William Blake Part 12

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 Suss.e.x. 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's _Grave_, 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 of _The 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 popular taste.

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 ill.u.s.trations 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 for _The Grave_ would be popular. Yet this did not arise from any affinity between Blake and the then famous author of _The Grave_. Blair had been dead for fifty years. His poem expressed the strict orthodoxy of his day. Its fine pa.s.sages 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 sh.e.l.l that the spiritual body may pa.s.s on into its spiritual environment. Yet with his love of marriages he depicted the rending of the tomb and the pa.s.sionate 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sivity, 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." That was 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 pa.s.sed, 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 collected _Discourses_ of 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 dispa.s.sionateness to which Blake could never attain.

What must strike any impartial reader of the _Discourses_ is 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 to caution 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 h.e.l.l, 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 ant.i.thesis of the ideal and the real. Reynolds extols Michael Angelo and degrades Hogarth. Blake loves both. In conclusion we say, with only the _Discourses_[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 the _Discourses_ to 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 fit To make mere common honesty In 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, lifted the 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's _Grave_, he drew a pencil sketch of _Chaucer'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 the _Canterbury 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 ill.u.s.trating 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 the _Canterbury 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 pa.s.sed successively through the hands of Lewis Schiavonetti, Engleheart, Niccolo Schiavonetti, and was finally done by James Heath. The result justified Cromek's calculations. The _Pilgrimage to Canterbury_ was 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 the _Canterbury Pilgrims_ and a _Descriptive Catalogue_ to 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-advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 picture _Confirmation_, 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 to make 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 pa.s.sed 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 ill.u.s.trated his own poems, he drew his monstrous beasts without check, 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 coa.r.s.e 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 experience into 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.

CHAPTER XI

THE SUPREME VISION

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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude of defiance, and to a.s.sure himself that his anger was G.o.dlike. 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 ma.s.s of myth, legend, and tradition.

After this wholesale rejection of the supernatural, it strikes one as comic to hear Samuel Butler solemnly a.s.suring 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 pa.s.s Him. He gazed at Him until he was seized by Him.

Pa.s.sionately 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: