Irene Langridge

“ Mere literary interest would give the picture no real claim to artistic regard. But Blake felt the drawing of each bounding line as a thing of beauty in itself, having an aesthetic element of its own, apart from its representative or symbolic use. In that coil of entangled fates, what manifold themes of pure sensuous beauty are to be found! For instance—just at the leap and bend of the circle—appears a woman with arms extended in the fluent wind, like a bird in flight, and a man’s embrace encircles her neck—a man whose face she kisses rapturously. ”

“ No one but Michael Angelo could have drawn with strong felicitous hand the glorious youth atop of the grave as Blake has done. The whole allegory is so intellectually definite, so succinctly expressed that thought and its body form are here identical. But the strangest flower of his thoughts on the grave, blossoms in the picture called “The Re-Union of the Soul and the Body.” Descending like a bolt from the blue, cleaving the smoke ascending from the fires of consuming materialism, the soul embraces with passionate joy the strong male body, which struggles from the grave to enfold her. ”

“ John Linnell and Tatham piously cared for and tended their lost leader’s widow. She died as Blake died, joyfully, and her body was laid to rest beside his in Bunhill Fields. There is no sign to-day to show where those graves lie, but it is as well.
“The vegetative earth” has absorbed the two dear bodies that the spirits of William Blake and his wife may shine the clearer; their bright radiance glimmers through the century like a guiding star, to lead men’s thoughts out into the endless vistas of the infinite life which transcends our present limited consciousness. ”

“ Dark, intensely green downs undulate and swell to meet the sky. A lurid light defines the horizon, and in the swathed masses of gray cloud above, an angel blowing a trump (suggesting a Last Judgement) wings his fateful way. It may easily be urged (and the prosaic mind which only rejoices in the precise and neat imitation of what it can see is sure to exclaim) that here is a defiance of all artistic rules, a pitiable inability to copy the most ordinary natural phenomena, proclaiming Blake a wilful “poseur” or an unobservant madman. ”

“ So now we are at last introduced to some of the personages of Blake’s curious mythology. The argument—a page of the most delicate and energetic design, representing a radiant young woman “plucking Leutha’s flower,” which, in the form of a man, leaps from the blossom to her lips—contains in its two initial verses the clue to all the ensuing legend. Oothoon is, according to Mr. Swinburne, the spirit of the great western world, “born for freedom and rebellion, but half a slave and half a harlot.” Leutha is the spirit of sensual impulse and indulgence. ”

“ When the apple of desire is given to mere sensual beauty instead of to moral or intellectual beauty, Love, the winged spirit, flies away, and Discord, the malformed demon, arrives. The three goddesses’ forms, delicate as reeds, pure as Blake’s austere imagination, and modelled with tender care for their lovely limbs, hands and faces, awaken in us a great wonder at the technique he could command when he chose. ”

“ Nothing mattered to him but the inner witness, the lively intuition of internal evidence. Convinced as he was of the cruelty of the fate that had chained eternal man into the bondage of the life of the senses and the division of the sexes; safe-guarding each self-hood from merging in the universal, by laws of restraint and prohibition, Blake took upon himself to proclaim a gospel of deliverance, to awaken man to the perception of the Infinite which lay without the clogged-up chinks of his senses. ”

“ The sense of freedom of the spirit, of the absence of all contractile elements in Blake’s work must however be obvious to all. It is his special charm, to be expansive, sublime, large. The great ethereal spaces of the sky have breathed their inspiration upon him, and he has reflected the colour and the mystery and the depth of the sea. To those who are spiritually homesick he comes as an emissary from beyond the Great Darkness, from where Life is found at its Source. ”

“ A top room in London with a good view of the sky were all the conditions which he found necessary for the expression of his genius. In the vastness of the heavens, clear and deeply blue, or peopled with glistening clouds, or set with large peaceful stars, which spread themselves before his upward gaze, Blake found that impetus to creation which most genius finds in nature or humanity. ”

“ The story is veiled in a shining mystery, but is still quite intelligible and pellucid in style, till just at the end, when the sphinx riddle of this life, the paradox of the senses, the wonder and terror of death, close round the consciousness of Thel, and dark sayings are uttered darkly. Thel is the youngest of the daughters of the Seraphim, but is herself a mortal. All her joy in her own beauty and that of the natural world is destroyed by the thought that she must die, the flowers must fade, the cloud will melt away, everything must change and decay. ”

“ The unprejudiced and scientific character of mind which analyses, classifies, and lays bare with sharp dissecting knife the structure, bones, muscles, heart, of an artistic creation, belonged to neither of them. The analytic and synthetic qualities are seldom united in one mind. (Goethe recognized this when he wrote, “I, being an artist, prefer that the principles through which I work should be hidden from me.”) Both Blake and Rossetti leaped with unerring instinct and the artistic intuition at all noble and right work, and loved it with passion, rather than appreciated it with cold reason. ”

“ As a matter of fact, capriciously self-educated as he was, his ignorance of ordinary rudimentary knowledge was as extraordinary as his acquaintance with much that is caviar to the ordinary intellect.
“Celui qui a l’imagination sans érudition a des ailes et n’a pas de pieds.” And so it was with Blake. But it does not detract one iota from the illuminating quality of the thoughts which flash as it were from a heaven in his brain in times of creative inspiration. Blake on the wing has a strange beauty, a swift, direct and strenuous flight that thrills and awes the imaginative spectator. ”

“ But Blake’s picture is not in any sense a composition which even unconsciously has been built up with the aid of memory. Imagination has here become vision, the uncovering of the veritable image; and Blake has faithfully copied what his entranced consciousness beheld.
Mary, white as the lilies of her annunciation, has fallen back fainting into the arms of Joseph, while above her prostrate body, “a mist of the colour of fire” would seem to have gradually taken form and become incarnate in the exquisite beauty of the infant Jesus. ”

“ No words could do full justice to the beautiful life of Catherine Blake. It is true that no ordinary man could have drawn such harmony from the vivacious, impulsive, passionate nature of the girl. All the generous love that her nature possessed she lavished on Blake, and her complete absorption in him seems to have satisfied the maternal cravings which were to have no other satisfaction, for William and Catherine had no children. ”

“ Deeply as all students of Blake must feel themselves indebted to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats for their learned work, and the real help it has afforded to a clearer view of his unique personality, I cannot but think that every man will—nay must—interpret Blake for himself. He was too erratic, too emotional, too much the artist, the apostle of discernment and the enemy of reason and science, to have constructed the closely-reasoned, carefully-articulated system of thought which they describe so graphically. Blake was an intuitive mystic, not a systematic or learned one. ”

“ We have seen nothing of Blake’s yet, so bold, decisive, nervous. The massive modelling of the Bromion torso is happily contrasted with the shrinking white slenderness of Oothoon. Beyond this passion-torn group, a calm sea, under a mild afternoon sun, shines deeply blue. We shall come across this plate again in the large book of designs in the Print Room. There, it is heavy and opaque in colouring, and totally different in mood, being gloomy and sinister in the highest degree. The blood-red sun hangs like a lamp in stormy purple clouds. The sea is deeply green. [Pg 107] All is ominous. ”

“ The first represents Blake in a rare mood, his mysticism in abeyance, and his temper one of aesthetic abandon. We are so little accustomed to think of him as an artist of varied and wide appeal, that this rhythmic dance, which acted on the spectator like music, surprised. It has in it the delirious joy of elemental things. The fairies’ delicate muslins are fetched out like mist in the greenwood; butterflies’ wings and petals of flower adorn their dainty heads. ”

“ Blake leaves each man to unlock the innermost mystery of those designs for himself. They are steeped all through in his own peculiar hues of thought, subjective to the very verge of the subjectivity allowable to art, but each of them exhibits that pictorial sense without which, however poetical and rare the meaning expressed, they could have no raison d’être—no artistic right to exist. They induce the mood which assists us to their sympathetic comprehension. ”

