Geniuses of History: William Blake

One hundred and twenty years ago there died in London "William Blake" — poet, painter, genius, and strange, eccentric man. He died at seventy, and the source of his literary and artistic inspiration remained the innocence of his violent, dramatic imagination — an innocence like that of a sensitive child's imagination, tinged with an experience of pains and trials which, had it been found in another man, would have made him rancorous and pessimistic; but in "William Blake" it stirred a revolt of the soul and a literary indignation.

It is difficult for anyone who studies Blake's life to fix the points of criticism in his literary career. Was he a poet among the great poets, or an accomplished painter, or a brilliant philosopher, or the bearer of a new message in life? The truth is that Blake was a blend of poet, painter, and philosopher all together. His painting, like his poetry, was a means of expressing his philosophy and his message in life. He is distinguished from other poets, painters, and philosophers in that he did not withdraw himself from the masses of men in order to study them from afar, record his observations upon them, and write about them, as others have been accustomed to do; his poetry and his painting grew, and his philosophy flourished, out of his daily life and out of his sense of the existence of God and of His love. At every moment of his life he believed in the existence of God Almighty — a faith drawn from the very fact of his own existence. He did not look upon Him, exalted be He, as theologians and clergymen do; he looked upon Him as the light of life and of love: the light of the sun is of His light, and the strength of the wind of His strength, and His power shows itself to the human heart in all the appearances of life.

Blake did not wish to make of himself a celebrated figure among the great poets, nor to win for himself the world's acknowledgment that he was a successful painter. The one thing that concerned him was his message to this world. It revealed itself sometimes in poetry, sometimes in painting, and sometimes in poetry and painting together — in those beautiful books in which poems and pictures mingle so that, taken as a whole, they form a harmonious work of art, even while each of them feeds the reader's mind and sharpens his sense and his feeling for the experiences of this poet-philosopher.

The strange thing about Blake is that he received no artistic training in the sense usually understood by that phrase — save only what he gained from his work as an engraver's assistant. The only men of art who influenced his particular method were those unknown sculptors and builders whose work appears in the British churches built in the Gothic style in the Middle Ages. He was influenced also by Michelangelo, from whom Blake took his exaggeration in displaying the details of the human body, in which the rounded, sinewy muscles stand out in huge masses upon gigantic frames. He made the sight of the human body in this form a symbol of man's latent power and of his heroism in life. In every picture of his — even in those pictures that depict pain and torment — you see a kind of ideal heroism, or symbolic traits, that make of every man Blake drew a magnificent Adam banished that very hour from Paradise. For Blake did not paint ordinary men; in his pictures he brought out man in his most splendid aspects.

One has scarcely begun to read Blake's poetry, or to look at his pictures, before one is carried in an instant into a new world of thought and imagination. This poet-philosopher had the power to write a piece of verse of no more than a few words, with which he defied all the schools of philosophy together — as when he said:

"A bird in a cage"

"rouses the wrath of all the heavens."

This single line of English verse contains the whole philosophy of universal love.

In this way we find that all Blake's pictures represent, in varying degrees, symbolic chapters of that great universal tragedy, the tragedy of sin and love. All the figures of men that Blake's brush has drawn show us Adams driven that very hour out of Paradise. Yet in each of them there is a touch of the angelic heroism that makes them deserve deliverance from the punishment of sin — which is death.

Blake was not the most skillful of painters in expressing a particular idea; many such painters surpassed him. He did not aim to bring out in his pictures the appearances of daily, worldly life; rather he aimed to bring out in his pictures the tragedy of a wider life — the tragedy of virtue and vice, the tragedy of the soul of man and the love of God. He had his own artistic peculiarities, but they were deliberate, intended peculiarities. And these peculiarities were as necessary to what he wished to express as were the tragedies he wished to bring out in his pictures. Nothing shows his skill as a philosopher-painter better than the bold way in which he has recourse to these peculiarities of his, for they give us a true picture of his own self, which he is never afraid to show as it really is. Nor is he ever inclined to rein in the impetuosity of his inspiration out of any love of fame or gain. These peculiarities are far greater than mere familiar tricks or habits of artistic style; they are a kind of indispensable prelude to his artistic work — or rather the sole means by which he could express the splendor and the novelty of his mental invention.