Text f. Blake and the Current of Imaginative Art

It is usual to consider Constable and Turner together and yet the differences are so great between the two that it is perhaps better to separate them by some account of the imaginative and romantic currents of their time with which Constable certainly had little to do. It may be said that he was romantic in the sense that Wordsworth may be so described, that is, in his belief in truth to nature. Ultimately perhaps the affection of both for landscape was an instance of a wished-for identification with nature in a period of alarming change and political revolution. It is, nevertheless, with a sense of incompatibility that one turns to such different ideas of expression as are to be found in Constable's contemporaries, Fuseli and Blake. If this seems an abrupt divergence, it can only be said that such divergences were a result of that individualism which had begun to assert itself in the eighteenth century. Constable himself was a great independent and not one who asserted authority as the head of a School. William Blake (1757-1827) was more vehemently and strangely so. In intransigence of opinion he may be likened to Hogarth. A middle-class Londoner, he had a similar forthright pugnacity in his iconoclastic attitude towards such masters as Rubens and Correggio, the same suspicion of conformity and rule, appearing in constant diatribes against Sir Joshua Reynolds and the precepts laid down in the Discourses. What is very striking also in this great age of landscape is his utter contempt for nature and what he termed the 'vegetative' or 'vegetable' universe and his belief in the imaginative product of the human mind which scorned imitation.

Blake indeed represents a revolt against all that the eighteenth century stood for, in so far as it may be looked on as an age of order, reason, and material values. In him something of that distant and long-buried past, stigmatized by the title 'Gothick' (i.e. barbarian), came again to life. A love of the religious art of the Middle Ages was fostered in him through the researches of the antiquary for whom as a youth, under the direction of the engraver James Basire, he prepared copperplate illustrations. The carved folds of the Gothic sculpture suggested to him the ideal costume of Heaven. The bearded visage of a medieval king or knight in bronze inspired his conception of a human archetype. A likeness to the medieval illuminated manuscript appears in the marginal illustrations of his books in which text and decorations were etched and hand-coloured. His horror of realistic oil painting caused him to devise the species of tempera painting which he called 'fresco'.

A different source of his art was the work of Michelangelo and other Renaissance masters as rendered in engravings. Their influence produced emphatic distortions of the figure akin to those of the sixteenth-century Italian Mannerists. Linear design again comes into its own with Blake and is used sometimes with individual power and sometimes with naive or mechanical effect in works which constitute an entirely personal version of the 'Grand Style'. Today the imperfections seem of less moment than the interest attaching to the expression of a complex mind.

The themes of Blake's art were ostensibly those of tradition – Biblical stories, allegory, and subjects taken from the poets, though a stubborn nonconformity and a purely personal interpretation of religion made them distinct. Thus the great series of 'Illustrations to the Book of Job' was not in fact illustrative but his own conception of the inward battle of the soul. His aversion from the Classical World led him to eschew Homer and Virgil and those fables to which the Renaissance had delighted to give sensuous form. He found inspiration rather in the thought of Milton and Dante in which he discovered symbols of what he conceived as the interior conflict of good and evil in the mind.

The creatures of his visionary world were not 'a cloudy vapour or nothing' but to be realized with a 'determinate outline'. '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.' Instinctively Blake put himself in the position of the English artist of the Middle Ages in whose work there is so little of corporeal substance and so strong a power of linear design and the clear colour which is its natural complement.

His achievement must be viewed apart from the history of oil painting – the medium he detested, or even from water-colour in which some of his most beautiful work was done. One can relate him as little to his contemporary Rowlandson as to Reynolds, while landscape was condemned by the nature of his ideas. As a painter he is in many respects imperfect but his mastery of design transcends these imperfections in a conception as magnificent as that of Satan Smiting Job, the allegories of life and love with their ecstatic swirls of form, the grandeur of Elijah in the Fiery Chariot, the pellucid splendour of the drawings inspired by Dante. With him a Romantic vista of free expression opens liberation of the poetic imagination long suppressed in English painting. Yet in this respect Blake, as intensely individual in thought as to appear an isolated phenomenon was not entirely alone.

Visually, Blake absorbed influence from a variety of sources in a complex fashion just as he absorbed ideas (the effort to unravel the meaning of which has given rise to so many interpretative studies). The modest faculty of design of Thomas Stothard, with whom he became involved in unfortunate competition in the painting of Chaucer's Pilgrims contributed to his idea of beauty in woman and child. The drawings of John Flaxman helped to direct him to the value of outline. It seems evident that some examples of Buddhist art which had found their way to England inspired the style of the series of 'Heroes' – the remarkable conceptions of the 'Spiritual Forms' of Nelson and Pitt. In design he is also to be linked with Henry Fuseli, who represents another facet of the awakening Romantic spirit of the late eighteenth century.