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ALBION.From Jerusalem.
Deism was the particular time-heresy of Blake’s day. He came into direct contact with it through his friend Tom Paine.Deistic religion, to be adequate for man’s need, must rest on perfect nature and perfect experience. Paine, Voltaire, and Rousseau, in order to provide these conditions which they saw to be necessary, were driven to make the wild statement, contrary to all experience, that man is naturally holy and good, and if he is not so as we know him, it is because he is everywhere perverted by artificial civilization. Having swallowed this baseless assumption, the rest was easy. They had only like Godwin to manufacture some scheme of political justice, or like Rousseau to arrange a social contract, and then the Millennium would come.
Against all this Blake protested, but without personal heat. He was well aware of Paine’s deism, when he helped him to escape to France; and of Voltaire he wrote justly: “He has sinned against the Son of man, and it shall be forgiven him.” He protested and he affirmed: “Man is born a Spectre, or Satan, and is altogether an Evil.” In this uncompromising affirmation, taken out of the heart ofJerusalem, written at the mature age of forty-seven, he cuts himself off sharply, not only from the humanitarian deism of his time, but from the pantheism that invaded so many phases of his thought; he goes beyond the kindly catholic dogma which allows a residuum of original righteousness in fallen man; and, with Whitefield and the Calvinists, denies that he has any righteousness left at all. Hence the utter failure of all empiricism, and the absolute need of Revelation and a supernatural religion. How near he was getting to Dr Johnson! Super-nature, of course, presupposes nature. Blake was obliged to contemplate Nature, and meditate on the ancient difficulties that she still presents.
There are many passages inThe Four Zoasto show how alive he was to Nature’s loveliness and cruelty. Her crueltyalone convinced him that she could not be taken as a basis for religion. A natural man building his character on a natural religion must be as cruel as his mother. The cruelty finds periodic vent in the lust of war.
Yet why there is so much cruelty in Nature remains a mystery, even to the man who has been driven by her to supernaturalism. Blake maintained that there were two ways of regarding Nature. The natural man, with only five senses to inform him, looks at her and sees a very small portion of the infinite, without ever suspecting the infinite. If he sees her loveliness it will arrest him and hold him fast. The spiritual man, on the contrary, looks not at but through Nature, to the spiritual world of which it is a vegetable mirror.
Here a difficulty presents itself. If Nature be a vegetable mirror of the eternal world, then her cruelties must reflect eternal cruelties. The spiritual man may see Nature far differently from the natural man, but that does not mean that she is merely the picture thrown by man’s subjective self on the great abyss. If man were altogether exterminated her cruelties would still continue. Since Blake did not deny all existence to Nature, he was finally obliged to accept the old Christian explanation so finely summed up by St Paul in the eighth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans. Sin and disorder originate in the unseen heavens of the cosmos, where the principalities and powers dwell. Man repeats their sins, and Nature reflects the disorder of their cosmos. Hence there is no redemption in the cosmic heavens. Man enters on his redemption only when he bows the knee to Him who was raised above all heavens. And though “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together until now,” yet at the great manifestation of the sons of God she also “shall be deliveredfrom the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.”
If the fall be denied, then the sufferings of nature and man must be referred to evolution, which taken alone solves something, but not the whole, of the ancient and baffling mystery.
All this explains finally why the great Memory to which Blake refers so often inJerusalemcannot redeem a man. It is shut up in the cosmos. Memory would keep man in the cosmos even though he were reincarnated a million times. Memory’s real work, whether for creative art or man’s redemption, is in the fact that she gives man standing ground amid the horrors of infinity, until he takes strong hold of Him who overcame the world, and is lifted by Him into His ascension glory beyond the maddening whir of the cosmic wheels.
In these poems we get Blake’s final attitude towards sex and passion.
Passion is always fire, and as such it is energy. To-day we are apt to use the word only for sex. In the eighteenth century passion was of any kind, and appetite stood for sex. With Blake, passion is man’s vital worth. It may flame along many forbidden avenues, but once it has mounted to the imagination, and is controlled by spirit, then it is the driving force that makes man’s works beautiful and his character spontaneous.
The passion of sex is, no doubt, the strongest of all. In the early prophetic books, when Blake was in a fever of rebellion, he affirmed that the sex passion was holy and should be free. Now in these later “prophecies” he still maintains, without wavering, the holiness of sex, but he no longer insists on free-love. He has no place for perversions. He steadily contemplates thenormal impulse, and sees it as the principle of life impelling to love and children.
Each man has to solve his own sex problem. Blake’s nature was exceptionally full and passionate. We caught a glimpse of him in his early married life panting in the whirlwind of sexual desire. It is probably true that he even contemplated following the patriarchal custom. But inconveniently for man’s theories he has it brought home to him sooner or later that no man can live to himself alone. Mrs Blake had her feelings; and though she was the most submissive and loyal of wives, yet she had the instinctive and normal objection to sharing her husband with others. Blake might argue that her objection was unreasonable, and that a truly unselfish woman should rise above such appropriation. But the stubborn fact remains that the woman who does so rise is either indifferent to her husband or abnormal, and Mrs. Blake, at any rate, both loving and unselfish to a heroic degree, was just here inflexible. King Solomon has sung the praises of a virtuous wife. We may take it as granted that her price is far above rubies. But the man who imperils his treasure by putting into practice some theory of free-love, however good that theory may seem in his own eyes, is worse than a fool; and if he cannot endure some inconvenience for the sake of keeping the best gift that Heaven can bestow, he is unworthy to receive it.
Besides these facts, which must have forced their full attention on Blake as the years went by, time was modifying his early notions in other ways. He was an indefatigable worker. When one realizes the immense energy expended in creative work, and that Blake carried this on day after day, one sees that much of the sex energy must pass into another channel to supply the necessary power.
And lastly Blake’s own spiritual life worked the change. As he learnt to see through Nature to her antetype, so he learnt to see through physical beauty. A beautiful face was a very transitory manifestation of eternal beauty. When Blake with Plato had pierced through to the unseen fount of beauty, then he was no longer a slave to externals. The passion remained, but transmuted, and legitimate relief was found in the continuous creation of beautiful things. Doubtless many will be disappointed that Blake’s experience brought him back to traditional morality; but after all the terms on which he held it—a clean conception of sex, and faithfulness to a woman worthy of all faith—were not so very narrow and rigorous. They are terms that every man ought at once to accept, if ever he should be so fortunate as to have them proposed to him.
