declared,
was to find form and to keep it, and whatever defects may have
crept into his completed work, it was never "smoothed up and
Nigled and Poco Pen'd," to use his own uncompromising phrase-
ology. He could not, however, keep the dew upon his blossoms
and also handle them, and all the sketches in the Manuscript
Book that are in any sense complete compositions show a spon-
taneity even beyond that of the engravings and consequently beyond
that of any contemporary or successor of Blake in art. Occasion-
ally, as in the drawing for Rairty the soft blur of the pencil, increased
no doubt by the additional blur of time, conveys an impression of
"that infernal machine, called Chiaro Oscuro,'' against which
Blake's verbal furies were launched from time to time; but com-
monly the pencil lines like those of the engravings are distinct and
pure, and furthermore have a flexibility and subtle expressiveness
hardly to be imagined by those familiar with the engraved work
alone. These sketches, some of them scribbled over with memo-
randa, others crowded close with drafts of poems and biting epi-
grams, all of them intended solely for the eye of the artist, are to
me more eloquent of Blake's commanding genius than the Inventions
to the Book of Job or the amazing drawings for the Jerusalem.
Blake, however, was persistent in his tendencies and single in
his aims. Like perhaps the majority of great inventors whose
minds are filled with harmonious and related ideas, he continued
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 13
in his age to seek those things which he had sought in his youth,
and to a great degree the same plastic forms satisfied him as caskets
for his strange imaginations. Mr. John Sampson has called atten-
tion to the unity of his writings and also to the " absolute uniformity
with which definite symbolical figures are used to express definite
conceptions in his poetry." He clung with the same consistency
to definite elements of design, repeating them in his work so often
that they constitute a kind of signature, a special stamp of his
individuality. His general attitude toward the two great elements
of decorative art, form and movement, also remained unchanged
throughout his life. They were always first with him, always
much more important than colour and tone, always to be sought
as the chief end of artistic eflFort. In spite of many variations of
method and medium, excursions into the finally despised field of
oil technic, attempts at portraiture, substitution of an elaborate
kind of colour-printing for the austerities of pure line-engraving,
and minor ups and downs of style and taste, Blake's art is un-
failing in its life-communicating quality and continually conveys
the idea of a soaring flame of imaginative energy enshrined in
rigidly controlled forms. He is alone in his generation in his
ability to express in the same design the quintessence of physical
and mental energy and the static quality of absolute repose. A
remarkable instance of the two qualities in one design so subtly
combined as to seem the inevitable result of the artist's conception
is the Crucifixion plate (Jerusalem^ page 76), superficially rem-
iniscent of Diirer's Passioriy but how much more intense and
impressive in its emotional significance! The Crucified, dimly
seen through gloom, droops lifelessly from the cross, the face
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14 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
retaining its mild beauty of expression. Beneath, the wide-flung
arms of the worshipper greet the vision with such exultation as
only an artist technically drilled as Blake was, and also concen-
trated upon the spiritual side of his subject, could evoke. There
seems hardly more to the drawing than a few perpendicular and
a few horizontal lines, yet it completely embodies the sentiment of
the accompanying text in which occur these lines, as exquisite in
their subdued passion as the drawing:
England! awake! awake! awake!
Jerusalem thy Sister calls!
Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death
And close her from thy ancient walls ?
Thy hills and valleys felt her feet
Gently upon their bosoms move:
Thy Gates beheld sweet Zion's ways;
Then was a time of joy and love.
And now the time returns again :
Our souls exult, and London's towers
Receive the Lamb of God to dwell
In England's green and pleasant bowers.
It is seldom, however, that Blake's work is quite as simple as
this, even in his earlier period. A monumental and impersonal
character is given to his designs by architectonic arrangements in
which his sense of form supports and corrects his sense of move-
ment, and he seems as well to have sought continually that balance
of eff^ect which consists not only in relations of line and mass but
in the relations of the mental drama to be illustrated. His per-
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 15
manent ideal was the vision of an earthly and material temple, as
fair as the fairest ever built by man, solidly constructed and in-
habited by aspirations, thoughts, and emotions for which the
slightest vesture is too gross. He continually limited and organized
form on the one hand while he augmented and accelerated move-
ment on the other hand until he definitely achieved in his design
a visible distinction between spirit and matter. The swifter his
soul flies to heaven the more fixed and permanent does he make
his earthly boundaries. In his Marriage of Heaven and Hell he
declares that "energy is the only Life, and is from the Body;
and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy"; and
also that "Energy is Eternal Delight." This eternal delight and
this sharp bounding line limiting it appear in all his designs.
For the rushing, impetuous flight of his little figures, liberated,
he persuades us, from the bonds of the flesh — his disembodied
spirits meeting in heaven with immortal ardour; his angels and
archangels descending like a bolt of lightning upon their imperial
errands; his devils contending and striding to and fro upon the
earth to work injury to human kind — Blake seems to have con-
sulted chiefly that inner vision as to whose counsel he was eloquent.
Not even Botticelli so powerfully conveys the sense of irresistible
movement, of an impulse that sends to their destination all human
and unearthly messengers as arrows are sent to a target and with
an aim as concrete and single. Certainly none of the artists with
whose work Blake is known to have been familiar gave him his
model.
But for the firm and austere walls which he erected as his
favourite symbol of the ponderable world he had an inexhaustible
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i6 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
mine of memorized forms to draw upon. In his boyhood, we
learn from his biographers, he was sent by the wise Basire, en-
graver to the Society of Antiquaries, to make drawings of the tombs
in Westminster Abbey and in other English churches. This he
did with great skill and fidelity, sketching the tombs from every
point of view, "frequently standing on the monument and viewing
the figures from the top," and fixing in his mind thereby certain
formal shapes that were to serve him to the end of his life in com-
binations of the greatest variety, but always recognizable as the
fundamental framework of his picture. The round-topped arch,
to take one conspicuous example, uniting columns, as it is seen
in Romanesque buildings, appears continually in his designs and
lends a basic dignity to the composition, however fantastic may
be the subsidiary ornament. It is possible that Blake attached to
this architectural form a symbolic significance such as he attached
to the Rock and the CaveS but certainly we must seek for its
origin in the Abbey drawings. Our concern with it, however, is
limited to its eflFect upon his composition, which is to suggest beyond
its enframing curve the freedom of a universe while holding the
dominant figures of the design within its severe limitations. To
glance through a single volume, the Poems of Innocence and Ex-
periencey for example, is to realize its pervasiveness and the value
of its influence upon the observer, conveying as it does the sense
of spaciousness under control, of the widest outlook brought within
the range of an individual door or window.
^ ** The Rock and the Cave, constantly recurring figures in Blake *s latter Prophetic Books, are
invariably used as symbols of the state opposed to Jerusalem (or the life of spiritual hberty and
imagination), in which ' Minute Particulars * of personal identity are crushed under the weight of
reason and natural religion.** Blake *8 Poetical Works: Edited by John Sampson, p. 307.
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 17
It is proof of Blake's thorough assimilation of his patiently
won familiarity with this and other architectural forms that he
uses them in his space composition often without hinting at their
origin in architecture. In the exquisite illustration to the poem
called The Little Boy Founds the arch which frames the inner
composition consists of two trees placed symmetrically on either
side of the design, their outer contours emphasized by a deep,
shadow, while their inner contours are in full light. The branches
meet above the radiant figures of the child and his heavenly guar-
dian as they emerge from a misty shade. A somewhat more subtle
arrangement is seen in the drawing for the preceding poem. The
Little Boy Lostj where line and light are both used in the structural
composition and made to contribute to the arch effect. On the
right of the design is a straight tree-trunk with a curving bough,
and on the left is the elongated oval of a blazing sun which assumes
the function of a pillar of light supporting the arch on one side
as the tree-trunk supports it on the other. In the second drawing
for The Little Black Boy the over-arching tree is again used, with
the bending form of the mild Christ repeating its slow curve and
the dark straight form of the Little Black Boy serving as the left
pillar. In the illiistration for Night we have once more an arch
and one column formed by a. tree, while the other column is a flight
of ascending angels. The illustration for the Cradle Song shows
a woman bending over a cradle, her figure completing the arch
begun by the curved hood of the cradle toward which she leans.
