CHAPTER XI

WORK IN THE EXHIBITION OF 1904

In the January of 1904 Messrs. Carfax's tiny galleries at 17, Ryder Street, St. James's, became a shrine to which all pious lovers of William Blake hastened to make their pilgrimage. None of the usual crowd that visit picture shows were to be descried here.

Blake's appreciators are not those who are most learned in schools of painting, in tricks of style and niceties of technique. They are mainly composed of those who, having a strong pictorial sense, are yet only effectively moved by _ideas_ in art.

And what a harvest of ideas was garnered here!--ideas which sprung like Athene fully developed and armed from the head of Blake--of which head a cast taken by Deville the phrenologist was conspicuously placed in the centre of the lower room of the exhibition. The closely-set mouth and jaw, arched and inflated nostrils, massy brow, and intense and rapt expression, tell one something of the nature of this rare and spiritual intellect.

Out of forty-one exhibits, twenty-five were subjects from the Bible, three were single plates repeated from Blake's "Prophetic Books," one was an Indian ink drawing illustrating a scene in his poem "Tiriel," three were purely imaginative compositions, the keys to which were to be sought in themselves, and seven were illustrations to the poets (three of Milton's "Paradise Lost," one of a scene in Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and three sketches to illustrate Gray, Young, and Blair). Mainly, then, the exhibition might be said to have dealt with Biblical subjects, though good specimens of all kinds of Blake's work rendered it representative of his genius in its various phases.

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. But with results so new, so different from anything ever achieved before, that our interest and delight were stimulated in proportion to our susceptibility to Blake's influence. I am not saying that this new treatment of Biblical subjects, of the Gospel story, is finer than the work of the old masters of the golden age of Italy. Nor do I rank it lower. "The ages are all equal," Blake says himself, "but genius is always above its age." The great point is that it is entirely _different_, and that it exhibits a total disregard for traditional treatment. Blake only found it _possible_ to see these subjects from his own point of view--one never before attained by any artist. And as objects seen from different outlooks vary in colour, profile, and proportion, so as to be sometimes quite unrecognizable, so do these religious pictures of Blake's appear startlingly alien to any we have ever seen before. Or as he puts it himself, "If perceptive organs vary, objects of perception seem to vary too."

Looking round the characteristic and representative collection, the ingenuous student realized that the predominant effect of this art on his mind was one of _strangeness_. It seemed to him unconnected with the past, unrelated to the present, an art set apart, unique, somewhat disquieting, which took him into Blake's visionary world, opposed in every sense to the natural world of daily experience. This visionary world of Blake's, was minutely discriminated by him, however, and was no formless region of emasculating dreams.

The amazing vigour of his conceptions, and the flat contradiction which they impose on the orthodox and traditional images which most people's minds unconsciously harbour, added a sense of shock to that of strangeness. Inquiring yet further into the causes of this impression one discovered the truth of W. B. Scott's assertion, that Blake's genius was unaided by its usual correlative, talent--that facility which enthrones the idea in its appropriately wrought shrine, dowers it with its organically perfect form. Greatly as Blake disliked it to be said, the truth was apparent among these collected works of his, that his execution was seldom equal to his invention. As proof of the strangeness, the independence of his work, we may quote the water-colour drawing of the "Three Maries with the Angel at the Sepulchre" (date 1803), in which the holy women shrink terrified from the angel, with all the shuddering horror that humanity feels at the manifestations of the spiritual world. A small colour-print from "Urizen"--called here "The Flames of Furious Desire"--with which we are already very familiar, must have augmented the impression of unique imagination and strangeness to those who had no previous acquaintance with Blake's work.

The furious raging, the vital majesty of the water-colour called "Fire," the delicate and curious imagination in "Satan watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve," with many others must have contributed to this effect; but the final strangeness and most curious beauty were to be found in "The Nativity," "The River of Life," and "The Bard." In these, Blake's highest and most mystic qualities are manifest, and his divergence from all preconceived ideas startlingly apparent. "The Nativity" is a small tempera picture painted on copper without the usual foundation of gesso that Blake first laid on the plate. Small patches of tempera have been dislodged, showing little gleaming bits of copper, but happily this has occurred mainly at the top part of the picture in the gloom of the roof of the stable. All the long succession of Nativities from Giotto to Correggio ("the soft and effeminate and consequently most cruel demon," as Blake termed him) seem not to have touched his imagination. Most artists carry an "infused remembrance" of great pictures in their mind, and can seldom divest themselves of the subtle influence emanating therefrom. 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. Light as thistledown and shining like a star, so that the whole chamber--with the terrified Joseph, the white mother, the oxen feeding--are all illuminated by its intense radiance--this apotheosis of divinity in childhood takes flight to the outstretched arms of St. Elizabeth, who sits on the floor with a quaint little St. John praying in her lap. The open window through which is discerned the star in the East, takes the imagination out into the night of limitless mystery.