The above ideas are culled fromThe Four ZoasandJerusalem. I do not propose any detailed analysis here. This I have done at some length inVision and Vesture. I will merely point out in conclusion that although these poems seem to ramble all over the universe inside and outside without plan or order, there is, in fact, a connecting link in the figure of Albion.
Albion is the personification of the divine humanity; but regarded individually he is fallen man, bound with “the pale limbs of his Eternal Individuality upon the Rock of Ages.” His inward eyes are closed from the Divine Vision, and so he may be reckoned dead in trespasses and sin. Blake pronounced the natural man altogether an evil. But Albion is not an image of total depravity. Within him are all the divine faculties in addition to the five senses without, but they are closed. If he is to be redeemed, there is no need to create new spiritual faculties, but to re-create and make operative those that arealready there. Hence Blake drives back of regeneration to the first generation, when man was made in the image and likeness of God. Regeneration is the renewal of the ancient image and likeness through the cross of Christ and the breath of the Divine Spirit.
Albion, like Lazarus, is sick. “He whom Thou lovest is sick. He wanders from his house of Eternity.” His “exteriors are become indefinite, opened to pain, in a fierce, hungry void, and none can visit his regions.”
Pained and impotent, he laments like Job:
“Oh I am nothing if I enter into judgment with Thee.If Thou withdraw Thy breath I die, and vanish into Hades;If Thou dost lay Thy hand upon me, behold I am silent;If Thou withhold Thy hand I perish like a leaf;Oh I am nothing, and to nothing must return again.If Thou withdraw Thy breath, behold I am oblivion.”
“Eternal death haunts all my expectations. Rent from Eternal Brotherhood we die and are no more.”
And so Man like a corse
“lay on the Rock. The Sea of Time and SpaceBeat round the rocks in mighty waves.”
Even his limbs “vegetated in monstrous forms of death.”
He is opaque and contracted. Yet mercifully there is a limit to his opacity and contraction, named by Blake Satan and Adam; else he would sleep eternally. The capacity remains to hear the Voice of the Son of God and live, and until that moment he is guarded in tender care by the “mild and gentle” Saviour.
It is Heaven’s purpose to awake him.
“Then all in great Eternity, which is called the Council of God,Met as one Man, even Jesus—to awake the fallen Man.The fallen Man stretched like a corse upon the oozy rock,Washed with the tide, pale, overgrown with the waves,Just moved with horrible dreams.”
Albion like Milton must tread the difficult way of self-annihilation and judgment.
His Day of Judgment is given with marvellous wealth of detail inThe Four Zoas, Night IX. But there are still finer passages inJerusalemwhich lead Albion to his final beatitude.
“Albion said: O Lord, what can I do? my selfhood cruelMarches against Thee ...I behold the visions of my deadly sleep of six thousand years,Dazzling around Thy skirts like a serpent of precious stones and gold;I know it is my self, O my Divine Creator and Redeemer.Jesus replied: Fear not, Albion; unless I die thou canst not live,But if I die I shall arise again and thou with Me.This is Friendship and Brotherhood, without it Man Is Not.Jesus said: Thus do Men in Eternity,One for another, to put off by forgiveness every sin.Albion replied: Cannot Man exist without mysteriousOffering of Self for Another? is this Friendship and Brotherhood?Jesus said: Wouldest thou love one who never diedFor thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee?And if God dieth not for Man, and giveth not HimselfEternally for Man, Man could not exist, for Man is LoveAs God is Love; every kindness to another is a little DeathIn the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood.So saying, the Cloud overshadowing divided them asunder;Albion stood in terror, not for himself but for his FriendDivine, and Self was lost in the contemplation of faithAnd wonder at the Divine Mercy, and at Los’s sublime honour.”
Thus Blake leads man back into his ancient simplicity and unity. Order is restored; and the four mighty ones that warred within to man’s distraction, led captive by Los, are content each to perform his proper function, and so to prevent any further disturbance of the peace.
That is a fine consummation, but it is not Blake’s last word. Perfect man must have a perfect City to dwell in. Albion redeemed must build Jerusalem. Blake beganMiltonwith the fond contemplation of England’s fields and meadows that he had loved in his youth. Calling for his weapons of war, he sang:
“I will not cease from Mental Fight,Nor shall my Sword sleep in my Hand,Till we have built JerusalemIn England’s green and pleasant Land.”
That vision may seem as far off as the vision of the prophet who declared, “The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” But the world’s master-spirits have never been content that a man here and there should save his soul.
Plato imagined his Republic, Christ His Kingdom of God on earth, St John his Holy City, St Augustine his City of God. And Blake, whose first dreams had been in London’s great city, still dreamed that man would return to his ancient simplicity, and build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.
Blake had left Hayley to face poverty again in September 1803. He lodged at 17 South Molton Street, and from there he continued till December 11th, 1805, to write to the patron who had caused him so much inward disturbance. As long as he had thought it was possible to be on terms of complete friendship with Hayley he had quarrelled with him. Now he knew that such friendship was impossible. He saw Hayley as he was, and after years of self-conflict he saw himself as he was, and he recognized that there was no fundamental agreement to bridge over their differences. The effect of this discovery was to put him at peace with Hayley, and also to lower his sanguine expectations of a wide fellowship in this world.
The letters to Hayley are courteous and almost affectionate in tone. Hayley was occupied with hisLife of Romney, Blake was hard at work on aHead of Romneyand an engraving of theShipwreck, after Romney. Hence there are many references to the artist from which we learn how genuine was Blake’s admiration for the classic simplicity and the skilful massing of the lights and shades of Sir Joshua’s great rival. Mr and Mrs Blake regularly send their love to Hayley and solicitations for his health till the correspondence gradually lessens, and Hayley, having no further use for Blake, gently closes it, and takes himself awayout of his sight for ever. The severance was inevitable, and Blake could not be surprised. He jotted in his note-book:
“I write the rascal thanks till he and IWith thanks and compliments are both drawn dry.”
And so the patron passes. The artist who has faced poverty is tasting its bitterness, stirred with the faint hope that he may find another patron who will be a corporeal friend and not a spiritual enemy. The patron in due time appeared. Robert Hartley Cromek was his name, print-jobber, book-maker, publisher, also an engraver who had studied under Bartolozzi.
This last fact was not auspicious. Blake, we know, had no regard for Bartolozzi’s work, and a pupil of his might prove as little understanding of Blake’s severe art as the Bard of Sussex. Still, there was hope. Cromek had an admirable business capacity. He understood how to advertise, to puff, to work the artist, and, what is still more materially important, to work the public. He had, in a word, all the practical qualities that Blake lacked. Blake with his love for uniting contraries believed that his art married to Cromek’s practice might produce fame and money, and he was sorely in need of both.
At this time Blake was making designs for Blair’sGrave, which he intended himself to engrave and publish. These were seen by Cromek, who admired them, and whose business instinct detected money in them. Immediately he proposed to publish a new edition ofThe Grave, and made a verbal agreement with Blake that he should contribute twelve engravings from his own designs. But, inspired by the same business instinct, it occurred to him that Blake’s designs would sell much better if they were engraved by one who was known to be able to meet the populartaste. Accordingly he went off to Schiavonetti, who had been a fellow-pupil of Bartolozzi, and proposed to him to do the engravings.
The result was satisfactory to everyone except Blake. His illustrations appeared in the summer of 1808, and he received twenty guineas for his designs, but he was naturally furious and resentful against Cromek for playing him such a trick.
Cromek was quite right in his judgment that the Blake designs forThe Gravewould be popular. Yet this did not arise from any affinity between Blake and the then famous author ofThe Grave. Blair had been dead for fifty years. His poem expressed the strict orthodoxy of his day. Its fine passages are scarcely able to give vitality to the whole. Blake can have had no sympathy with the long-drawn-out description of the damask-cheeked maiden lying in her grave, the food of worms. The real genius of Christianity does not permit of such nauseous details of the charnel-house. We know how sensitive Blake was to the damask cheek of a maiden; but we also know that he had come to regard it as the very transitory manifestation of the eternal beauty, and with his spiritual eye continually on the “Inviolable Rose” he did not need to remind himself of the mouldering relics in the grave.
He selected for what proved to be one of his finest designs Blair’s description of the reunion of soul and body on the Day of Judgment. The poem repeats the doctrine of the resuscitation of the body that has long since returned to dust. Blake, of course, repudiated this dogma. He believed that the spiritual body is already present in one who has been born again of the spirit; and, therefore, death is the bursting of the mortal shell that the spiritual body may pass on into its spiritual environment.Yet with his love of marriages he depicted the rending of the tomb and the passionate reunion of soul and body, not because he believed in such a future event, but because that reunion taken symbolically was marvellously expressive of the rapturous marriage of many pairs of contraries that man in his day persisted in keeping apart.
For the rest, Blair’s poem was sufficiently universal in its treatment of death to enable Blake to illustrate him, and yet read his own opinions into the words he selected.
Blake’s indignation was hot against Cromek, as we can all understand. But unfortunately his soul was torn with the kindred passion of resentment, which he was inclined to nurse rather than exterminate. Here a little reason might have helped him; but his distrust of reason, and his own passivity, led him to give vent to his resentments against successful men that strike us as captious and rude. He might plead the example of Christ in His treatment of the Pharisees, and he did jot down in his note-book words that I cannot help thinking he applied to himself:
“Sir Joshua praises Michael Angelo.’Tis Christian mildness when knaves praise a foe;But ’twould be madness, all the world would say,Should Michael Angelo praise Sir Joshua—Christ used the Pharisees in a rougher way.”
In answer to this we can but say that Sir Joshua was not a Pharisee, and that Blake was not Christ.
Blake’s resentment against Sir Joshua seems to have begun at an interview when, a very young man, he had shown him some designs, and had been “recommended to work with less extravagance and more simplicity, and to correct his drawings.” Thatwas the sort of advice that he never would take at any time. One would have thought that if Sir Joshua was so palpably a Pharisee, Blake would not have troubled to ask his advice.
As the years passed, the significant facts about Sir Joshua and Blake were that the one was famous and rich, the other was unrecognized and poor. Blake’s vision, sharpened just here by the injustice of fame, was preternaturally quick to discover that Sir Joshua was earthy and of the earth, while his own aim was the so much loftier one of piercing to the heavenly reality, and then expressing it by clear, definite, and “sweet outlines,” and making the colours, lights, and shades serve to emphasize the heaven-revealing lines.
Sir Joshua died February 23rd, 1792. His coffin was carried to St Paul’s followed by ninety coaches, and the most eloquent man of the day, Burke, was bidden to sing his praises. In 1808, when everyone was reading the collectedDiscoursesof Reynolds, Blake too read, and as his custom was, made copious marginal notes. With the help of these we are able to relate Blake to Reynolds with a dispassionateness to which Blake could never attain.
What must strike any impartial reader of theDiscoursesis the extraordinary similarity of the aims of art there set forth with Blake’s own cherished views. Both give the supreme place to Michael Angelo and extol Raphael. Both depreciate the Venetian and Flemish Schools. Both reckon good drawing the foundation of great art. The difference between them is mainly one of emphasis. Blake believed in impulse and instinct, and Sir Joshua in theoretical and reasoned deliberation. Yet the reasonable man writes: “If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion, before we act, life would be at a stand, and art would be impracticable.” And again: “I mean tocaution you against ... an unfounded distrust of the imagination and feeling in favour of narrow, partial, confined, argumentative theories.” Both extol the grand style—with a difference. Reynolds’s conception of the grand style is derived from the laborious study of the excellencies of many masters. When he attains to it, he is an epitome of those excellencies.
He reaches by this means his ideal, his heaven, and its contrary immediately bounds into view, which he is too urbane to call hell, and contents himself to designate as the real. Blake’s ideal came to him with overmastering force from his direct vision of the inward reality. Hence he had no need of the false antithesis of the ideal and the real. Reynolds extols Michael Angelo and degrades Hogarth. Blake loves both. In conclusion we say, with only theDiscourses[5]before us, the differences between the two men are negligible in a world where two men can never quite see eye to eye. It is when we turn from theDiscoursesto Sir Joshua’s accomplished works that we begin to understand what was reasonable in Blake’s furious resentment and attack.
Sir Joshua preached one thing and practised another. He sang the praises of the Florentine, Roman, and Bolognese Schools, and painted for all the world as if Rembrandt were his chief master.