Nearly all, if not all, of Blake's books would yield similar
examples of his use of the arch and also of a great number of other
architectonic members and architectural details; sometimes with a
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i8 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
quite crude frankness of geometrical rendering, as on page 14 of
the Jerusaleniy where the arc spanning the heavens is the segment
of a circle, the chord of which is the horizontal line of the prostrate
figure on the ground; sometimes successfully distracting our at-
tention from the plan of the composition by the wreathing of its
formal skeleton with gay and lovely scenes from the natural world
but never diminishing the loftiness of his style by a too familiar
realism or mean or trivial accessories.
Occasionally, indeed, he introduces his beautifully proportioned
ogees, his circles and spirals, the pointed as well as the round arch,
the Doric gateway, and the mediaeval tomb itself, with its marble
pillow, its braided mouldings, its supine knight or lady in the
stiff seemliness of death, as literally as though he had taken them
directly from the cathedral monuments. His enormous designs
for Young's Night Thoughts are instances. The plate illustrating
The Counsellor^ ^i^gy Warrior^ Mother and Child in the Tomb
shows unmistakably this source; the prone figures in the arched
recess are none other than those of the Abbey. The Soul hovering
over the Body reluctantly parting with Life is another plate in which
occurs a mediaeval bier, and still another is The Death of the Good
Old Many above whose stark limbs fly horizontal angels. In his
designs for Miller's new edition of Biirger's Lenore (1796) he clearly
called to his aid the marble forms which he had found such ser-
viceable models. In the illustration to the last stanza where
Lenore wakes to William's tumultuous affection we see the long
recumbent figure rising from its stiff couch with almost a sense of
watching the ancient effigy of Queen Philippa open astonished
eyes upon the stony composure of her tomb. These more or less
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 19
literal transcripts or at least close adaptations of his early studies
to the demands of his later art demonstrate at least the excellence
of his training. Nothing could exceed the elegance of the draughts-
manship or the learned precision with which the relations of lines
and spaces are planned, and the same beautiful execution is seen
in his copies from Michelangelo and others that are now in the
British M^useum. He speaks from his own experience in one of
his comments on Reynold's Discourses. "If he means/' he says
with reference to a dull statement by Sir Joshua, "that Copying
correctly is a hindrance, he is a Liar, for that is the only School
to the Language of Art."
It was a school in which Blake had been a diligent scholar;
but having mastered his language he was not guilty of confining
it to the hackneyed phrases of the copy-book. Even where he
drew, as we have seen, upon his early lessons and models for his
constructions, the -depth of his emotion, his amazing capacity to
communicate his mood, his power of charging his design with
fresh feeling, made him at all times the most original of artists.
We may say that he adopted for his type of aged man one made
familiar by Michael Angelo and kept it to the end; that the gnarled
nudes of his Jerusalem suggest those of Diirer's prints; that the
long-limbed, deep-chested youths and maidens of his illustrations
to Paradise Losty with their small heads and noble gesture, bring
hints to us of Greek marbles, but at the same moment we recog-
nize that it is never the likeness to a prototype that strikes first
upon the mind, but, instead, the personal character and rich sig-
nificance of the design controlling all minor resemblances. And
in the finer drawings where the linear definition becomes less fixed
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20 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
and hard, where the artist insists least upon that article of his
creed which affirms that "a spirit and a vision are not, as the
modem philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing; they
are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal
and perishing nature can produce"; where he allows a tender
atmosphere to fill his spacious arrangements with the bloom and
mystery of spring mornings, he shows a mastery of space-composi-
tion which could not have been learned from a lifetime of mere
copying but must have sprung from an imagination haunted by
majestic visions. The water colour entitled Creation of Evej which,
reduced to its linear framework, conveys but a weak impression of
the composition, is built up with masses of Ught, half-tone and pale
colour, to an effect large and stem in its suggestions of an empty
world roofed by the dome of the sky, yet filled with floating mists and
the soft radiance of dawn. The familiar round arch may be dis-
tinguished in the panel of light behind the figures of the Creator
and Eve, and no Templar Knight lies more rigid in his death sleep
than Adam upon the flowering earth; the upright figures have a co-
lumnar strength and symmetry, and their position suggests the con-
struction of an inner arch or doorway through which we look into the
warm light surrounded by the dim twilight of a chaotic world. Yet
there is not, as in many of the drawings already referred to, a too
obviously scientific arrangement. That "infernal machine called
Chiaro Oscuro" intervenes to clothe the scene with captivating
beauty. The spectator is soothed by the cool sweetness of that
morning air bathing the primeval forms and filling the mighty void,
before his mood ascends to meet the solemnity of the severe com-
position.
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 21
Such a drawing represents Blake at his imaginative best; but
it is far from being unequalled in his accomplishment. The
famous design called Plague, also a water colour, is hardly less
noble in its arrangement of lines and masses or less expressive of
the sentiment of the subject. We behold women weeping over
their dead, a bier borne by tall classic figures, a man bending
over an open grave, and a background filled with a dwelling and
a portion of a church. The straight lines of casements, roofs, and
walls, the squares of the pavement, the low arch of the church
door, give great clearness and a certain rigidity to the design. In
opulent contrast are the large full curves of the figures, of the
mounting flames of distant fires, and of the billowing smoke. The
colour is almost one tone of yellowish gray deepened with purple
tints in the shadows. The Hellenic spirit of the whole is so marked
that it seems much more like an illustration to the Electra of
Euripides than the expression of modem sentiment.
The secret of Blake's power to communicate such moods,
moods as foreign to our common temper as those induced by poetry
of the highest quality, lies in part in his intensity of motive. He
makes extraordinary sacrifices to attain his end, subordinating or
eliminating everything that does not contribute to the sense of
grandeur, sorrow, solemnity, or joy, as the case may be. Where
he wishes to convey a sense of swift motion he cuts off ruthlessly
all other appeals to our aesthetic pleasure. In the figure striding
through flames at the head of the third page of the Book of Urizen
we translate the wide stretch of limb, the uninterrupted flow of
the principal lines, the rhythmic gesture, the buoyancy of the form,
into an impression of rushing motion that leaves us only dimly
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22 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
conscious of the strong sinews, the powerful frame, the muscles
reacting to the eflFort. This figure, however, has enough modelling
of surface to suggest a substantial body. But where, as in the case
of the title page for the Book of Thely and some of the designs for
the Visions of the Daughters of Albion^ and for the Europe^ the
effect of the movement of disembodied thought and feeling is
desired, Blake does not hesitate to show us abstract forms with
merely the hint of human shape, soaring like flames, or driven as
leaves by a mighty wind, and with imaginations powerfully excited,
we demand of them nothing more than that they should thus soar
and thus be driven^ A corporeal form, a muscle, a feature would
impede, we instinctively admit, that irresistible flight through space.
Critics who resent this arbitrary use of the human figure now
as an architectural member in the structure of Blake's design,
and again serving merely to render values of movement, and who
recall Blake's contempt of models, are inclined, perhaps, to lay
too great a stress upon his unwillingness to follow nature. It is
true that he said quaintly, "Natural objects always did and now
do, weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me," and,
again, " I assert for myself that I do not behold the outward crea-
tion, and that to me it is hindrance and not action," but he was
speaking from the standpoint of a trained artist, one who has
chosen his method and his field, and is beyond the initial stages
of his craftsmanship. In those initial stages his study of natural
objects was sufficient to furnish him with material for the work of
a' lifetime. He was not a portraitist but a poet and designer, and
while the portraitist may be these also, portraiture is not essential
either to design or to poetry. He has himself stated the case as
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 23
follows : " If you have not nature before you for every touch, you
cannot paint portrait, and if you have nature before you at all,
you cannot paint history," for "portrait painting is the direct
contrary to designing and historical painting in every respect."
