No More Learning

He does not mean by outline the bounding-line
dividing a form from its background, as one of his commentators has
thought, but the line that divides it from surrounding space, and
unless you have an overmastering sense of this you cannot draw true
beauty at all, but only 'the beauty that is appended to folly,' a
beauty of mere voluptuous softness, 'a lamentable accident of the
mortal and perishing life,' for 'the beauty proper for sublime art is
lineaments, or forms and features capable of being the receptacles of
intellect,' and 'the face or limbs that alter least from youth to old
age are the face and limbs of the greatest beauty and perfection. '
His praise of a severe art had been beyond price had his age rested
a moment to listen, in the midst of its enthusiasm for Correggio and
the later Renaissance, for Bartolozzi and for Stothard; and yet in
his visionary realism, and in his enthusiasm for what, after all, is
perhaps the greatest art, and a necessary part of every picture that
is art at all, he forgot how he who wraps the vision in lights and
shadows, in iridescent or glowing colour, having in the midst of his
labour many little visions of these secondary essences, until form be
half lost in pattern, may compel the canvas or paper to become itself a
symbol of some not indefinite because unsearchable essence; for is not
the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian a talisman as powerfully charged with
intellectual virtue as though it were a jewel-studded door of the city
seen on Patmos?

To cover the imperishable lineaments of beauty with shadows and
reflected lights was to fall into the power of his 'Vala,' the
indolent fascination of nature, the woman divinity who is so often
described in 'the prophetic books' as 'sweet pestilence,' and whose
children weave webs to take the souls of men; but there was yet a
more lamentable chance, for nature has also a 'masculine portion' or
'spectre' which kills instead of merely hiding, and is continually at
war with inspiration. To 'generalize' forms and shadows, to 'smooth
out' spaces and lines in obedience to 'laws of composition,' and of
painting; founded, not upon imagination, which always thirsts for
variety and delights in freedom, but upon reasoning from sensation
which is always seeking to reduce everything to a lifeless and slavish
uniformity; as the popular art of Blake's day had done, and as he
understood Sir Joshua Reynolds to advise, was to fall into 'Entuthon
Benithon,' or 'the Lake of Udan Adan,' or some other of those regions
where the imagination and the flesh are alike dead, that he names by
so many resonant phantastical names. 'General knowledge is remote
knowledge,' he wrote; 'it is in particulars that wisdom consists, and
happiness too. Both in art and life general masses are as much art as a
pasteboard man is human. Every man has eyes, nose and mouth; this every
idiot knows. But he who enters into and discriminates most minutely
the manners and intentions, the characters in all their branches, is
the alone wise or sensible man, and on this discrimination all art is
founded. . . . As poetry admits not a letter that is insignificant, so
painting admits not a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant,
much less an insignificant blot or blur. '

Against another desire of his time, derivative also from what he has
called 'corporeal reason,' the desire for 'a tepid moderation,' for a
lifeless 'sanity in both art and life,' he had protested years before
with a paradoxical violence. 'The roadway of excess leads to the palace
of wisdom,' and we must only 'bring out weight and measure in time of
dearth. ' This protest, carried, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds,
to the point of dwelling with pleasure on the thought that 'The _Lives
of the Painters_ say that Raphael died of dissipation,' because
dissipation is better than emotional penury, seemed as important to his
old age as to his youth.
He taught it to his disciples, and one finds
it in its purely artistic shape in a diary written by Samuel Palmer, in
1824: 'Excess is the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark, embalming
spice of the finest art. There are many mediums in the _means_--none,
oh, not a jot, not a shadow of a jot, in the _end_ of great art. In a
picture whose merit is to be excessively brilliant, it can't be too
brilliant, but individual tints may be too brilliant. . . . We must not
begin with medium, but think always on excess and only use medium to
make excess more abundantly excessive. '

These three primary commands, to seek a determinate outline, to avoid a
generalized treatment, and to desire always abundance and exuberance,
were insisted upon with vehement anger, and their opponents called
again and again 'demons' and 'villains,' 'hired' by the wealthy and
the idle; but in private, Palmer has told us, he could find 'sources
of delight throughout the whole range of art,' and was ever ready to
praise excellence in any school, finding, doubtless, among friends, no
need for the emphasis of exaggeration. There is a beautiful passage in
'Jerusalem' in which the merely mortal part of the mind, 'the spectre,'
creates 'pyramids of pride,' and 'pillars in the deepest hell to reach
the heavenly arches,' and seeks to discover wisdom in 'the spaces
between the stars,' not 'in the stars,' where it is, but the immortal
part makes all his labours vain, and turns his pyramids to 'grains of
sand,' his 'pillars' to 'dust on the fly's wing,' and makes of 'his
starry heavens a moth of gold and silver mocking his anxious grasp. '
So when man's desire to rest from spiritual labour, and his thirst
to fill his art with mere sensation and memory, seem upon the point
of triumph, some miracle transforms them to a new inspiration; and
here and there among the pictures born of sensation and memory is the
murmuring of a new ritual, the glimmering of new talismans and symbols.

It was during and after the writing of these opinions that Blake did
the various series of pictures which have brought him the bulk of his
fame. He had already completed the illustrations to Young's _Night
Thoughts_--in which the great sprawling figures, a little wearisome even
with the luminous colours of the original water-colour, became nearly
intolerable in plain black and white--and almost all the illustrations
to 'the prophetic books,' which have an energy like that of the
elements, but are rather rapid sketches taken while some phantasmic
procession swept over him, than elaborate compositions, and in whose
shadowy adventures one finds not merely, as did Dr. Garth Wilkinson,
'the hells of the ancient people, the Anakim, the Nephalim, and the
Rephaim . . . gigantic petrifactions from which the fires of lust and
intense selfish passion have long dissipated what was animal and
vital'; not merely the shadows cast by the powers who had closed the
light from him as 'with a door and window shutters,' but the shadows
of those who gave them battle.