“Instead of ‘Michael Angelo’Read ‘Rembrandt,’ for it is fitTo make mere common honestyIn all that he has writ.”
Sir Joshua, after years of toil, painted Nelly O’Brien’s petticoat, and we marvel at the consummate workmanship. Blake, in spite of his faulty technique and impatience of criticism, liftedthe veil that hides the heavens, and inspires us. We thank those who make us wonder: we owe something deeper than thanks to those who inspire us. Blake was well aware that his art was of a loftier kind than that of the President of the Royal Academy. The one was reckoned the foremost painter of his age, the other was pitied as a madman. And Blake felt he did right to be angry.
Let us return to Cromek.
While Blake was at work on his designs for Blair’sGrave, he drew a pencil sketch ofChaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims, which had always attracted him. Cromek, hopping in and out to see how the Blair designs were progressing, saw the sketch, and his brain immediately swarmed with fertile ideas. He proposed that Blake should engrave his design, and he would push it. But on second thoughts it occurred to him that the subject was admirably suited to Stothard’s genius. Leaving Blake with nothing but a verbal agreement, he went straight off to Stothard, and proposed that he should make a design on the subject, for which he would pay him sixty guineas. Cromek undertook to find an engraver. Blake, who had been a friend of Stothard for many years, went to visit him, and found him at work on theCanterbury Pilgrims. Unsuspecting, he praised the work. Afterwards he discovered the part that Cromek had played in the seeming coincidence. At once he concluded that Stothard was privy to the deceit, and he included him in his vehement indignation against Cromek, and the lamb roared. With note-book at hand he jotted:
“A petty sneaking knave I knew—O! Mr. Cromek, how do ye do?”
Stothard and Blake had been young together. It was he who had introduced him to Flaxman. The friendship, of course,was not of the closest, for they followed a very different track in art.
Flaxman and Blake had a common interest in Swedenborg as well as a supreme regard for outline, but Stothard’s was always an outward eye, never inward. With a wife and many children, and everlastingly busy producing his thousands of designs, it was not to be expected that he should dive into inner causes. His contemporaries were content, and we too, that he should see the effects in a graceful and poetic glow, and reproduce them in soothing and graceful compositions. He peered into many times and many countries, but he was happier when illustrating his contemporaries, happiest when depicting the chequered career of Clarissa Harlowe.
Cromek was not wrong in thinking that Stothard would make a successful picture of theCanterbury Pilgrims. He was famous at grouping, had an eye for horses, and was willing to drudge at the British Museum to clothe his figures correctly. There was some difficulty about the engraving, which Cromek had first intended to entrust to Bromley. It passed successively through the hands of Lewis Schiavonetti, Engleheart, Niccolo Schiavonetti, and was finally done by James Heath. The result justified Cromek’s calculations. ThePilgrimage to Canterburywas exhibited in all the great towns of England, and also in Edinburgh and Dublin. It had the most extensive sale of anything of the kind published within a hundred years. Everyone bought it and exhibited it, according to Mrs Bray, in their front parlour. It was reckoned Stothard’s masterpiece. And when Harlow painted Stothard’s portrait, he placed in the background a curtain just sufficiently drawn back to show the finest group of a picture in which the whole grouping was excellent.
Meanwhile Blake, determined to dispense with a professional advertiser, engraved his own design, and put it up for sale at 28 Broad Street, the house of his birth where his brother James carried on the business. But it was not to stand alone. It was exhibited together with sixteen historical inventions, eleven frescoes, seven drawings. Blake wrote a prospectus to theCanterbury Pilgrimsand aDescriptive Catalogueto the whole collection. One or two people, notably Crabb Robinson, found their way to the room; and while the praises of Stothard were being sung throughout the land for a design that had originated from Blake, Blake was tasting the bitter mortification of knowing that his attempt at self-advertisement and appeal to the public had failed.
Although comparisons are odious, we may give ourselves the luxury of comparing these two rival treatments of a fine subject.
Stothard’s task was the easier of the two. His respect for and knowledge of Chaucer were much less than Blake’s, and from the outset he had no mind to burden himself by attempting a servile copy of the poet. If the wife of Bath was just enjoying her fifth husband, then obviously she was no longer a pictorial subject, and Stothard took off as many years as the lady herself could have wished.
His treatment of the religious types was even less faithful. The protestantism of the eighteenth century regarded monks, friars, abbesses, and nuns merely as odd curiosities of an odd past. Stothard had religious feeling, as is evident in his pictureConfirmation, which Landseer admired so much, but for him a friar was the type of laziness, and the monk of gluttony, and his only idea in portraying them was tomake the lines of their chins and stomachs as rotund as possible.
The idea of a pilgrimage was equally as remote from his mind. It was a foolishness to be pardoned only because it afforded the artist such excellent material for form and colour. But if Stothard had no wish to understand Chaucer’s types and point of view, he was overjoyed at the chance of introducing so many horses, whose evolution from the Middle Ages was negligible. He had an eye for a horse, and could not resist the temptation of mounting his pilgrims on much finer horses than Chaucer provided, or they, for the most part, could afford. Finally he painted a pleasing background which Mrs Bray says was the Surrey Hills, and Blake the Dulwich Hills, but in either case were not passed by the Pilgrims in their journey from the Tabard Inn to Canterbury.
The picture, as Hoppner said, is a modern one—charming, even captivating, and if it is not Chaucer, yet Stothard only took the liberty which Blake was ready to take himself when it suited his purpose.
Blake, for his part, was enormously attracted by Chaucer. He saw in him a first-rate example of the poetic genius that can pierce through to the underlying reality of every kind of man, and embrace him with genial warmth. He was observer and contemplator, and there was present just that element of imagination which always produces something original and creative.
The first happy result of Blake’s capture by Chaucer was that he forgot for a time his horrid symbolism. When he illustrated his own poems, he drew his monstrous beasts withoutcheck, but now that there was no possibility of mounting Urizen and Los with the rest of the Pilgrims, he was driven to use Chaucer’s symbolism, which time has proved to be universal.