The technique is superior to most of Blake's work in tempera, and is adequate, the rendering of light in the picture containing qualities nothing short of marvellous.

It was impossible to look at this "Nativity" without being moved. The event appeared to Blake entirely supernatural in effect as in cause. He seems to have attached no historical value to it, nor indeed to any of his Biblical subjects. They were to him merely symbols of eternal ideas, projected by the Holy Ghost into the world for its enlightenment, and of these ideas Christ was the chiefest; but every idea he thought capable of manifesting itself equally in diverse symbols. His mind had some of the contemplative and impersonal characteristics of the oriental, and by its original processes he was enabled to appreciate the true inwardness of Christianity as the western mind cannot do. Christianity was born in the East like the Star of its Epiphany, and has come to maturity in the West, but its most mystical secrets will be hid from us until it has returned again and bathed in the immemorial symbolism and true occultism of the East.

Being so unfortunate as not to obtain leave from the "Nativity's" present owner to reproduce it in these pages, I have been obliged to take our illustration from the etching which William Bell Scott made after the original, and for which permission was courteously granted me by Messrs. Chatto and Windus. It is but the shadow of a shadow, for Bell Scott's etching is only that, but it will serve to give some idea of the solemn beauty of the tempera painting.

Now let me recall another purely imaginative composition.

"The River of Life," a water-colour picture, reminded me in its transparence and delicate brilliance of Blake's earlier printed books.

It is a rhapsody of Heaven. The River of Life which flows through the City of God, and in which all new-born souls are dipped, is a mighty stream flowing between green banks, on which are situated the gleaming houses of the city. Groups of happy souls wander beside the clear pale waters, and with his back towards us the Saviour with two children (new-born souls) in either hand swims towards the river's source, which is the Throne of God, typified by the sun. In its rays may be descried adoring angels, reminding us of Blake's ardent words, which I have already quoted, "What! it will be questioned, when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?" "Oh, no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!'"

Two angels--angels of the presence--remain suspended in flight above the stream on either side, playing on pipes, while a beautiful strong woman, clad in lemon-yellow robe, swoops down like a bird just above the surface of the stream with lithe strenuous body bent to meet the wind. 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 Bard" is a picture of quite another order, and pitched in a very different key. Here is a twilight world of intellectual notions and poetic motives wafted hither and thither on the blast of the Bard's frenzy. The Bard himself, a commanding figure, stands on a shelf of rock surveying the vortex, while he smites music from his harp. Below, a king and queen and their horses are overwhelmed in a Stygian stream. All is dark, with a strange gleam and shimmer here and there, like jewels and burnished silver seen through a purple veil. This was one of the pictures that appeared in Blake's own exhibition in his brother's shop, and his description in the celebrated catalogue is well worth quotation:

On a rock whose haughty brow Frown'd o'er old Conway's foaming flood, Robed in sable garb of evil With haggard eyes the Poet stood: Loose his beard and hoary hair Streamed like a meteor of the troubled air. Weave the warp and weave the woof, The winding-sheet of Edward's race.

Thus the poet Gray; and Blake commented, "Weaving the winding-sheet of Edward's race by means of sounds of spiritual music, and its accompanying expressions of spiritual speech, is a bold and daring and most masterly conception that the public have embraced and approved with avidity.

"Poetry consists in these 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 to its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception? No, it shall not be so! Painting as well as poetry and music exists and exults in immortal thoughts.

"The connoisseurs and artists who have made objections to Mr. Blake's mode of representing spirits with real bodies would do well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, the Apollo, which they admire in Greek statues are all of them representations of spiritual existences--of gods immortal--to the ordinary perishing organ of sight; and yet they are embodied and organized in solid marble. Mr. Blake requires the same latitude and all is well. King Edward and Queen Eleanor are prostrated with their horses at the foot of the rock on which the Bard stands--prostrated by the terrors of his harp, on the margin of the river Conway, whose waves bear up a corpse of a slaughtered bard at the foot of the rock. The armies of Edward are seen winding among the mountains.