It would be, however, an unpardonable blunder to assume that
he was indifferent to nature or ignorant of the pictorial aspect of
the natural world. He had learned his language of art not only
from copying the works of man but from copying the trees and
fields and animals encountered in his long rambles on the outskirts
of London. He had supplied himself with innumerable observa-
tions and records of nature upon which he could draw at will after
they had become familiar to him, and, like the forms of the Abbey
monuments, they appear and reappear in his designs. How often
has he not used in his decorative borders the tendrils and fruit
clusters, the broad leaves and twisting stalk of the grapevine that
grew in his garden f The q^k trees in whose shade he rested rise
in majestic strength above the dark sheep of the English meadows
clustering characteristically in sculpturesque masses, haunting the
distances of his rural landscapes, or standing singly with bent
heads enhancing the symmetry of his composition. The little
greens on which his rustics dance and sing, the winding streams,
the children leaping in play, the modelled shapes of the hills with
their bland sweep across the horizon, the simple huts and beautiful
little churches that nestle in their hollows, all testify to the accuracy
of his vision and his hand. But he saw nature in terms of art.
An anecdote told of him in Gilchrist's Life illustrates the constant
play of his transforming imagination over the familiar scene. "The
other evening," he said to a group of interested listeners, "taking
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24 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
a walk, I came to a meadow, and at the farther comer of it I saw a
fold of lambs. Coming nearer, the ground blushed with flowers;
and the wattled cote and its woolly tenants were of an exquisite
pastoral beauty. But I looked again, and it proved to be no living
flock, but beautiful sculpture." When asked where he saw this,
he touched his forehead, replying, "Here"; and he may have
meant that the whole vision was imaginary; but how many times
must he not in fact have looked thus upon the fair fields near Dul-
wich or Blackheath, mentally turning their tranquil aspect into
forms of artistic expression. He used a certain number of natural
objects, notably the sheep, the tree, and the vine, somewhat as a
writer may use special words and construction with a consciousness
of their communicating his inner mood as no others could; and
this very repetition aids in their effectiveness. They also, like his
• arches and pillars, become a part of his style, indissolubly connected
in our minds with his way of looking at things and his choice of
things to see. That he did not see the outdoor world as most of
his contemporaries saw it is obvious; but that his references to
nature were constant and appreciative cannot be doubted. When
he said, "None could have other than natural or organic thoughts
if he had none but organic perceptions," he uttered a truth to
which the work of all genuinely imaginative artists testifies. In
order to create life or the appearance of life it is necessary indeed
to have "organic perceptions," discriminating between the essential
and the non-essential in things seen; from such discriminations
spring vital and poetic works in which the objects of the visible
world play their valuable part, in truth, but which are inspired
and quickened by imagination. Blake saw imaginatively whether
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 25
he looked within or without for his models; and he may be said
to have seen as truly as the purely imitative worker whose literal
renderings are devoid of spirit.
With what seems in him a surprisingly patient effort, he once
attempted to make this clear to the Reverend Dr. Trusler, and
put his case more vividly and justly than it can be put for him:
"I see everything I paint in this world," he wrote to this diffi-
cult and dissatisfied patron; "but everybody does not see alike.
To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the sun,
and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful pro-
portions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves
some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing,
which stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and de-
formity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and
some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of
imagination Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he
sees. As the eye is formed such are its powers. You certainly
mistake when you say that the visions of fancy are not to be found
in this world. To me this world is all one continued vision of
fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so."
And in many of his marginal notes to Reynold's D is courses j
Blake emphasizes the value of study from nature as preliminary
to imaginative drawing. Where Reynolds declares: "How inca-
pable those are of producing anything of their own, who have spent
much of their time in making finished copies is known to all who
are conversant with our art," Blake responds, elaborating the
statement already quoted, "This is most false, for no one can
ever design till he has learned the language of art by making many
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26 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
finished copies both of nature and art, and of whatever comes in
his way from earliest childhood. 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." Where Reynolds
says on the other hand that he very much doubts "whether a habit
of drawing correctly what we see will not give a proportionable
power of drawing correctly what we imagine/' Blake claps him on
the shoulder with the response: "This is Admirably Said. Why
does he not always allow as much ? " And at the head of the Second
Discourse Blake writes: "What is laying up materials but copying?
Thus we see him pursuing the laborious path of genius in the
well-known fashion; laying up his materials, making himself master
of his tools, correctly copying appearances, yet never losing his
sense of the large uses to which he must put his smallest effort.
It is precisely this long labour of preparation that enabled him to
respond in moments of inspiration to the mystic voices commanding
him with apparently such unpremeditated art. If his designs seem
unexpected and instantaneous it is because the ideas upon which
they are formed lay so long ripening in his mind, and the executive
hand was so many years in training.
The persistence and uniformity of his artistic theories extend
to his types, which are unchanging throughout his work. In more
than one instance these have their origin in the "visions" that
have lent to Blake's history an element of unreality irritating to
the skeptic who sees "with, not through the eye," and endlessly
fascinating to the student of hagiography. His Satan he beheld
one evening when he was standing at his garden door in Lambeth,
a "horrible grim figure, scaly speckled, very awful, stalking down-
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 27
stairs'* toward him. The Ancient of Days hovered over his head
at the top of his staircase in No. 13 Hercules Buildings, and these
two symboHc forms continue essentially the same in the various
compositions in which they appear. The Satan "scaly-speckled"
is a peculiarly magnificent conception, usually accompanied with
darting flames, and wearing the haughty aspect appropriate to a
Prince of Darkness. In clear and bland contrast to this stalking
form, which in the coloured plates is iridescent with darkly shining
blues and greens, is the fair, incomparably gracious and benign
Christ, lofty and commanding but with a supreme gentleness that
illustrates Blake's reiterated article of faith: "The Spirit of Jesus
is continual forgiveness of sin."
These features of Blake's design, fixed human types, archi-
tectonic composition, facts of nature transformed into truths of art,
are held in common with many another artist of first importance.
What separates him specifically from his fellows is the union in
him of two types of artist seldom found together. He decorated
his page as learnedly as the Florentines their chapel walls, at the
same time he interpreted spiritual moods with the fervour of a
Savonarola. He was not only a Decorator of extraordinary power,
he was an Illustrator in the sense given to the word by Mr.
Berenson. As the first he adapted his forms to the space they
were to fill with all the cunning of the best mediaeval illuminators.
In his printed books his text and his ornament are absolutely
harmonious. To realize how each was complementary to the
other it is only necessary to compare in Gilchrist's Life those
pages which are fac-similes of pages in the Jerusalem with those
upon which are printed reproductions of the designs in conjunc-
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28 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
tion with ordinary type. His space composition is as dignified
and ample in his page decorations as though intended for the wall
of a temple. He never confused art with emotion, yet he never
failed to make it the vehicle of emotion. In power to com-
municate a mood he has no superior; he can conduct his
orchestra of line and colour in a way to fill the mind now with the
sense of hieratic dignity, now with the joy of soaring melody, now
with the freshness of pure air and simple sounds, now with the
dread of crashing storms and furious whirlwinds, now with the
awful quiet of irrevocable doom. He endows his figures with an
immense significance, yet he never allows them to break the bounds
of formal decorative arrangement. That interpreters are still
working with confessions of tentativeness and inadequacy over the
intricate maze of his doctrine in the Prophetic Books is a sign of
the difficulties that would await an interpreter of the spiritual
intention of his drawings, but the spiritual intention whether cryptic
or clear is never permitted to clog the artistic interest of the design.