Blake’s sympathy here equals that of the elder poet. Like him he sees the fleshly weakness of the monks and friars, but he sees also, as Stothard could not, their strength and significance. The cook, the manciple, and the pardoner are low and coarse types affording the shade, but the parson, the knight, the squire, the abbess, the Oxford student, and the yeoman are bright types of human excellence that appear at all times, even in the eighteenth century, as Blake knew, though in a different dress.
The host on his good stout horse rightly holds the central place. The knight and squire lead the party as they ought. The religious types—monk, friar, abbess, nun, three priests—are grouped together. The most dignified figure is the parson—the person—seated on a wretched cob, for he cannot afford a better; and near him, happy in his company, are the man of law and the yeoman. The wife of Bath, the miller, and the cook are different studies in sensuality. In the rear are the clerk of Oxenford and Chaucer himself, the philosopher and the poet, the poet being more prominent, since he with his poetic genius means more to us finally than the philosopher. Last of all comes the reeve, whose position accords with his office as steward.
Hence there is a spiritual significance in the picture. The pilgrims are real Chaucerian people on a real pilgrimage, grouped by a compelling spiritual kinship. The artist and poet are wedded. Yet the artist never loses his individuality, because the poet is so universal that he allows the artist to read his private experienceinto his own. The picture may not at first be so attractive as that of Stothard, but when one has grown accustomed to the exterior charms of the two pictures, there still remains in Blake’s a rich field for fertile gleaning, while when the eye has become satiated with Stothard’s sweetness there remains nothing else as food for the spirit.
Blake did well to be angry—so he believed. The years were slipping by, and the gleams of light that had promised a glad day now seldom came. Hayley had passed out of his life. Cromek could make the money out of him that he could not make for himself. Stothard, he believed, had acted with his eyes open. As he brooded on these things, anger and resentment took possession of him. His courage was failing. His resentments secreted poison that was surely spreading through his entire being and threatening to turn the once overtrustful Blake into a disillusioned and bitter old man.
Then he turned to the gospel, not like tens of thousands to find comfort, but to justify himself in his attitude of defiance, and to assure himself that his anger was godlike. He fixed his eyes on to the figure of Jesus, and essayed the difficult task of seeing Him as He was.
There was not much help coming even from those contemporaries whom he admired.
Wesley and Whitefield proclaimed incessantly the death of Jesus as the one availing sacrifice for sin, but they appeared to contemplate the life of Jesus as little as the great Apostle of the Gentiles. William Law, in a sweat of excitement at his finding of Boehme, devoted all his powers to discovering the riches of the mystical indwelling Christ.
Since Blake’s day the higher critics have given their whole lives to carving out a human Jesus from the mass of myth, legend, and tradition. After this wholesale rejection of the supernatural, it strikes one as comic to hear Samuel Butler solemnly assuring us that there are many gaps in the character of Jesus that we may fill up, as we like, from our own ideals. The old dilemma was, Either Jesus was divine or He was not good: to-day it is, Either Jesus was falsely reported or He was mad.
To the old orthodoxy Jesus was all gentleness, meekness, and mildness. To the new heterodoxy He was afraid of reality and life, and in His manners vehement, impatient, and rude. Some see in Him the pattern of obedience: others the flaunter of all authority.
Blake, as we saw, had reckoned himself among the rebels. He pitted the future against the past. This was in his youth. Since then he had been learning that the past held endless treasures, and now he was forced to consider that it held Jesus. Rebellion must go beyond Jesus. Blake tried, but he could not pass Him. He gazed at Him until he was seized by Him. Passionately he contemplated Him. He perceived the energy and force of His anger and wrath, which like lightning struck the strongholds of evil and levelled them. He saw Him, His furious ire bursting forth until it became a chariot of fire. Then driving His course throughout the land, cursing the scribe and Pharisee, trampling down hypocrisy, breaking the Gates of Death till they let in day, with bright scourge in hand scourging the merchant Canaanite until:
“With wrath He did subdueThe serpent bulk of Nature’s drossTill He had nailed it to the Cross.”
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THE PRAYER OF THE INFANT JESUS.Reproduced by kind permission of Mr Sydney Morse.
Here was what Blake wanted—an anger and fury only greater than his own. He proceeded impatiently to tear to pieces the conventional Jesus.
Was Jesus obedient, or gentle, or humble? There is no simple answer. His life was dual—Godward and manward. To God He was obedient and humble: to man disobedient and proud. His life cannot be explained in terms of law, just because it was a life, and life is greater than law or logic. It was no more possible for Him to keep the letter of the ten commandments than for us. He set aside the Sabbath, He exposed His disciples to murder, He turned the law from harlots, He lived a vagrant life on other people’s hard-won gains; He coveted the best gifts for His friends; He lived, not by laws and rules, but by an all-compelling instinct and impulse. He became in the eyes of His contemporaries a criminal only deserving of capital punishment.
Blake read on breathlessly.
A woman, a sinner taken in the act, was brought to this terrible Jesus. Instantly He became a lamb. With exquisite gentleness, sweetness, and tact, He spoke words chosen not to wound or shame her, and then sent her away forgiven and blest. This was no isolated event. His kindness to outcasts never failed. He was angry with Pharisees, yet even to them strangely without resentment. There was in Him a marvellously tender compassion, united with a hot hatred of meanness and hypocrisy. All fierce extremes met in Him. Here was what Blake had been seeking all his life—that for which he had been a rebel. Just here, in the old gospel, looming out of the past, he gained his supreme vision of One who satisfied his utmost need. He gazed, and worshipped Him in His immense energy and strength, His lowliness and meekness, Who had deserved all that His chosenpeople could give Him, yet had borne no resentment when they despised and rejected Him. Slowly Blake saw his life as a mere blot by the side of that resplendent life. Then all resentment died in him. The child spirit returned. He accepted his earthly lot, henceforth content to do his work with all his might, careless whether his generation paid the wages due to him or not.
Blake, like the Patriarch, wrestled through his dark night till the day dawned. He had wrenched the secret out of the angel messenger. Henceforth he was an Israelite indeed—a guileless Prince with God, with a word of God on his lips for such as had ears to hear. Doubtless if we could arrange the details of human experience we would decree that after such a contact with the Divine a man should for the rest of his days sail on a halcyon sea into a haven of rest. But though the giants are slain, their ghosts return; and Blake, like Jacob, was still haunted by spectres which only did not deter him because he had painfully learnt to discern between the shadow and the substance.
