Chapter III

William Butler Yeats in his Ideas of Good and Evil has said some notable things about Blake. He calls him a realist of the imagination and first pointed out the analogy between Blake and Nietzsche. "When one reads Blake it is as though the spray of an inexhaustible fountain of beauty was blown into our faces." And "he was a symbolist who had to invent his symbols." Well, what great artist does not? Wagner did; also Ibsen and Maeterlinck. Blake was much troubled over the imagination. It was the "spirit" for him in this "vegetable universe," the Holy Ghost. All art that sets forth with any fulness the outward vesture of things is prompted by the "rotten rags of memory." That is why he loathed Rubens, why he seemingly slurs the forms of men and things in his eagerness to portray the essential. Needless to add, the essential for him was the soul. He believed in goading the imagination to vision--though not with opium--and we are led through a dream-world of his own fashioning, one in which his creatures bear little correspondence to earthly types. His illustrations to the Book of Job, to Dante, to Young's Night Thoughts bear witness to the intensity of his vision, though flesh and blood halts betimes in following these vast decorative whirls of flame bearing myriad souls in blasts that traverse the very firmament. The "divine awkwardness" of his Adam and Eve and the "Ancient of Days" recall something that might be a marionette and yet an angelic being. To Blake they were angels; of that there can be no doubt; but we of less fervent imagination may ask as did Hotspur of Glendower, who had boasted that he could "call spirits from the vasty deep." "Why, so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?" quoth the gallant Percy. We are, the majority of us, as unimaginative as Hotspur. Blake summoned his spirits; to him they appeared; to quote his own magnificent utterance, "The stars threw down their spears, and watered heaven with their tears"; but we, alas! see neither stars nor spears nor tears, only eccentric draughtsmanship and bizarre designs. Yet, after Blake, Doré's Dante illustrations are commonplace; even Botticelli's seem ornamental. Such is the genius of the Englishman that on the thither side of his shadowy conceptions there shine intermittently pictures of a No Man's Land, testifying to a burning fantasy hampered by human tools. He suggests the supernatural. "How do you know," he asks, "but every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed by your senses five?" Of him Ruskin has said: "In expressing conditions of glaring and flickering light Blake is greater than Rembrandt." With Dante he went to the nethermost hell. His warring attributes tease and attract us. For the more human side we commend Blake's seventeen wood engravings to Thornton's Virgil. They are not so rich as Bewick's, but we must remember that it was Blake's first essay with knife and box-wood--he was really a practised copper engraver--and the effects he produced are wonderful. What could be more powerful in such a tiny space than the moon eclipse and the black forest illustrating the lines, "Or when the moon, by wizard charm'd, foreshows Bloodstained in foul eclipse, impending woes!" And the dim sunsets, the low, friendly sky in the other plates!

Blake's gospel of art may be given in his own words: "The great and golden rule of art, as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp and wiry the boundary line the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling." He abominated the nacreous flesh tones of Titian, Correggio, or Rubens. Reflected lights are sinful. The silhouette betrays the soul of the master. Swinburne in several eloquent pages has instituted a comparison between Walt Whitman and William Blake. (In the first edition of "William Blake: A Critical Essay," 1868.) Both men were radicals. "The words of either strike deep and run wide and soar high." What would have happened to Blake if he had gone to Italy and studied the works of the masters--for he was truly ignorant of an entire hemisphere of art? Turner has made us see his dreams of a gorgeous world; Blake, as through a scarce opened door, gives us a breathless glimpse of a supernal territory, whether heaven or hell, or both, we dare not aver. Italy might have calmed him, tamed him, banished his arrogance--as it did Goethe's. Suppose that Walt Whitman had written poems instead of magical and haunting headlines. And if Browning had made clear the devious ways of Sordello--what then? "What porridge had John Keats?" We should have missed the sharp savour of the real Blake, the real Whitman, the real Browning. And what a number of interesting critical books would have remained unwritten. "Oh, never star was lost here but it arose afar." What Coleridge wrote of his son Hartley might serve for Blake: "Exquisitely wild, an utter visionary, like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle of his own making. He alone is a light of his own. Of all human beings I never saw one so utterly naked of self." Naked of self! William Blake, unselfish egoist, stands before us in three words.