That is always present and always extraordinary. Nevertheless
it is indissolubly connected with the spiritual intention. Blake's
genius lay deeper than the gifts of the designer and decprator
which he possessed in such plenitude; it was that of the psychologist
who knows the tempers and weathers of the human soul. The
human soul, in fact, was the book of his illustration but we shall
presently see how well it pleased him to work in a kind of indirect
collaboration at his monumental task.
His attitude toward colour was entirely characteristic and con-
sistent with his theories of art. Although endowed with a singu-
larly delicate sense of colour he nevertheless believed colour to be the
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 29
great stumbling block of all artists not blessed with inventive imagi-
nation and a passion for form. " In a work of art," he declared with
his customary emphasis, "it is not fine tints that are required but fine
forms. Fine tints without fine forms are always the subterfuge of
the blockhead." He felt, however, the supreme importance of
"fine tints" where there was to be any colouring at all. He had
the passion of the true colourist for pure unsullied hues and care-
fully calculated harmonies. Writing of one of Fuseli's pictures
which had been attacked on the side of its colour, he said: "The
effect of the whole is truly sublime on account of that very colouring
which our critic calls black and heavy. The German flute colour
which was used by the Flemings (they call it burnt bone) has pos-
sessed the eye of certain connoisseurs that they cannot see appro-
priate colouring, and are blind to the gloom of a real terror."
And in a letter to Thomas Butts he writes : " Let me observe that
the yellow-leather flesh of old men, the ill-drawn and ugly old
women, and above all, the daubed black-and-yellow shadows that
are found in most fine, aye, and the finest pictures, I altogether
reject as ruinous to effect, though connoisseurs may think otherwise."
This sentiment is shared by the Impressionists whose work
marks the progress of art in the nineteenth century, and a very
brief examination of Blake's coloured drav/ings suffices to show
him in advance of his time in many other tenets of his belief.
That his colouring should be "appropriate" was of the highest
importance with him. He used it as he used his line, to illustrate
the story of human aspirations and emotions. Every tint in his
coloured works is a part of his intellectual plan and as far as pos-
sible removed from the unimaginative realism of imitative painting.
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30 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
He held in contempt the mere reproduction of the appearance of
things without reference to their function as the expression of an
idea. "A man sets himself down with colours, and with all the
articles of painting," he said, "he puts a model before him, and he
copies that so neat as to make it a deception. Now let any man
of sense ask himself one question : Is this art i Can it be worthy
of admiration to anybody of understanding?"
To handle colour in a way worthy of admiration to people of
understanding required the use of imagination he held, and it is
rather in defence of imagination than of his own skill that he speaks
in his candid appreciation of his picture of the Ancient Britons.
"The flush of health in flesh," he writes, "exposed to the open air,
nourished by the spirits of forests and floods, in that ancient happy
period which history has recorded, cannot be like the sickly daubs
of Titian or Rubens. Where will the copier of nature, as it now is,
find a civilized man who has been accustomed to go naked f Imag-
ination only can furnish us with colouring appropriate, such as is
found in the Frescoes of Raphael and Michael Angelo: the dispo-
sition of forms always directs colouring in works of true art. As
to a modem Man stripped from his load of clothing, he is like a
dead corpse* Hence Rubens, Titian, Correggio, and all of that
class, are Hke leather and chalk; their men are like leather and
their women like chalk, for the disposition of their forms will not
admit of grand colouring; in Mr. B*s Britons, the blood is seen
to circulate in their limbs; he defies competition in colouring."
This searching for significance in colour as in everything else
contributed, of course, to the life and passion of Blake's work
and made him dear to those who, like the young Pre-Raphaelites,
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 31
considered intensity of feeling of supreme importance in art.
Although his theory is marred in its expression by characteristic
animadversions upon great painters with whom he was not in
sympathy and of whose works he had the most imperfect knowledge,
it fits in with all his other theories and with it he achieved remark-
able victories, presenting to the vision imaginary scenes in which
is felt the pulse of life throbbing more ardently than in any realistic
painting of the actual world.
If, for example, we should examine the coloured copy of
the Europe from which the illustrations for the present volume
are taken, we should find the emotional quality of the colouring
in complete harmony with the emotional character of the design
and of the theme forming the basis of the design. The very title-
page, with its serpent rampant, suggests by its soft rich tones, by
the broken splendour of the reptile's spotted skin, and the dim,
clouded background, a text of mystery and eloquence. The frontis-
piece representing the Ancient of Days striking the first circle of
the Earth is a magnificent introduction to the general scheme of
colour maintained with few exceptions throughout the book —
the colour of sunlight and flame against darkness. The lines illus-
trated are not those of Blake's text but those of Milton's Paradise
Losty book vii, 11. (lines) 225-231:
"He took the golden Compasses, prepar'd
In God's Eternal store, to circumscribe
This Universe and all created things:
One foot he center'd, and the other turn'd
Round through the vast profunditie obscure;
And said, thus farr extend, thus farr thy bounds,
This be thy just Circumference, O World."
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32 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
Not only does the majestic kneeling figure, concentrated upon
its mighty task, convey the required impression, but the resonant
gold of the orb from which the King of Glory leans, joined to the
red of the clouds and the dusk of the
"... vast immeasurable abyss
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,"
intensifies it thrice over.
In the design depicting Enitharmon lifting the mantle of cloud
from the sleeping Ore, we have a marvellous hint of the subdued
blaze of suns slumbering in purple heavens, and the plate in which
appears the figure of the demon attended by two angels gives the
contrary aspect of night, the moonlit and starlit twilight, the pale
blue and yellow robes of the angels glinting with a cool lustre on
either side of the sombre Satan, and the colour tone of the whole
illustrating in an elusive yet convincing manner the first line of the
text upon the page:
"Now comes the night of Enitharmon 's woe.*'
Accompanying Enitharmon's melodious cry to "Ethinthus,
queen of waters " is a border of gaily coloured birds, snails, butter-
flies, serpents, and spiders which flash in and out of the text, gleam-
ing notes of emphasis upon such charming allusions to the natural
world as that comparing the children of Ethinthus to
"... gay fishes on the wave, when the cold moon drinks the
dew."
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 33
The final illustration is for the lines describing the genius of rev-
olution awakened from sleep and striding to his work of destruction :
But terrible Ore, when he beheld the morning in the East,
Shot from the heights of Enitharmon,
And in the vineyards of red France appeared the light of his fury.
The sun glow'd fiery red;
The furious terrors flew around,
On golden chariots raging with red wheels dripping with blood
The Lions lash their wrathful tails.
This plate shows a figure instinct with energy, moving swiftly and
forcibly dragging reluctant ones with him, followed by flames. The
conflagration of yellow and red upon the page gives the poem the
air of setting as it rose in the light of fiery planets.
Any of Blake^s coloured books would yield similar instances of
his endeavour to illustrate through his colouring the mood of his
text. We may say, if we like, that in later years under the influence
of the rising school of water-colourists he turned from light tints
and washes to heavier pigment and more elaborate and violent
colour schemes, but the evolution followed that of his poetry and
seems to me to be governed entirely by his theory of emotional
and intellectual illustration.
In the fine collection of water-colour drawings now in the Print
Room of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts we see Blake's colour
untrammelled by his mechanical processes and exhibiting to a high
degree his care for the "character" of a subject as he called that
quality which differentiates one thing from another in the minutest
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34 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
particulars. Conspicuous among these designs are the ones illus-
trating the Plagues of Egypt. The technical beauty of the washes
of colour in several of the series, their delicate precision, the clearness
of definition in the tones without hardness of edge or dryness of
texture, the light, fresh quality of the colour devoid of crudity and
innocent of vaporous indecision, the lively calligraphic line, bring
them very near perfection in the difficult and well-nigh lost art of
"wash-drawing"; yet the value of the colour in the expression
of the idea, so passionately and positively conceived, is perhaps the
most extraordinary characteristic they have.
The design for Famine is almost a monochrome of violet gray,
warmed with yellow — "very terrible and grimly quiet," Mr.
