BLAKE’S finished pictures have never received the same attention nor aroused the same admiration as his wash-drawings, his wood-cuts, or his engravings. It is difficult to account for this comparative neglect, since they not only show command of a technique which admits of the completest realisation of the idea, but they seem actually to express what was personal to Blake in a purer form than many of his other works, with less admixture of those unfortunate caprices which the false romantic taste of his day imposed too often even on so original and independent a genius. The explanation may perhaps lie in the fact that to most people Blake, for all his inimitable gifts, appears as a divinely inspired amateur rather than as a finished master of his art, and they are willing to tolerate what they regard as his imperfect control of form in media which admit only of hints and suggestions of the artist’s vision.

There assuredly never was a more singular, more inexplicable phenomenon than the intrusion, as though by direct intervention of Providence, of this Assyrian spirit into the vapidly polite circles of eighteenth-century London. The fact that, as far as the middle classes of England were concerned, Puritanism had for a century and a half blocked every inlet and outlet of poetical feeling and imaginative conviction save one, may give us a clue to the causes of such a phenomenon. It was the devotion of Puritan England to the Bible, to the Old Testament especially, that fed such a spirit as Blake’s directly from the sources of the most primeval, the vastest and most abstract imagery which we possess. Brooding on the vague and tremendous images of Hebrew and ChaldÆan poetry, he arrived at such indifference to the actual material world, at such an intimate perception of the elemental forces which sway the spirit with immortal hopes and infinite terrors when it is most withdrawn from its bodily conditions, that what was given to his internal vision became incomparably more definite, more precisely and more clearly articulated, than anything presented to his senses. His forms are the visible counterparts to those words, like the deep, many waters, firmament, the foundations of the earth, pit and host, whose resonant overtones blur and enrich the sense of the Old Testament. Blake’s art moves us, if at all, by a similar evocation of vast elemental forces. He deals directly with these spiritual sensations, bringing in from external nature the least possible content which will enable him to create visible forms at all. But though he pushed them to their furthest limits, even he could not transcend the bounds which beset pictorial language; even he was forced to take something of external nature with him into his visionary world, and his wildest inventions are but recombinations and distorted memories of the actual objects of sense.

By the strangest irony, too, the forms which came to his hand as the readiest means of expressing his stupendous conceptions were in themselves the least expressive, the least grandiose, that ever art has dealt with. It was with the worn-out rags of an effete classical tradition long ago emptied of all meaning, and given over to turgid rhetorical display, that Blake had to piece together the visible garments of his majestic and profound ideas. The complete obsession of his nature by these ideas in itself compelled him to this: he was entirely without curiosity about such trivial and ephemeral things as the earth contained. His was the most anti-Hellenic temperament; he had no concern, either gay or serious, with phenomena; they were too transparent to arrest his eye, and that patient and scientific quarrying from the infinite possibilities of nature of just the appropriate forms to convey his ideas was beyond the powers with which nature and the poor traditions of his day supplied him. Tintoretto, who had in some respects a similar temperament, who felt a similar need of conveying directly the revelations of his internal vision, was more happily situated. He was, by comparison, a trivial and vulgar seer, but the richness and expressive power of the forms which lay to his hand in Titian’s and Michelangelo’s art enabled him to attain a more unquestionable achievement.

But, allowing for circumstances, what Blake did was surely more considerable and implied a greater sheer lift of imaginative effort. That it was an attempt which remained almost without consequences, isolated and incomplete—marred, too, by a certain incoherence and want of reasonable co-ordination—must be allowed, and may perhaps explain why Blake is not universally admitted among our greatest.

The Byzantine style, he declares, was directly and divinely revealed to him; and whether this were so, or whether he obtained it by the dim indications of Ottley’s prints, or through illuminated manuscripts, the marvellous fact remains that he did succeed in recovering for a moment that pristine directness and grandeur of expression which puts him beside the great Byzantine designers as the only fit interpreter of Hebrew mythology. His “Flight into Egypt”[43] will at once recall Giotto’s treatment of the subject in the Arena chapel at Padua; but the likeness is, in a sense, deceptive, for Giotto was working away from Byzantinism as fast as Blake was working towards it, and the two pass one another on the road. For there is here but little of Giotto’s tender human feeling, less still of his robust rationalism; what they have in common, what Blake rediscovered and Giotto inherited, is the sentiment of supernatural dignity, the hieratic solemnity and superhuman purposefulness of the gestures. Even more than in Giotto’s version, the Virgin here sits on the ass as though enthroned in monumental state, her limbs fixed in the rigid symmetry which oriental art has used to express complete withdrawal from the world of sense. No less perfect in its expressiveness of the strange and exalted mood is the movement, repeated with such impressive monotony, in the figures of Joseph and the archangel. It is absurd, we think, to deny to the man who discovered the lines of these figures the power of draughtsmanship. Since Giotto’s day scarcely any one has drawn thus—simplification has been possible only as the last effort of consummate science refining away the superfluous; but here the simplification of the forms is the result of an instinctive passionate reaching out for the direct symbol of the idea.

Blake’s art indeed is a test case for our theories of Æsthetics. It boldly makes the plea for art that it is a language for conveying impassioned thought and feeling, which takes up the objects of sense

as a means to this end, owing them no allegiance and accepting from them only the service that they can render for this purpose. “Poetry,” says Blake, “consists in bold, daring, and masterly conceptions; and shall painting be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile representations of merely mortal and perishing substances, and not be, as poetry and music are, elevated into its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception?” The theory that art appeals solely by the associated ideas of the natural objects it imitates is easily refuted when we consider music and architecture; in those at least the appeal to the spirit is made directly in a language which has no other use than that of conveying its own proper ideas and feelings. But in pictorial art the fallacy that nature is the mistress instead of the servant seems almost ineradicable, and it is difficult to convince people that increased scientific investigation of phenomena, increased knowledge of how things present themselves to our sight, changes the mode, but does not necessarily increase the power, of pictorial expression. The Byzantine artists, with a knowledge of appearances infinitely less than that of the average art student of to-day, could compass the expression of imaginative truths which our most accomplished realists dare not attempt. The essential power of pictorial as of all other arts lies in its use of a fundamental and universal symbolism, and whoever has the instinct for this can convey his ideas, though possessed of only the most rudimentary knowledge of the actual forms of nature; while he who has it not can by no accumulation of observed facts add anything to the spiritual treasure of mankind. Of this language of symbolic form in which the spirit communicates its most secret and indefinable impulses Blake was an eloquent and persuasive master. He could use it, too, to the most diverse ends; and though the sublimity which is based upon dread came most readily to his mind, he could express, as we have seen in the “Flight into Egypt,” the sublimity of divine introspection. In the “David and Bathsheba” (see Plate) he touches a different note, and he shows his true power of symbolic expression in this, that it is not by the treatment of the figure itself, not by any ordinary sensual enticements, that he gives the atmosphere of voluptuous abandonment. It is rather in the extravagant tropical flowers, in the architecture which itself blossoms with oriental exuberance, in the fiery orange of the clouds seen behind trees preternaturally virid, that the spirit is bewildered with anticipations of extravagant bliss. The picture might be described in Blake’s own terminology as the mental abstract of voluptuousness.

All art gives us an experience freed from the disturbing conditions of actual life. Blake’s art, more concentrated than most, gives us an experience which is removed more entirely from bodily and physiological accompaniments, and our experience has the purity, the intensity, and the abstraction of a dream.