The day dawned, but not in the way that most would choose. Worldly success was farther from him than ever. Instead of himself arising like a blaze of light on the England that he loved, it was his spirit that was secretly illumined by the spiritual sun; and while he could live by the memory of his resplendent vision of Christ, yet as he moved among men he was merely observed to halt on his thigh, or in other words to be touched with that frenzy or madness which marks those who have rashly gazed on the sun.
For the next ten years—years of rich spiritual maturity—Blake worked incessantly; but his life was so obscure that his biographers have been able to glean but a handful of facts.
Immense changes were taking place in European literature and art. The new spirit and the old spirit were energetically at work side by side. At home, Jane Austen brought the novel as understood and treated by Fanny Burney to consummate perfection. Sir Walter Scott cast a magic glow of romance over the past. Wordsworth was piercing through the sacramental significance of nature. Coleridge was dreaming weird mystical dreams in the open daylight. Abroad, Goethe was exploring the riches of man’s fallen nature. Beethoven, bursting away from Haydn, was introducing a world of passion into his music. Napoleon was a new kind of man.
Did Blake read the signs of the times? And what did he think of them? We know that he admired Wordsworth, but feared lest nature should ensnare him. The rest is guess-work. Blake could hardly have known how to place himself among the great moderns. It is we, looking back over the lapse of a century, who can see his deep affinity with many that came after him. I would say more. He had anticipated much of the better side of Nietzsche’s teaching, but had seen it still more clearly in the character and teaching of Christ. He is strictly the Evangelist to the modern world enamoured of art, strength, and spontaneity, to bring it back to Christ.
Amidst these changes we can just discern a change in Blake’s spiritual life which is common to all original geniuses. The Psalmist sang: “Instead of thy fathers thou shalt have children whom thou mayst make princes.” Blake had hardly had a father, but he had had friends or brothers that were too apt to play the part of the heavy father. These were passing one by one, and their places were being taken by young men, sons who sat at the feet of the wise man and gave him the reverence that was his due.
We cannot say that Blake had a genius for friendship. With none of his old friends had he been really intimate. He was always uncompromising on his convictions, and these were so peculiar that not even Swedenborgian Flaxman could always understand him. His feeling for Flaxman survived with difficulty. What might have grown to a close friendship for Hayley died the moment he saw him as he was. Stothard had refused his offered hand after their quarrel. There remained Fuseli, of whom he wrote:
“The only man that e’er I knewWho did not make me almost spewWas Fuseli.”
Fuseli was a learned man who could scamper about the world’s history with breathless speed. He lectured on the different ages of art with all the fluency of a Swiss polyglot waiter. Out of the copious flow of his eloquence one can, with long patience, fish up such fine things as this on Michael Angelo: “A beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of poverty,” or this on Rembrandt’s Crucifixion: “Rembrandt concentrated the tremendous moment in one flash of pallid light. It breaks on the body of Christ, shivers down His limbs, and vanishes on the armour of a crucifix; the rest is gloom.”
Fuseli had shared with Blake an admiration for Lavater. In an age of crude scepticism he openly confessed his faith in Christ. With Blake he reckoned outline the foundation of great art. Here was much on which the two men could meet. But Fuseli never quite dug down to fundamental principles.
He declared again and again that “our ideas are the offspring of our senses,” and Blake regarded such damnable Lockian heresyas rank atheism; and among his other heresies, also damnable in Blake’s eyes, was an enthusiasm for Titian and Correggio, and a summary denial that Albert Dürer was a man of genius. Hence, Fuseli and Blake, with regard for one another, were never intimate friends. It was about the year 1818 that Blake found himself in the midst of a new and younger circle. George Cumberland, himself young and orthodox on outline, introduced him to John Linnell and John Varley.
John Varley moved from 2 Harris Place to 5 Broad Street, Golden Square, about 1806. His house was shared with William Mulready, who married his sister. His wife, Esther, was sister of John Gisborne, who moved in the Shelley and Godwin set. Another sister married Copley Fielding. Here was a group of artists connected by marriage.
Varley helped to found the Water Colour Society in 1804, and drew to himself many young men who were more or less his pupils. Among these, besides Mulready, were W. H. Hunt, John Linnell, Samuel Palmer, James Holmes.
With the big, fat, genial Varley Blake soon became friends. Varley was a typical once-born man, and his clean earthiness made its irresistible appeal to the twice-born Blake with his head in the skies. Besides his water-colours he pursued with equal ardour and success the study of astrology.
Minds of Blake’s order have been apt to believe in astrology, like Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus; but Varley failed to convert Blake because, no doubt, of the extremely materialistic explanation that he could only give of his science. The stars, according to the astrology that the Western mind scoffs at, are supposed to exert a direct influence on the destinies and characters of men. But there is an Oriental doctrine that dispenses with such a crudetheory, considering that the stars have no more direct influence on character than the hands of a clock on time. Like all mysticism, East and West, it regards the universe as the macrocosm and man the microcosm. Between the two there is a correspondence, and therefore the state of the microcosm can be read by the starry indications of the macrocosm as the time can be known by the hands of an exact clock or sundial.
Varley understood nothing of all this, and so failed to convince Blake. But he gave him what he needed far more, hearty good will and unpatronizing faith and reverence. Blake could pursue his visions and report on them, certain that his companion would believe in his marvels with that perfect credulity which so many are ready to give who have rejected the marvels of Christianity. At his bidding he evoked visions of past worthies, and sketched them while they waited. From 1819 to, 1820 Blake executed no less than fifty heads, including his famousGhost of a Flea.
Those of us who were thrilled in our boyhood by the tales of Lord Lytton like to know that Varley was consulted by him before writing his fascinatingZanoniandStrange Story.
A still greater comfort and help to Blake was John Linnell.
John Linnell began by copying George Morland, passed under the influence of Sir Benjamin West, and then became a pupil of Varley, who sent him straight to nature. Varley’s brother Cornelius attended a baptist chapel, and he induced Linnell to go with him and listen to the sermons of its pastor, the Reverend John Martin. He was convicted of sin, converted, duly immersed, and regularly enrolled. Henceforth religion of a puritanic kind ruled his life, and made him easy to dissenters of the different sects, but stiff and uncompromising towards the Churchof England and the clergy. At one time he had thoughts of joining the quakers, whose position is far different from that of the baptists; but he was deterred by Bernard Barton, who, though fond of art himself, warned him that the Friends as a whole looked with extreme suspicion on anyone addicted to such a questionable pursuit as that of making pictures.