William Rossetti calls it in his annotated list. The tomb-like
vault of stone, the austere line of the hills in the background, the
long straight lines of the figure, all contribute to the effect of fading
vitality, of waning vigour, and no colour-scheme could more com-
pletely suggest the faintness of starvation than this flickering gray
sinking into cold purplish shadows and rising into wan light.
The design for Pestilence no less forcibly communicates the
sentiment of the subject, but with a more varied and less limited
treatment. A demon covered with parti-coloured scales stretches
out huge arms from which a visible miasma pours down upon
rushing, frightened figures seen in the pale light of torches. Be-
tween the legs of the demon is seen a small house with an angel in
the doorway. The demon strides lightly and powerfully upon his
devastating way, filled with the energy of his strength and oblivious
to all human emotions. No wrath or sense of cruelty is in his
face. With a woeful yet immobile expression and with a graceful
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 35
motion and blithe gesture he distributes bereavement. Beneath
him, men and women faint and fall or fling despairing arms in
lovely attitudes. The agony of their expressions is balanced and
corrected by the bland sweetness of the flowing lines. It is chiefly
the colour that renders the impression of horror. A strange ma-
lignity is suggested by the dusky background mysteriously blurred
as by a film of smoke, the blue lights streaming from the figure of
the demon, the glowing crimson eyes and jet of flame colour on the
head; and the white light of the torches completes the dramatic
scheme. The contrast between the depth and mystery of the
colour attained apparently by a considerable amount of reworking,
and the large clear washes of the Famine which are in the tradition
of the early "stained manner," shows that Blake, though inde-
pendent of the realist's desire to copy textures and incidental effects
of light and shade, was not confined by any rigid limitations in the
use of his medium. To get his effect he would use quite opposite
methods, and although he clung with the best possible result to the
pen outline in most of his work, he was capable of entirely oblit-
erating it where he felt the need of atmospheric depth to produce
an emotional impression.
An intense effect of murky terror is again given in the design
entitled The King of Babylon in Hell (also in the Boston Museum).
The red robe in this superb piece of colour might be by Titian's
own hand — that Titian of whom Blake cheerfully afiirmed: "Such
Idiots are not Artists." A rich blue plays over the scaled breast
of Lucifer with a metallic gleam. His arm is thrown out with
magnificent energy of gesture, and here as elsewhere he corresponds
to the Miltonic Satan, the brilliant son of the morning whose form
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36 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
"had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured."
About his imperious figure the fires of hell bum in low dusky tones
of red and orange. Simple and few as the colours are, their choice
and combination adequately support the epic conception; and the
treatment of the background is sufficiently vague and generalized
to suggest the dim echoing cavern of Milton's Hell. In a design
with such a message to convey, vagueness becomes itself a "minute
particular'' in Blake's sense of the term, that helps to establish the
identity of the idea; and the crispness and positiveness gained by
the use of the pen outline wherever he desired especially tj) "define
the parts" keeps the drawing decided while emphasizing the depth
of the atmospheric background.
In thus adapting his treatment to his conception Blake's tact
was impeccable and his skill adequate. A very large number of
his water-colour drawings, however, are in the style of the Famine
— some of them hardly so much as washed with colour, merely
stained with thin tints so lightly as to make them seem unfinished
in comparison with the full hues of the colour-printed books.
Notwithstanding, these faintly tinted drawings convey the idea
with as much poetry and distinction as any of the more splendid
works. The texture unimpaired by abrasion, the dignity of the
broad stretches of monochrome, the imaginative value of the
slight suggestions of colour in place of complete harmonies, give
them the charm of serenity. In them Blake's energy is subdued.
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE zi
By his handling of the colour in consonance with the noble forms
he transports us into an ideal mood of quietness and revery, and
it is interesting to note that in conspicuous instances this mood is
evoked by a subject drawn from Milton.
The design depicting Raphael and Adam in Conversation^ Eve
ministering to them^ one of a series of nine subjects from Paradise
Losty conveys in a peculiar degree this sense of pleasant rest and
peace such as may belong to dreams of Eden. The figures have
a mingled brightness and majesty quite in harmony with the Mil-
tonic ideal, and the entire scene realizes Milton's stately verbal
picture. In the background are a low hill and a plain on which a
wolf and an elephant, an ostrich and a peacock, are in friendly
juxtaposition. In the distance are other animals, a lion, a flock
of sheep, a cow, and horses. From a knoll in the centre of the
background springs the Tree, and about its trunk curls the body
of the serpent, his head resting on a crotch of the branches whence
he looks reflectively at the figures of Adam and Eve and the Angel.
Eve*s superb form is the centre of the composition, rising erect
and graceful within an arch of palms and flower sprays. Raphael
sits at the right, his arms upraised, pointing aloft. His face is
fair and stem, his wings spring upward and meet like curving
flames above his head, a crown, the spikes of which also suggest
flames, is on his blond hair. Adam sits on the other side of Eve,
his palms outspread in a gesture of deprecation. Eve holds out to
him a heavy bunch of purple grapes, in the other hand is a shell-
shaped cup which she ofi^ers to Raphael. The ground is covered
with delicate flowers and Gothic ornament is naively suggested in
the framework of the bench and table, which seem, nevertheless.
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38 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
to spring from the ground as a natural growth. The colouring
throughout is pale and soft, light greens, violets and blues pre-
dominating, and the whole effect has an indescribable blithe mild-
ness as if the action were taking place indeed in an irradiated
atmosphere of celestial regions, where it is easy to breathe freely
and natural to be glad, where glorious forms and pure colours are
the rule and boundless space opens out on every side beyond the
particular scene.
Another of the same series, The Temptation of Eve^ though less
beautiful in tone, less homogeneous and spacious, still has the
essential quality of appropriateness in the colour. The branches
of the Tree and the fruit fall in a shower from the top of the picture,
the fruit glowing with an inner light
" — of fairest colour mixed,
Ruddy and gold."
Eve eats her forbidden apple from the jaws of the enticing
serpent. According to Milton,
"Earth felt the wound, and nature from her seat.
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe.**
and Blake, fulfilling this description, causes zigzag flashes of light-
ning to play luridly about the lovely sinner over whom domes a
blackening sky with gray and crimson clouds. The colours of the
serpent are gay rather than sinister, and the boding sky with its
lightnings is the only hint given of approaching misfortune.
It is exceedingly interesting to turn from these majestic inter-
pretations of Milton's vast poem to the little set of illustrations to
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 39
the ComuSy and to observe the quick-minded ease with which
Blake's point of view changes under the dominion of his subject.
The pretty masque that belongs to Milton's beauty-loving youth
is enacted in Blake's graceful drawings with the enchantment of
soft pale tints and simple execution. A delightful humour plays
over the different scenes. The advent of Comus and his rabble
rout racing down the hill, long-limbed and gleeful, their arms
tossed above their heads making a beautiful pattern against the
sky, is painted in delicate and pale but bright colours. The scenes
are those of fancy, not those of imagination, and there is no. terror
in them. The drawing of the revellers at table, the fiery lion, the
mild-faced elephant, the long-beaked solemn bird, the cat serving
with bristling mustachios, is filled with the atmosphere of fairy-
land, as quaint and spontaneous as the poetry of Christina Rossetti
when she transmutes the reality of the animal world into romance.
In fact, these eight designs, unimportant as they are in the sum
of Blake's works, leave the spectator idly wishing that he had
oftener indulged himself in this frankly childlike idealism, so unlike
are they to the work of any other illustrator, and so expressive of
that enchanted mood which he awakened in his early poetry by
such lines as the familiar "Piping down the valleys wild."
It is curious that Blake should have shown himself so completely
in sympathy with the remote Milton whose colder genius would
seem inhospitable enough to Blake's fire of inspiration; but it is
true that these illustrations, both to Paradise Lost and to Comusy^
are in a very literal sense illuminations, lighting up the beauty of
passages in the poems that otherwise would be lost on all but the
^I have not seen the series of illustrations to Paradise Regained.