He wound with toilsome march his long array!

"Mortimer and Gloucester lie spellbound behind the King. The execution of this picture is also in water-colours or fresco," he added finally. It was probably painted in water-colours with white of egg or glue on a medium of gesso. The gloomy glory of its colour was a thing to ponder on. Like the dim silvery splendour of a pearl seen in the twilight of deep-sea waters, so does it glint and gleam. In no picture has Blake brought home to us more directly the visible population of the world of his mind--its power and grandeur and mystery--than in the complex imagery of this great work.

The picture was probably painted in 1785, and was exhibited at the Royal Academy. It afterwards appeared again at Blake's own exhibition in 1809. It is a sad thing that he so seldom dated the pictures which he executed for his staunch friend and supporter Mr. Butts. The pictures in the Exhibition, with a very few exceptions, were originally done for him, but few of them could have an authentic date affixed to them. All Blake's original methods of working were here represented by splendid examples.

First there are the tempera pictures, or "frescoes," as he termed them. He would never paint in oil-colour, because he thought and wrote that "oil, being a body itself, will drink, or absorb very little colour, and changing yellow, and at length brown, destroys every colour it is mixed with, especially every delicate colour. It turns every permanent white to a yellow or brown putty, and has compelled the use of that destroyer of colour, white lead, which when its protecting oil is evaporated will become lead again," and he hotly affirmed the opinion that "oil became a fetter to genius and a dungeon to art." This being so, he evolved a method of painting in water-colours, stiffened with white of egg or dilute glue, on a ground prepared with whiting or plaster and laid on copper or board.

When the "fresco" was finished he varnished it with a preparation of glue. In his old age Linnell lent him a copy of Cennino Cennini's "Trattato della pittura," and he was delighted to find that the method he had always employed in his tempera pictures was very like that of the old sixteenth-century painter.

Occasionally his pictures acquired the mellow harmony, the indescribable deep, yet faded tenderness of the old masters' tempera pictures, as for instance that entitled "Bathsheba at the Bath seen by David." There is nothing supernatural or weird here, save the flowers which grow around the pool, and they are like the strange mysterious blooms that appear to one in dreams. Bathsheba, nude and beautiful, with her two childish attendants, one on either side, somehow recalls the work of Masaccio and Filippino Lippi in the Chapel of the Carmine at Florence, perhaps because it is so nobly naturalistic in treatment.

Another beautiful tempera is "The Flight into Egypt." It was painted in 1790--the year of the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell." Holman Hunt developed in his magnificent picture of the same subject a poetic motive first used by Blake. The great may take from the great without shame. The angelic spirits of the martyred Innocents flutter around the Mother and Child, while the ass on which they ride is followed by angels with great gloomy wings, like night made visible and beneficent. The Virgin's little delicate face looks wistfully from the dim picture like one of Gentile da Fabbriano's small jewel-clear miniatures, and a crescent moon shines vaguely silver through the darkness. This is a picture of high and tender imaginative quality, more in the spirit of old masters like Fra Angelico, it must be admitted, than characteristically Blakean in expression.

There are three other methods used by Blake, of which one--the printed or engraved outline, filled in with hand-wrought water-colour--is so familiar to us from the examples studied at the British Museum, that we need not linger to describe it again. At the British Museum we have also seen many of Blake's "colour-printed" designs, but not any nearly as fine as the two pictures entitled "Hecate" and "Lamech and his two Wives" of the exhibition. The process, according to the younger Tatham's account, was as follows: "Blake when he wanted to make his prints in oil, took a common thick millboard and drew, in some strong ink or colour, his designs upon it strong and thick. He then painted upon that in such oil colours and on such a state of fusion that they would blur well. He painted roughly and quickly, so that no colour would have time to dry. He then took a print of that on paper, and this impression he coloured up in water-colours, repainting his outline on the millboard when he wanted to take another impression; and each having a sort of accidental look, he could branch out so as to make each one different. The accidental look they had was very enticing."

The depth and grandeur of tone obtained in "Hecate" are unique, and, united to the sombre majesty of the composition, form a most satisfying work to eye and intellect. Looking closely at the technique, the colour is seen to be collected in little pin-head dots all over the ground, in a manner that clearly points to its having been impressed while yet wet, with some carefully roughened surface, but just what means were used to obtain this effect must always remain a mystery.