Blake was introduced to Linnell by George Cumberland in 1818 at Linnell’s house in Rathbone Place. They soon became intimate. Their religious conception of art united them, and Linnell much relished Blake’s tirades against kings and priests. It was only when Blake spoke with equal licence of the sex passion that Linnell felt an adverse tug at their friendship.
Linnell took over for his country house Collins’ Farm, North End, Hampstead, and there Blake became a regular visitor on Sunday afternoons until sickness and death put an end to his visits.
North End, now in the County of London, is still a village on the Heath. On Saturdays, Sundays, and Bank Holidays it is overlaid with trippers, orange-peel, and paper bags. But no sooner do the holiday-makers return to work than North End and its marvellous portion of heath resumes its mystery, and the dreamer can dream undisturbed till the next people’s holiday.
It is pleasant to think of Blake arriving at Collins’ Farm, then after the friendly greetings emerging by the Bull and Bush, sacred meeting-house of many artists, crossing the road to Rotten Row, mounting the hillock and viewing the fir-trees which still stand in all their mysterious beauty. If only North End had been south instead of north! Blake declared with seeming perverseness that the North upset his stomach. Varley would have explained to him that his ruling sign being Leo, he required like all lions the warm sunny south.
Linnell introduced him to many of his young friends, who, catching the infection, hailed Blake as a master and sat at his feet to learn. We note this deference because it is what Blake so richly deserved; but even among his new young friends there was nothing like complete discipleship. Blake’s art was an inseparable part of his whole passionate, chequered spiritual life. No one whose inner life does not repeat the same broad outlines can really approach near to him as an artist. James Holmes, with his easy, superficial, courtly life, might teach Blake to brighten his water-colours, but he was completely outside of his spiritual travail, and could only wonder mildly why young idealists like Calvert, Palmer, and Richmond could be so preoccupied with Blake’s half-crazed thoughts.
Even among those chosen three, there were no sons of thunder.
Edward Calvert caught Blake’s spirit in his lovely and simple woodcuts, but quite rightly followed his own bent, which led him ultimately along a different path from Blake’s zigzag lightning tract. The master always transpierced Nature, and lived in a transcendental region: Calvert, serene and calm, detected the heart of the Divine beating equally in Nature, and reproduced what he heard and saw in musical and sweet landscapes, where storms never come, and which modern artists would probably prefer to see disturbed by an earthquake.
Samuel Palmer, with youthful impulse and generosity, gave himself to Blake, and, rendered receptive by his love and enthusiasm, soon assimilated all the master’s principles. Palmer’s rich nature allowed of much reverence for Linnell too, and in his early work it is easy to find examples first of Blake’s influence and then of Linnell’s. Like Calvert, he was deeply and equablydevout. He did not demand that austerity which drew Linnell to the baptist, John Martin; nor that passion for which Blake went to hell. The gentler elements of his soul led him away from harsh sects to the more temperate Church of England, which can, among other things, still nourish those souls that require the kind of diet that George Herbert could provide so bountifully.
We look with extreme interest to see how Blake’s professed disciples set about to unite their religion and art. They did it as many other Christian artists have done it, as Fra Angelico did supremely well; yet they missed Blake’s daemonic energy, and so have failed to meet that demand of our own age which will at all cost have passion for the driving force of religion if it is to have religion at all. Samuel Palmer painted and etched some exquisite pictures; but he was in after years gently apologetic for Blake’sMarriage of Heaven and Hell, and he left the problem of the synthesis of religion and art in the light of Christianity precisely where it was left by the best Italian Christian artists.
George Richmond completed the little inner circle of three disciples. He was only sixteen when he met Blake at John Linnell’s, North End, and then walked with him back to Fountain Court, Strand, thrilling with a unique impression as if he were verily walking with the prophet Isaiah. For a while he was plastic clay in the hands of Blake, revealing the master’s influence inAbel the ShepherdandChrist and the Woman of Samaria, but like his friends, Calvert and Palmer, he had sufficient native energy to follow his own instinct, and when he found himself in portrait painting there is nothing to remind us even remotely of Blake. His sitters appear a noble family. Cardinal Newman,Bishop Wilberforce, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell, and many others are extraordinarily beautiful, and might all be taken for brothers and sisters. Richmond’s religious feelings brought him into fellowship with the tractarian movement, which of all recent religious movements in England allows most standing-ground for one devoted to religion and art. He did not paint Titans, but he puts us in love with his beautiful family, and that surely is no mean achievement.
Among Blake’s friends must be mentioned Crabb Robinson and Frederick Tatham, not because of their intrinsic importance to Blake, but their use to us. Robinson was often sorely perplexed by the vehement paradoxes that Blake wilfully poured into his ears; but at the same time, he thought it worth while to jot them down in his diary.
Tatham came near enough to Blake to enable him to fulfil several of the indispensable qualifications of the biographer. Afterwards he became an Irvingite, and, conscience-ridden, destroyed many of Blake’s works that had come into his hands because he reckoned them unsound.
One other very curious friendship stands out, that with Thomas Griffiths Wainewright.
Wainewright was born out of due season. He might have avoided the unpleasant and ugly things that befell him if he had been a contemporary of the Borgias. He was an artist, and art is no respecter of persons. We are tempted to say that art is fallen man’s supreme consolation. It is assuredly the meeting-place between a certain kind of saint and a certain kind of sinner. The highest artist-saint, like Jesus Christ, appears to create himself rather than works of art, and such always makes an irresistible appeal to the artist-sinner, as we see that Christ did to OscarWilde in hisDe Profundisand to George Moore in hisBrook Kerith. The latter seems to be as far as the artist can reach without religion, and it could teach most Christians something about their Master. When Blake discovered that the Real Man in each one of us has imagination for his chief and working faculty, he overcame once for all the provoking dualism of art and religion, and at the same time he became an attraction to those who live an imaginative life, especially among sinners. Wainewright was drawn to Blake for precisely the same reason that many modern enthusiasts are who could hardly be reckoned religious. He is permanently interesting to the psychologist as to the artist, and hence he could not escape the notice of Lord Lytton, who introduced him into hisLucretia, and above all of Oscar Wilde, who darted upon him, and who, with such a subject, was loosened to write in his most witty, brilliant, and characteristic style.