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40 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
most attentively appreciative readers. We know from them how
the Miltonic characters looked and moved in the pictorial world.
Comus and the Lady, Adam and Eve and the angels take on a
personality that wins our belief in them. From Milton's imposing
generalities we turn to Blake's specifications with a sense of finding
ourselves awake when we had thought ourselves dreaming. It is
as strange a world surely as any Milton imagined, but we are in,
not out of it, and we see as he intended us to see, with our spiritual
vision. It is evident that to Blake Milton was neither vague nor
general — in his Advertisement he speaks of drawing "with a firm
and decided hand at once, like Fuseli and Michael Angelo, Shake-
speare and Milton." The true point of approach between Blake
and Milton is probably to be found in their avoidance of the collo-
quial and familiar in their imagery. Where Milton uses pleasant
common incidents of every-day life in his poetry — such as the
comfortable meal served by Eve to Adam and Raphael in Eden —
he elevates them to a plane of superhuman significance by elimi-
nating from them all homely detail, all touches of human vulgarity.
Where Blake employs ordinary intimate features of his own en-
vironment in his composition, he likewise so closely and inextricably
links them to his epic ideal as to make them seem a part of an
unreal world, precisely as the features of those we know best become
unfamiliar to us under the stress of unusual emotion or exaltation.
His "natural port" as Johnson says of Milton's, "is gigantick
loftiness." Also Milton, like Blake, illustrated an abstract concep-
tion with concrete figures, so vividly defined as to seem realistic
even where they are farthest removed from portraiture.
If we turn from Blake's drawings for Milton's poems to his
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 41
drawings for Scriptural themes we see even more clearly the analogy
between the two poetic interpreters. Each works upon his theme
with an imagination that shapes definitely for itself the figures of
such abstractions as Death and Satan and the characters of the
Old Testament, and each invents a setting or background for these
that shall heighten the significance of the drama in which they
take part. For each, significance is the chief end of their style.
Not a word or line, not a fragment of imagery or a note of colour
is used that is not considered with reference to its effect in the
whole design and its contribution to the meaning.
In the design of which our frontispiece is a reproduction, we
have an excellent example of Blake's creative imagination at work
upon a literary theme. It may appear on first thought that " creative
imagination*' is hardly the expression appropriate to the illustra-
tion of a theme already described by another artist. If we remem-
ber, however, that the function of the imagination is to invent, and
also keep in mind the fact that Blake's illustrations are based
primarily on emotional resemblances and convey the life of the
idea, we need not hesitate to consider him as much a creator in his
illustrative as in his purely original designs. Our frontispiece
represents the vision of Ezekiel as it is described in the first chapter
of the book of the prophet Ezekiel. We see "the likeness of the
four living creatures " with every one four faces and every one four
wings, and the hands- of a man under their wings, and this appear-
ance is stepping out of the eyed wheels, " as it were a wheel in the
middle of a wheel with their rings full of dreadful eyes;" we see
also above the heads of the living creatures the likeness of a throne,
and "the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it," and
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42 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
round about a brightness "as the appearance of the bow that is
in the cloud in the day of rain." No one reading the Scriptural
version with the pictorial version before them will be disposed to deny
the power of Blake's rendering in which all that is exuberant and
fantastic in the Hebrew symbolism is translated with the poetic
passion and dignity of the verbal picture. Neither will anyone
familiar with the full swell and noble energy of Milton's less im-
petuous style fail to perceive a similarity between his vision of
Scriptural scenes and Blake's own.
How Miltonic, again, is the water-colour drawing The Re-
pose of the Holy Family in Egypt, now in the possession of the
Metropolitan Museum, New York. What power of suggestion is
in the quaintly conceived Eastern scenery with its monstrous palm-
tree, its little winding river, and distant pyramids. Beyond the
arch of the foreground within which the mother and child sit bathed
in light, stretches the landscape into illimitable sky; just above the
horizon looms a great sun; at the left the donkey stands in the
stream drinking, a delicate monster that once seen is not forgotten,
beautifully drawn but with leafy markings on his "vegetated
body and with a bristling serrate mane. At the feet of the trav-
ellers on the brink of the stream are clusters of small flowers such
as Milton describes in Paradise, "of slender stalk" with heads that
hang "drooping, unsustained." The figure of Joseph clad in a
long robe stands at the right. A broad-brimmed hat is on his
head and his face is patriarchal in type. Mary, deep-chested and
ample in form, sits with a certain stately carriage, lifting her small
head, which is nobly set on a columnar neck, toward Joseph. The
child is something of a manniken without any babyish feature.
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 43
His mother has given him her breast, but she neither touches him
nor looks toward him; her placid gaze is quite impersonal.
Nothing could be less in the spirit of the modern Madonna or
more in the spirit of Milton when his theme is Scriptural. The
distinction of the design, the large freedom of the pattern, the
majestic framework of line and mass, the unreal yet definite imagery,
are all Miltonic, and we feel in looking at this as in looking at
many other paintings and drawings by Blake — the entire Job
series for example — that he owed to the English poet far more
than to any Italian painter the determination of the form in which
he cast his more especially illustrative art. While acquaintance
with Milton's poetry could not, of course, teach him the secret of
admitting to his picture only what would tend to its unity and
the breadth of its relations, it could teach him the beauty of severe
forms and support him in the choice of intellectual expression.
At nineteen years of age Milton wrote that he would choose to leave
trifles for a grave argument
Such as may make thee search the cofi^ers round
Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound;
Such where the deep transported mind may soar
Above the wheeling poles, and at Heaven's door
Look in, and see each blissful deity.
How he before the thunderous throne doth lie.
This choice Blake also made and himself looked in at the door of
such a heaven to behold the thunderous throne and those who lay
before it. The words of the one poet seem to have been uttered
for the designs of the other, and it is easy to see how Blake's mind
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44 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
would have been companioned on lonely heights by Milton's stem
energy, and also by that virtue, "peremptory and impassioned,"
which demanded on the instant an ideal justice.
Thus to find in masters of language rather than in masters of
drawing and painting the counsellors upon whom Blake depended
for that intense and concentrated sympathy of mind which spurs
an artist to effective expression might lead to the conclusion that
he was deficient in the true painter's quality, that the idea and not
the execution occupied his attention, that he had intellect rather
than vision in the painter's sense of the latter word, that he could
think and dream but could not see. The contrary is true. While
he, desiring to express through his compositions his own emotion,
dismissed as irrelevant all facts not directly instrumental in com-
municating that emotion, his power of seeing was greater than that
of the ordinary observer. Otherwise he would not have felt so
keenly the intrusion of multitudinous nature upon his mood when
he was in the act of executing an emotional conception. Milton
could not have stimulated his genius as he did had he not himself
been concerned with a visible world. The fact that in his physical
blindness the latter looked inward for his scenes of Paradise, filling
them with "select and holy images," makes these scenes none the less
of a kind to capture the imagination of a painter. Blake also could
close his eyes in voluntary blindness and behold the verdurous walls,
the large rivers, the shaggy hills, the bowers and groves, the fruits
and blossoms of an imaginary Eden. "You have only to work
up imagination to the state of vision, and the thing is done," he
said; and it is not unnatural — indeed it is wholly natural — that
descriptive literature of a supreme order should have stirred him
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 45
to his own expression of a subject more powerfully than the work
of an artist in his own medium which to reproduce would of neces-
sity be to imitate. The works of such artists, like the works of
nature, hindered him by continually suggesting a copyist's labour.
But the works of an artist in words he could accept with rapture
as fit material for reproduction by his different tools and in his
different art. To look upon Michael Angelo's Night or Diirer's
Melancholia doubtless must have given him profound delight and
awakened in his mind a desire to express his own thought as nobly,
but it can hardly have made him wish to execute a Melancholia or
a Night with his similar instruments of art. The combat with
the memory of the other artists' manner would have been too con-
stant and severe, as in working from nature he found the combat
with insignificant detail too wearying for the purpose of invention.
