“The painters of England are unemployed in public works.” Blake’s lament and desire show how he conceived of the function and need of art in national life. Isolated in his own age, he was ever conscious of the lost medieval tradition and striving to take up again its broken threads. His own art may be charged with eccentricity, partly due to an abnormal nature, partly to want of education and the warping circumstances of his time; but he aspired to belong to the central tradition. And we may with more justice perhaps charge with “eccentricity” the trend of nineteenth-century art, embogged in a naturalism which may well appear to future times as little significant as the “naturalist” movement in seventeenth-century Italy.
Blake’s immediate influence on his little group of young disciples was mainly through the pastoral vein of his woodcuts, and did not succeed in stimulating them to arduous creation. The torpor of prosperous commercialism came on England, and was heavy to contend against. When Rossetti sought for a tradition to sustain the effort of the Pre-Raphaelites to reconnect the arts and the imaginative life, he too looked back to the Middle Ages; and on the path behind there was no one but Blake to help him. Sterile dogmas have done their best to drain the arts of imagination: but no fulness of power will be theirs till the imaginative life pours into them again. Of that time Blake is the herald and the prophet.
LAURENCE BINYON.
Cordial acknowledgments are due to the Trustees of the National Gallery of British Art; to the Trustees of the British Museum, and of the Boston Museum; and to the private owners Mr. William Bateson, Miss Carthew, Mr. Edward Marsh, Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Morse, Mr. T. H. Riches, Messrs. Ricketts & Shannon, Mr. Edgar Tindall and Mr. W. Graham Robertson whose courtesy has made it possible to represent Blake’s art in these pages more fully than in any previous publication; in especial to Mr. Graham Robertson, who has allowed his unrivalled collection to be drawn on to the extent of one quarter of the whole number of illustrations. I wish also to thank Mr. A. G. B. Russell, whose forthcoming authoritative catalogue of Blake’s drawings has been so long awaited, for friendly advice and information, and Mr. Geoffrey Keynes for valued help and for reading the proofs of the text. Mr. Keynes’s “Bibliography of Blake,” published this year for the Grolier Club, with its scholarly and minute account of Blake’s printed books and MSS., is a work to which every student of Blake must be deeply indebted.
FOR the sale of the Linnell collection of drawings, prints and books by Blake, the great room at Christie’s was full to overflowing. It was March of 1918. Copies of the Songs of Innocence, of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell; the set of water-colour designs for The Book of Job; the famous century of Dante illustrations; single drawings and rare prints; all were fetching or going to fetch hitherto unparalleled prices. Competition ran high, the excitement of the bidders was infectious. In the middle of the sale Lot 171 was announced; and observers on the edge of the crowd could see, lifted high in the hands of the baize-aproned, impassive attendant, a human mask, conspicuous in its white plaster. It was the life-mask of William Blake; and as those tense features were carried duly along the knots of dealers and bidders, who, pencil and catalogue in hand, threw up at it an appraising glance, the Ironic Muse could surely not have forborne a smile. The auctioneer invited bids, collecting from various quarters those imperceptible nods which give to auctions an air of magic and conspiracy; and still the white mask, with the trenchant lip-line and the full, tight-closed eyes, was held up and offered to every gaze, turned now this way and now that. It seemed to be the most living thing in the room; as if the throng of curious watchers, murmuring among themselves, and the auctioneer himself, were mere shadows engaged in a shadowy chaffering. It seemed to me that, next moment, those eyes would blaze open, seeing, not us, but some vision of celestial radiance; and that all who could not share that vision must dissolve into their native insignificance. Sentences floated through my brain: “I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit; I want nothing; I am quite happy.” “Painting exists and exults in immortal thoughts.” “Art is a means of conversing with Paradise.” I remembered how Blake died singing hymns of joy. And I thought of his “madness”; and suddenly it appeared as if the world, with its mania for possessing things, and its commercial values for creations of the spirit, were really insane, and the spirit inspiring Blake the only sane thing in it.
A subtle fluid streams through Blake’s work, which has in it the germ of intoxication; hence people find it hard to judge of it without a certain extravagance, either of admiration or repulsion. Possibly indeed a quite “sane” estimate of it misses something of its essence. But, after all, he is an artist among the artists of the world, with affinities among them, if few of these are to be found among those of his own race, and fewer still among those of his own time. There is no need to judge him by a strange and special standard, as if he were a wholly isolated phenomenon. He is one of the greatest imaginative artists of England.
The first edition of “The Golden Treasury” contained none of Blake’s poems: now his songs are in every anthology. He has come into his kingdom as a poet. As a seer and as a quickening influence on the thought of later generations he is recognized. As an artist, also, he has of late years begun to receive more general homage. But Blake’s art, in its great qualities as in its frequent blemishes and deficiencies, is still not understood and appreciated as it should be; and chiefly because it is little known. Yet it is as painter, draughtsman and engraver that Blake is greatest. Nothing perhaps in his pictorial art quite matches the aerial radiance and felicity of his best songs. But nothing in his poetry has the sustained grandeur of the Job engravings, or of a whole series of splendidly imagined designs.