Here I must mention, in order, Blake’s chief works from 1810 to the end.
In 1793 was published a small book of engravingsFor Children, The Gates of Paradise. Blake re-issued this in 1810, changing theFor ChildrentoFor the Sexes. The changes do not throw fresh light on Blake. Rather, what is important to know, we see, in spite of the changes, that Blake’s deepest thoughts were the same in 1795 and 1810. I will quote only the first two lines:
“Mutual Forgiveness of each vice,Such are the Gates of Paradise.”
Forgiveness of sins, so impossible for the Pharisee, so easy for the artist, is the heart of Christ’s gospel. Blake leaned tothat form of Christianity which best understood forgiveness. At this time he was inclined to think that the Church of Rome came nearest to Christ.
Blake reprintedThe Prologue and Characters of Chaucer’s Pilgrimsin 1812. Then followed five years of indefatigable production, but the works are lost for this world, though Blake would probably say that they were published in the other, and read, and remembered.
About 1817 he engraved leaflets,Laocoon, andOn Homer’s Poetry, andOn Virgil.
The first is covered with small writing, fresh proverbs of hell, which are the same in substance as the earlier proverbs, but less provocative. TheLaocoonperfectly expressed his own experience during years of obscure struggle. He found the same mighty conflict described from cover to cover of the Bible. Christians have been accustomed to see there the history of their sin, conviction, struggle, and victory. Blake had nothing to say against all this, but he named that which was striving for the victory the spirit of art, and all the things that accompany the conflict—prayer, praise, fasting—he explained in terms of art. Protestantism had made necessary such a vehement vindication of the beautiful. To-day, I suppose, we accept naturally Blake’s aphorisms, but need to rediscover some of those other things that protestantism and catholicism alike have insisted on so uncompromisingly in the past.
FromOn Homer’s PoetryI quote the following:
“Unity and Morality are secondary considerations and belong to Philosophy and not to Poetry, to Exception and not to Rule, to Accident and not to Substance. The Ancients called it eating of the Tree of Good and Evil.”
In other words, poetry, like life and love and other instinctive things, goes deeper and before our fine-spun distinctions of number and morality. Philosophers have sprung up since Blake’s day who are wonderfully agreed with him.
This on the cause of European wars is striking: “The Classics! it is the Classics, and not Goths nor Monks, that desolate Europe with Wars.”
FromOn VirgilI gather this, which needs no comment: “A warlike State never can produce Art. It will rob and plunder and accumulate into one place, and translate and copy and buy and sell and criticize, but not make.”
During Blake’s last year in South Molton Street he executed seventeen woodcuts for Dr Thornton’sPastorals of Virgil. These are very simple and childlike or childish, according to our state when we look at Blake’s work. They seem to me of very unequal merit; but the best of them are invaluable, for they show that Blake at the age of sixty-three had not lost that childlike innocence, the parody of which is all that most men attain to in their second childhood.
In 1821 Blake removed to 3 Fountain Court, Strand, where he had the plainest of neutral rooms, not without value as a background for his visions. Here relief was at hand, but he knew it not. Harassed by poverty, he must raise money somehow. His collection of engravings, which had steadily grown since the day that he had endowed his bride with it as his sole treasure, was marketable, and with as little fuss as need be he sold it to Messrs Colnaghi and Company. It was the final self-stripping. Humbled and disciplined by the inexorable years, having surrendered himself and his last precious possession, he was ready to bring forth the rich fruit of his mature genius. His old friendand patron Butts gave him a commission to paint twenty-one water-colour designs illustrating the Book of Job. He was allowed to show them, and they drew forth from his friend Linnell a further commission to execute and engrave a duplicate set, with the written agreement that he should receive £100 for the designs and copyright and another £100 out of the profits. There were no profits forthcoming; but Linnell paid him in instalments £50 besides the first £100. We may note here that the Royal Academy in 1822 made him a grant of £25. And so, at last, Blake had sufficient means to enable him to devote himself to his joyous work without the gnawing distraction of poverty and want.
There is no book in the world better suited for Blake’s genius than the Book of Job. It has been in itself a complete Bible to the mystic in all ages. In it is given a marvellous description in dramatic form of that mysterious and awful self-stripping which the saint experiences after his conversion and not before. It is an expansion of the text that even here death is the gate of life. The same truth is insisted on by all the prophets, especially by the prophets to the nations like Ezekiel and Jonah; by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; by the personal experience of St Paul; and recently by Hegel, till it has become a commonplace both in religion and philosophy.
Blake was troubled by no modern criticism of the Book of Job, which by post-dating it several hundred years has robbed it of much of its literary interest. To him it was the porch of the Sanctuary, the oldest book in the Bible, at once the most ancient and most modern of books. Job, after his dark night of testing and judgment, emerged simple and guileless, a Patriarch who served God solely because that was the supremely right thing todo. Who was Job? The Book gives no hint of his parentage. Who wrote the wonderful prologue? Who could write it? Again the Book is silent. Tradition says Moses; and if tradition speak truly, then several very interesting things follow. Job was probably the son of Issachar,[6]and as such went down with his father into Egypt when Joseph had been advanced in that land. He would then remove to Uz in Chaldæa, carrying within treasures of Egyptian learning. In later years, Moses, fleeing from Egypt into the desert of Midian, would become his neighbour. Moses is admittedly one of the world’s greatest initiates. As such he could certainly have written the prologue and the epilogue. And how lofty a level the drama maintains throughout! Even Job’s friends, who pour out pithy things in rich poetical language surpassing that attained by all laureates, are rebuked for uttering only what everybody knows. Yet so universal is the Book in its symbolism that it can afford, if need be, to dispense with picturesque details of its authorship and date, and stand simply on its merits as an inspired dramatic epic of Man’s passage from his consciousness of degradation as a worm, and his stubbornness as a wild ass’s colt, to the dignity and power of a son of God.
Blake had already traced the course of man’s day of judgment in Night IX ofThe Four Zoas, and had painted a fresco of the subject in 1820. In the poem he had used his own peculiar mythology, and closed his poem to nearly all readers. The Book of Job obliged him to drop his own symbolism and use the simple and universal symbols that the drama itself supplies. A brief reference to each design in order will make his purpose clear.