But the path opens broad and smooth when a writer of equally
noble poetic impulse selects and describes, moulds and colours for
him a subject in which his imagination can revel at ease without
even the effort of initiative. To one possessed by Blake's power
of inner seeing it was comparatively simple to place upon his draw-
ing block the visible counterpart of that scene evoked by words
informed as it already is by the emotion it has stirred in him.
And even in illustrating his own poems Blake occasionally
used the verbal pictures of various poets to define for him his own
visions. In the British Museum copy of his Europe a number of
marginal notes appear in his small handwriting, for the most part
quotations from Milton and Shakespeare, Rowe, Dryden, and
Fletcher, which help to explain, as Mr. Swinburne has noted, the
marked departures from the text in the pictures. For example,
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46 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
Ann RadclifFe's poem The Pilgrim is written out on the reverse
side of the title-page, and the design following it illustrates the
written poem rather than the printed text. Above the design
Blake has written the title The Assassiuy and a sketch for it
appears in the Manuscript Book. On another page are
gathered together this group of quotations on the subject of comets :
" He like a Comet burned
That fires the length of Ophiscus huge
In the artick skye, and from his horrid hair
Shakes Pestilence and War." Milton.
"As the red Comet from Satumus sent
To fright the nations with a dire portent,
With sweeping glories glides along in air
And shakes the sparkles from his blazing hair."
Homer.
"Comets imparting change to times and states
Brandish your golden tresses in the skies."
Shakespeare.
"Like some malignant
Planet that lowrs
Upon the world." RowE.
The accompanying design shows a winged figure with hands clasped
on the back of her head, apparently the "secret child" of the text
who
Descended through the orient gates of the eternal day.
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 47
The figure descends too slowly through the clouds to represent a
comet, nor is the colouring appropriate, and we should be unwary
indeed if we should assume that Blake would err in either of these
particulars. Apparently his use for the quotations was in this case
a general one, the poem as a whole dealing with such warfare among
worlds as they imply. A mere suggestion of reversion to these
literary sources occurs in the lines
And Urizen unloosed from chains
Glows like a meteor in the distant North,
on the same page with the quoted stanzas.
A drawing in which appear three horrific forms grappling in
the air, clearly is explained not by the text, but by these verses
written in Blake's hand upon the upper and lower margins of the
page, with the headline '* Storms, Tempests, etc.":
"He views with horror next the noisy cave
Where with hoarse din imprisoned tempests rave
Whose clamorous Hurricanes attempt their flight
Or whirling in tumultuous Eddies fight.
"This orb's wide frame with the convulsion shakes,
Oft opens in the storm and often cracks.
Horror, Amazement, and Despair appear.
In all the hideous forms that mortals fear."
The text on this page seems to be quite closely connected with
the comet idea, containing these lines:
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48 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
Unwilling I look up to heaven! unwilling count the stars.
Sitting in fathomless abyss of my immortal shrine,
I seize their burning power
And bring forth howling terrors all devouring fiery kings
Devouring and devoured roaming on dark and desolate mountains
In forests of eternal death, shrieking in hollow trees
Oh mother Enitharmon!
Stamp not with solid form this vigorous progeny of fires.
And on page 4 occur the lines :
The horrent Demon rose, surrounded with red stars of fire,
Whirling about in furious circles round the immortal fiend.
At the head of page 5 is written the word "War,'* and the design,
a Satanic figure with an angel on either side, illustrates this quota-
tion:
"O war! thou Son of Hell
Whom angry heavens do make their minister/*
It also however, illustrates, the text in a less direct manner. On
pages 6 and 7 of this copy there is no printed text but the word
"Famine** at the top, and underneath in pencil the one line "pre-
paring to dress the child," followed by this stanza from Dryden:
"Famine fierce that what's denied man's use
Even deadly plants and herbs of pois'nous juice
Will Hunger eat — and to prolong our breath
We greedily devour our certain death."
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 49
The design shows two figures of women and a naked child before
a glowing fire, over which a pot is hung, filled presumably with
"herbs of pois'nous juice/* Page 7 shows a man tolling a bell and
figures in front of him fainting and praying; above the design is
the word "Plague," and on the lower margin these lines from
Mason :
"The midnight clock has toU'd, and hark! the Bell
Of Death beats slow! — heard ye the note profound ?
It pauses now, and now with rising knell
Flings to the hollow gale the sullen sound."
I have failed to find any lines in the text that correspond to
either of these designs. On the lower margin of page 12 is
written —
"Then to a Dungeon's depth I sent, fast bound,
Where stow'd with snakes and adders now they lodge.
The rats brush o'er their faces with their tails.
And croaking Paddocks crawl upon their limbs."
and on the upper margin of page 13 the word
"Imprisonment"
with these lines on the lower margin :
"This is all my world — I shall nothing know,
Nothing hear, but the Clock that tells my woes.
The Vine shall grow, but I shall never see it,
Summer shall come, and with her all delights,
But Dead Cold Winter still inhabit here.
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The design on this page shows an imprisoned man "fast
bound" with another figure — no doubt the "mighty spirit named
Newton " of the text — ascending some steps leading out of the
dungeon.
I have already described the concluding design, with its sugges-
tions of conflagration and the striding spirit of revolution, as a
perfectly appropriate ending to the poem, but it is interesting to
note that on the upper margin of this page (page 15) Blake has
written the word fire and on the lower margin these lines:
"Th* impetuous flames, with lawless power advance,
On ruddy wings the bright destruction flies
Followed with ruin and distressful cries,
The flaky Plague spreads swiftly with the wind,
And gastly desolation howls behind.
These instances of Blake's method in this particular book indicate
his tendency to fuse and harmonize in his illustration such sugges-
tions as will arouse a particular emotion whether these suggestions
come from his own mind or the minds of others. In other words,
they are a witness to his desire to illustrate an emotion rather than
a verbal passage. Whatever helps to strengthen and warm his
imagination he takes as so much aid toward his expression of this
emotion. It is to this peculiar freedom of imagination, this sense
not of irresponsibility but of responsibility to the soul rather than
the body of his task, that Blake owes the spontaneity and concen-
tration of his eflPect.
Mr. Arthur Symons in his recent very valuable book on Blake
is deeply impressed by his use of detail and constructs from it an
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 51
ingenious argument accounting for the sense of unreality — it
would be more exact to say unnaturalness — in his designs. "In
Blake every detail is seen with intensity," he says, "and with equal
intensity. No one detail is subordinated to another, every inch of
his surface is equally important to him; and from this unslacken-
ing emphasis come alike his arresting power and the defect which
leaves us, though arrested, often unconvinced. . . . Blake was too
humble toward vision to allow himself to compose or arrange what
he saw, and he saw in detail, with an unparalleled fixity and clear-
ness. Every picture of Blake, quite apart from its meaning to the
intelligence, is built up in detail like a piece of decoration; and
widely remote as are both intention and result, I am inclined to
think he composed as Japanese artists compose, bit by bit, as he
saw his picture come piece by piece before him." The Manuscript
Book enables us to decide that he did not compose in this way but
in the way common to nearly all constructive artists: by determining,
that is, the principal lines of his design, the division of spaces and
the action of his figures. By comparing such sketches as those for
the design accompanying the Argument in Albion and the mandrake
design with the completed drawings it is clearly to be seen that
Blake was not in the least too humble to compose and rearrange.