“ Stothard’s motley throng are gracefully habited, and appear dainty and spruce in spite of the dust of the highway as they amble along. His lighting of the picture, the firm and effective modelling of the horses and their riders, the wide range of tones amounting almost to colour itself, give a satisfying richness which we fail to find in Blake’s picture.
The whole composition is harmonious, and for those who desire nothing further of art than that it shall cater for the eye without much or intimate reference to the mind, then Stothard’s graceful performance is indeed pre-eminent. ”

“ He could only work with freedom when the fact could be treated as merely the symbol of an idea. So that in these plates the homely domestic scenes he tries to represent have a cold and ghastly appearance. They are like nothing we have ever seen, because Blake was so curiously unobservant of details not interesting to him that he simply did not know about them when he came to draw them. His work is only of a high order when his imagination is excited. His spiritual insight not being called into play renders many of these engravings weak, dull and archaic-looking. ”

“ Such artists are but little concerned with the innate and obligatory form with which an idea must necessarily clothe itself. Blake writes in the Descriptive Catalogue, “A spirit and a vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.” ”

“ The spirits ascending into Paradise are as lovely as heart and eye of man could wish. Orcagna’s conception of the beatified souls in Santa Maria, whose profiles Ruskin likened to “lilies laid together in a garden border,” is not more delightful in its artless way than is Blake’s. The children of wrath, snake-encircled, howling, and falling head foremost into the abyss, recall the terrors, the uncouth and wild imagination of “Urizen” and one of the plates in “America.” ”

“ And it is this quality in them which so powerfully acts on the spectator, assuring him that indeed “More things exist in heaven and earth than our philosophy dreams of.” But besides these tremendous imaginative creations, there occur touching and beautiful transcripts from Nature, low-lying hills, under a great sky, waving field grasses and delicate spiders’ webs accurately observed and represented, as far as they go, proving that Dame Nature was not so utterly repudiated by Blake but that at times he saw and loved her for her own sake, in spite of all his theories. ”

“ Error is created, truth is eternal. Error or creation will be burnt up, and then, and not till then, truth or eternity will appear. It is burned up the moment men cease to behold it.” (This is a mystical utterance, a spiritual discernment which will repay thoughtful consideration. It gives the Last Judgement—hitherto conceived of by the orthodox as a terribly material and mundane affair—an imaginative and esoteric significance very grateful and welcome to the spiritually sensitive.) “I assert for myself, that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. ”

“ But often the thought will not, cannot be inclosed: it outstrips the reach of his art. Hence many designs are tumultuous with leaping ideas, dimly apprehended suggestions, not one of which is caught and contained in its essence, but seems rather, as it were, to flutter, tantalizingly enough, just beyond the grasp.
Blake “hitched his waggon to the stars,” to use Emerson’s expressive phrase, and to the spiritually “elect” in art—those to whom ideas are the really precious things—he speaks winged words and with authority. ”

“ From the old Byzantine mosaicists through art’s early springtime to her full summer in the Renaissance, and even since then, no class of subjects has so deeply occupied the mind of painters as sacred history. There are no incidents left untreated in the New Testament, and the Old has had a large meed of attention, yet we find a painter of such unique and peculiar genius as William Blake expending his strength and invention on this well-worn field of motives. ”

“ She is a delicious creation, satisfying the aesthetic sense with completeness. The disposition of the figures in this picture, the decorative arrangement of the overhanging fruit-laden branches of the Tree of Life, the clear treble notes of colour, made one think of the rare and iridescent art of Japan. Blake’s mood when he painted “The River of Life” must have attained to a high and heavenly unity and joy. ”

“ The work of one of the greatest spirits that ever made Art his medium has yet its way to make among the general public. The world entertained the angel unawares, for three-quarters of a century have passed since the death of William Blake, and still his name and his work are but indifferently known. Yet to those that know them, the designs from his pencil, and the poems from his pen, are among the most precious things that Art has bequeathed to us. ”