The finest example of the process is, however, "Lamech and his two Wives," in which the tragic nature of the subject is deepened by the colour-printing, here most successfully handled.

Pure water-colour, sometimes delicately outlined with the pen, was Blake's fourth mode of working, and the exhibition had a goodly array of this class of work. We have mentioned "The River of Life," perhaps the most beautiful example extant, but several others, noticeably "Oberon, Titania, and Puck with fairies dancing" and "The Wise and Foolish Virgins," were very lovely. 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. Puck has wings on the back of his hands (a new and delightful idea this!), and the rapid graceful movements of the dance do not seem to be arrested by their embodiment in a painting. Though this phase of Blake is distinctly novel, even strange to us, it is entirely delightful. There is no stress, no repelling yet attractive mystery as in the "Hecate" here. It is just pure "joie de vivre."

"The Wise and Foolish Virgins" is much more characteristic of him. The wise virgins in the foreground are ranged in a row, their lamps by their sides. Their bodies and faces are smitten with a cold unearthly white light, presumably, but not obviously, thrown by the lamps. The modelling of their forms is most careful. Behind them, issuing from a small hut, the foolish virgins, in wild confusion, implore oil for their lamps. The landscape in which the scene is laid is anything but Eastern. 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. "Here," they exclaim, "is little atmosphere, no distance, no attempt at truth of tone, and no comprehensible rendering of the light."

Blake rendered it as he did because he _chose_; because his masterly sense of style (that is, the treatment best suited to the representation of the idea, his subjective vision) required it to be so painted and thus only, because he considered himself free to take from Nature just what he needed for his purpose, and never felt himself obliged to make an entire and wholly truthful representation of her. To emphasize the light on the figures of the foreground, he overcharged the colour in the sky and the downs behind, and by this treatment obtained an effect productive of strange and solemn emotion in the beholder.

Nature was to him shadow or reminiscence only, and here he has defiantly subordinated the truth of the landscape to the spiritual truth of his subject.

The most significant types were revealed in his soul, and owned a relationship to the visible creation only in so far as this relationship was necessary to render his art-work intelligible to the world. His decorative sense approved of the white virgins set so statue-pale against the dark green of the downs. The suddenness of the contrast, the livid and supernatural effect, were part of his deliberate intention. So does the white fire of an intense spiritual alertness contrast with the opaque darkness of natural physical life. For this scene, taken from the parable of Jesus, is only another of those types which Blake regarded in so wide and catholic a sense, and which by his treatment he has lifted above all merely historical association into a realm of pure spiritual symbolism.

The pleasure derived from the examination of his collected pictures is rather that of a profound intellectual excitement than a purely aesthetic satisfaction. The climax of this excitement is reached before the two pictures called, respectively, "Elohim creating Adam" and "Satan triumphing over Eve." How different is Blake's conception of the former subject to Michael Angelo's, and yet, widely different as they are, somehow we know them to be related. Elohim, in the vortex of the winds, lifts a face pale with awe and power, as he calls into being from the clay below him a figure scarcely human yet, and stamped with the stamp of terrestrial creeping mortality. A snake binds one leg, and there is no other suggestion of life about this half-developed repelling organism. But presently Elohim will breathe into the clay, and then this thing (which somehow recalls Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein" to my shuddering fancy!) will arise and live.

Michael Angelo chose the right moment, the body made beautiful but languid, and God's finger applied like a magnet to the limp hand through which the fiery currents of life are just beginning to flow in thrilling gushes into the perfect body. But Blake, with a more curious care for the earlier part of the process of creation, a more meditative and less dramatic sense, invites us to dwell on, not the final perfect beauty of created man, but his partial evolution from the dark earth to which he will one day return. The accidental character of the body of man, the universal nature of the Spirit of God, without whose inspiration there is no beauty nor comeliness--these are thoughts on which he mused while painting this great and terrible picture.

The death-weary figure of Eve in the companion picture was a haunting thing. Overcome by the serpent's wiles, Eve lies prostrate in the tightening coils, and the cruel flat head is pressed upon the white breast, whose power to resist is quite gone. The struggle is over, the delicate body is relaxed, the little head has fallen back piteously, and the eyes are closed, for no blue heavens smile comfort down on her who lies so low in the dust. Satan in clouds of terror triumphs above her, and her overthrow is complete.

A little sketch in pencil, ink and wash, called "Satan, Sin and Death," has a human figure (strangely enough that of Satan), finely posed, and drawn with infinite power. The vigorous torso, slender hips, fine and muscular legs, are classic in their heroic proportions, but it must be admitted that the inspiration of the sketch as a whole is below Blake's level.