Nor does it seem to me that any close examination of his work
upholds Mr. Symons's point of view with regard to his emphasis
upon detail, his "passion" for it, and his "refusal to subordinate any
detail for any purpose." The illustrations comprised in the present
volume, although but a small part of his accomplishment, are suf-
ficiently varied to be fairly representative, and I do not discover
in them any instance of such " unslackening emphasis" evenly
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52 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
distributed. Although Blake certainly held that "as poetry admits
not abetter that is insignificant, so painting admits not a grain of
sand or a blade of grass insignificant — much less an insignificant
blur or mark," he was far too much of an artist not to feel, if he
did not state, the importance of keeping significant detail in its
proper place in the composition, and while he may be said to have
had in a certain sense a "passion for detail," it was not a passion
so overwhelming that he did not choose altogether to omit such
detail as interfered with his large impression. We have only to
look at the design on page 1 1 of the Americoy to choose a highly
characteristic example, to observe how disturbing emphatic detail
would be to the effect of those long sweeping lines in which the very
spirit of motion is made manifest. Everything is subordinated to
the effect of flight in the upper part of the design. Half a dozen
lines suggest the feathers on the great wings of the flying bird. The
little figure astride his back is sufficiently articulated to seem en-
tirely human and alive with his streaming, wind-blown hair, but
the artist's touch upon him is of the lightest. The thick clouds
with their effective light and shade are crossed by the forms of
smaller birds — mere flecks of light or dark, and completely sub-
ordinated to the larger incidents in this vivid drama of the sky.
In the lower part of the design the snake itself, vivacious, filled with
energy, moving swiftly along its path and ridden by children lightly
yet securely poised upon its rounded body, is by no means an
inartistically prominent feature in the composition. Largely in
shadow it merges with the dark of the clouds and preserves the
beautiful balance of the composition. The bright accent of the
moon and the sparkle of the tiny stars may claim the attention,
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 53
but not as an incongruous or importunate part of the artistic scheme;
on the contrary, as an element in the interest of the whole which
is recognized by every observing painter of night, adding to the
picture as it does a quality of light by the side of which all other
illuminations pale.
Mr. Symons makes an admirable statement of one aspect of
Blake's art in the passage calling attention to the life with which
Blake invests inanimate objects: *'The stones with which Achan
has been martyred," he says, speaking of one of Blake's coloured
drawings, "live each with a separate and evil life of its own, not
less vivid and violent than the clenched hands raised to hurl
other stones; there is menacing gesture in the cloud of dust that
rises behind them." Nothing could better describe the effect of
Blake's energy of imagination exercised upon Ufeless things; and
if his grandeur of style in the composition of his design were not a
counterbalancing factor in the general impression made by him,
such energy must indeed be wearying and distracting. But I have
tried to show in these untechnical notes on Blake's art that he
worked in the true, and not in the pseudo, Gothic spirit and con-
cerned himself first of all with the proportions and unity of his
building before evolving its decoration. Vital and insistent in their
expressiveness as are the gargoyles of Notre Dame, it is not of them
that one first thinks in looking upon the massive structure. Thus
in such a design as the title-page to the Americaj or that on page 37
of the Jerusalem^ or the wonderful frontispiece to the Europe j or any
of the designs reproduced from the Songs of Experience^ it is not
the half-seen trunks and foliage of the trees, the licking flames and
flying birds and climbing vines and grazing sheep that give us our
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54 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
greatest and instant pleasure, nor yet the individual figures of the
men and women and children, sometimes beautiful as in the noble
Jerusalem drawing, oftener contorted and grotesque; but the power
and dignity of the spacious, lofty composition with its suggestions
of cathedral aisles and broad horizons.
Occasionally we find a design such as that for the title-page
of The Book of Ahania in which the element of the grotesque
ceases to stimulate the imagination and becomes unpleasant, though
even here the wide-flung arms and flying hair give the sensation
of rapid motion, but without that dignity of environing structure
upon which we have dwelt. Occasionally, too, we have such a
drawing as the David and Goliath of the Boston Museum, in which
a childlike naivete informs the chosen types of Innocent and Ogre
without aesthetic qualities adequate to support it; but these examples
are not typical. The type of Blake's art to which reference con-
tinually must be made if we are to do justice to his great genius
lies in such achievements as the famous illustration from his Jeru-
salem with its learned divisions and subdivisions of light and dark,
its small forms of colossal significance, its prone figure, its swimming
planets, its mourning angel, its dying human, its hints of pleasant
landscape and fair heavens; as the frontispiece to his Europe^ with
its geometrical shapes broken into by the soft bulk of large clouds,
its unearthly effect of subdued Hght less positive yet more potent
than the sharp white of the hair and beard of the bending figure, its
suggestion by means of that driven hair and beard of a great wind
in empty spaces; or as the title-page to the America^ perhaps most
lovely of all Blake's illustrative designs, with its sad, drooping forms,
its heavenward flying messengers, its symbol of earthly loss and
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THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE 55
mourning, its canopy of cloud forms and the close harmony of its
tender values.
Without attempting to cover the large field occupied by Blake's
art in its various aspects I have wished to indicate how easily it is
approached along the ordinary lines followed by the student of
art, and how rewarding it is to those who apply to it the tests they
would apply to Diirer, for example. If I have suggested that one
source of confusion concerning it is the persistent effort to regard
it as lying outside the region controlled by the laws of art, I have
not been far wrong. Its great distinction, its strength and not its
weakness, comes from its connection with literature and with intel-
lectual ideas. It has in its way accomplished a union between
intellect and actual vision — in other words, has made abstract
ideas and emotions take on a visible aspect. The difference be-
tween such an art and one that tells a story better suited to literary
expression would seem obvious enough, yet the assumption of
identity between the two is the rock on which many a criticism of
Blake's work has been wrecked.
Another error no doubt will spring from my own effort to trace
the inspiration of certain drawings back to their literary origins.
I believe one attempt already has been made — although I do not
know the work to which I refer — to fix the old slur of plagiarism
on Blake's poetry. It may be considered a kind of plagiarism that
I have suggested in noting the dependence of the designs in Europe
upon the descriptive writings of others. My belief is that minds
of the highest originality work in this way. Their fire is fed by
innumerable little flames; if it were not so they would exhaust
themselves in lonely space. Be that as it may, there is no question
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56 THE ART OF WILLIAM BLAKE
that Blake was intent upon his own vision and not upon that of
others. His true originality lay in his independence of contradiction
and was not impaired by his sensitiveness to the stimulus of other
thinkers like minded with himself.
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DESIGN FOR "FIRE''
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"I FOUND HIM BENEATH A TREE IN THE GARDEN'
A Page from The Manuscript Sketch Book
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THE CRUCIFIXION
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THE LAUGHING BOY
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SONGS OF EXPERIENCE: PAGE ja
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JOINT TITLE PAGE OF SONGS OF INNOCENCE
AND EXPERIENCE
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SHE SHALL BE CALLED WOMAN
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THE BOOK OF THEL: PAGE 2
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hy Courtesy W.A. WhiU, Esq.
DESIGN FOR THE ARGUMENT OF THE VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION
From the Manuscript Sketch Book : Page 28
XVI
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ALBION: THE ARGUMENT
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JOSEPH OF ARIMATHEA
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THE ANCIENT OF DAYS
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PESTILENCE - THE DEATH OF THE FIRST-BORN
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XXI
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THE KING OF BABYLON IN HELL
(The Boston Museum of Fine Arts)
XXII
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THE TEMPTATION OF EVE
(The Boston Museum of Fine Arts)
XXIII
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ILLUSTRATIONS TO MILTON'S COMUS
(The Boston Museum of Fine Arts)
XXIV
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THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT
From Original in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
XXVI
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TITLE PAGE OF EUROPE: A PROPHECY
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EUROPE: PAGE FIVE
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EUROPE: PAGE SEVEN
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FRONTISPIECE OF AMERICA: A PROPHECY
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XXXIV
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AMERICA: PAGE THIRTEEN
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THE MANUSCRIPT SKETCH BOOK: PAGE THIRTEEN
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THE MANUSCRIPT SKETCH BOOK: PAGE EIGHTY-FIVE
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Nebuchadnezzar
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THE WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY
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XLV
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XLIX
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THE BOOK OF JOB: PAGE TWENTY-SIX
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