No More Learning

I. HIS OPINIONS UPON ART.

WILLIAM BLAKE was the first writer of modern times to preach the
indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol. There had been
allegorists and teachers of allegory in plenty, but the symbolic
imagination, or, as Blake preferred to call it, 'vision,' is not
allegory, being 'a representation of what actually exists really and
unchangeably. ' A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some
invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while
allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing,
or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination:
the one is a revelation, the other an amusement. It is happily no part
of my purpose to expound in detail the relations he believed to exist
between symbol and mind, for in doing so I should come upon not a few
doctrines which, though they have not been difficult to many simple
persons, ascetics wrapped in skins, women who had cast away all common
knowledge, peasants dreaming by their sheepfolds upon the hills, are
full of obscurity to the man of modern culture; but it is necessary to
just touch upon these relations, because in them was the fountain of
much of the practice and of all the precept of his artistic life.

If a man would enter into 'Noah's rainbow,' he has written, and 'make a
friend' of one of 'the images of wonder' which dwell there, and which
always entreat him 'to leave mortal things,' 'then would he arise
from the grave and meet the Lord in the air'; and by this rainbow,
this sign of a covenant granted to him who is with Shem and Japhet,
'painting, poetry and music,' 'the three powers in man of conversing
with Paradise which the flood "of time and space" did not sweep
away,' Blake represented the shapes of beauty haunting our moments of
inspiration: shapes held by most for the frailest of ephemera, but by
him for a people older than the world, citizens of eternity, appearing
and reappearing in the minds of artists and of poets, creating all
we touch and see by casting distorted images of themselves upon 'the
vegetable glass of nature'; and because beings, none the less symbols,
blossoms, as it were, growing from invisible immortal roots, hands, as
it were, pointing the way into some divine labyrinth. If 'the world of
imagination' was 'the world of eternity,' as this doctrine implied, it
was of less importance to know men and nature than to distinguish the
beings and substances of imagination from those of a more perishable
kind, created by the phantasy, in uninspired moments, out of memory
and whim; and this could best be done by purifying one's mind, as with
a flame, in study of the works of the great masters, who were great
because they had been granted by divine favour a vision of the unfallen
world from which others are kept apart by the flaming sword that turns
every way; and by flying from the painters who studied 'the vegetable
glass' for its own sake, and not to discover there the shadows of
imperishable beings and substances, and who entered into their own
minds, not to make the unfallen world a test of all they heard and
saw and felt with the senses, but to cover the naked spirit with 'the
rotten rags of memory' of older sensations. The struggle of the first
part of his life had been to distinguish between these two schools, and
to cleave always to the Florentine, and so to escape the fascination of
those who seemed to him to offer the sleep of nature to a spirit weary
with the labours of inspiration; but it was only after his return to
London from Felpham in 1804 that he finally escaped from 'temptations
and perturbations' which sought to destroy 'the imaginative power' at
'the hands of Venetian and Flemish Demons. ' 'The spirit of Titian'--and
one must always remember that he had only seen poor engravings, and
what his disciple, Palmer, has called 'picture-dealers' Titians'--'was
particularly active in raising doubts concerning the possibility of
executing without a model; and when once he had raised the doubt it
became easy for him to snatch away the vision time after time'; and
Blake's imagination 'weakened' and 'darkened' until a 'memory of
nature and of the pictures of various schools possessed his mind,
instead of appropriate execution' flowing from the vision itself. But
now he wrote, 'O glory, and O delight! I have entirely reduced that
spectrous fiend to his station'--he had overcome the merely reasoning
and sensual portion of the mind--'whose annoyance has been the ruin
of my labours for the last twenty years of my life. . . .
I speak with
perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which has passed upon me.
Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him, I have had twenty;
thank God I was not altogether a beast as he was. . . . Suddenly, on
the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures'--this
was a gallery containing pictures by Albert Durer and by the great
Florentines--'I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my
youth, and which had for exactly twenty years been closed from me,
as by a door and window shutters. . . . Excuse my enthusiasm, or rather
madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take
a pencil or graver in my hand, as I used to be in my youth. '

This letter may have been the expression of a moment's enthusiasm,
but was more probably rooted in one of those intuitions of coming
technical power which every creator feels, and learns to rely upon;
for all his greatest work was done, and the principles of his art
were formulated, after this date. Except a word here and there, his
writings hitherto had not dealt with the principles of art except
remotely and by implication; but now he wrote much upon them, and not
in obscure symbolic verse, but in emphatic prose, and explicit if not
very poetical rhyme. In his _Descriptive Catalogue_, in _The Address
to the Public_, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds, in _The Book of
Moonlight_--of which some not very dignified rhymes alone remain--in
beautiful detached passages in _The MS. Book_, he explained spiritual
art, and praised the painters of Florence and their influence, and
cursed all that has come of Venice and Holland. The limitation of
his view was from the very intensity of his vision; he was a too
literal realist of imagination, as others are of nature; and because
he believed that the figures seen by the mind's eye, when exalted by
inspiration, were 'eternal existences,' symbols of divine essences,
he hated every grace of style that might obscure their lineaments.
To wrap them about in reflected lights was to do this, and to dwell
over-fondly upon any softness of hair or flesh was to dwell upon that
which was least permanent and least characteristic, for '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.