I must notice a very fine and highly-finished water-colour, called "The Judgment of Paris." The subject was a congenial one to Blake, who entertained the most original notions about classic legend and literature. He wrote in the Descriptive Catalogue:

"The Artist (Blake) having been taken in vision into the ancient republics, monarchies, and patriachates of Asia, has seen those wonderful originals called in the sacred scriptures the Cherubim, which were sculptured and painted on walls of temples, towers, cities, palaces, and erected in the highly-cultivated States of Egypt, Moab, Eden, Arum among the rivers of Paradise--being the originals from which the Greeks and Hetruvians copied Hercules Farnese, Venus of Medicis, Apollo Belvedere, and all the grand works of ancient art....

"No man can believe that either Homer's Mythology or Ovid's was the production of Greece or Latium; neither will anyone believe that the Greek statues, as they are called, were the invention of Greek artists; perhaps the Torso is the only original work remaining, all the rest being evidently copies, though fine ones, from the greater works of the Asiatic patriarchs. The Greek muses are daughters of Mnemosyne or Memory, and not of Inspiration or Imagination, therefore not authors of such sublime conceptions."

In this ingenious way did Blake seek to justify his admiration for the old pagan art, the old pagan mythology. They were recollections of symbols and ideas given by God to the ancient patriarchs of the Old Testament, and from them had filtered through to the civilization of Greece and Rome. To Blake it all amounted to this, "God hath not left Himself without witnesses," and he vehemently protested against any race, age, or religion arrogating to itself the authorship of ideas which should only be ascribed to God.

So that the "Judgment of Paris" is treated like the biblical subjects, as a spiritual parable. 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. One of the tenderest and most beautiful of Blake's slightly tinted drawings, "The Vision of Queen Katherine"--we are enabled to reproduce through the kindness of its present owner, Sir Charles Dilke. The composition is of exceeding harmony, the delicate outlines being suave, fluent, gracious, to a singular degree. Sweetness and tenderness are its predominant characteristics, and it is without a rival among Blake's works in this respect, saving perhaps for the picture, "And when they had sung an hymn they ascended unto the Mount of Olives."

Katherine, sick unto death, has been soothed to sleep by music:

Cause the musicians play me that sad note I named my knell, whilst I sit meditating On that celestial harmony I go to,

she had asked. Griffith and Patience sit beside her, unconscious of the vision that is blessing her sleep. Katherine, beautiful and crowned, "makes in her sleep signs of rejoicing, and holdeth up her hands to heaven." Angels of diminutive but exquisite forms float in circles above her, and two are holding a crown of laurels over her head. Many pictures--the Indian ink drawing called "The Deluge," an infinite waste of stormy sea; "The Entombment," a picture of solemn intensity and originality; and others deserve description and comment, but space does not allow.

The exhibition was an occasion of much illumination to Blake's admirers, and the thoughts on his art which it gave rise to may be happily summarized in a passage from Heine's "Salon":

"Art attains its highest value when the symbol, apart from its inner meaning, delights our senses externally, like the flowers of a _selam_, which without regard to their secret signification are blooming and lovely, bound in a bouquet."

"But is such concord always possible? Is the artist so completely free in choosing and binding his mysterious flowers? Or does he only choose and bind together what he must? I affirm this question of mystical un-freedom or want of will. The artist is like that somnambula princess who plucked by night in the garden of Bagdad, inspired by the deep wisdom of love, the strangest flowers, and bound them into a _selam_, of whose meaning she remembered nothing when she awoke. There she sat in the morning in her harem, and looked at the _bouquet de nuit_, musing on it as over a forgotten dream, and finally sent it to the beloved Caliph. The fat eunuch who brought it greatly enjoyed the beautiful flowers without suspecting their meaning. But Haroun al Raschid, the commander of the faithful, the follower of the Prophet, the possessor of the ring of Solomon, he recognized the deep meaning of the beautiful bouquet; his heart bounded with delight; he kissed every blossom, and laughed till tears ran down his long beard." We may not be followers of the Prophet, nor rejoice in long beards or magic rings, yet I dare assert that in entering into the meaning, the deep "_Innigkeit_" of the _selam_ which Blake presented to us, we have entered on a new phase of spiritual and artistic life not less intensely delightful than the joy experienced by the Prophet.