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PRAEGER WORLD OF ART PAPERBACKS $4.95 Kathleen Raine William Blake • x^»»- y l. $Mh i ((!K (l(M [{Mk (5fc>M William Blake y i ^ lip v r i I U ft* t~ > Dp /Infro Nympherum (detail), 1821 i William Blake KATHLEEN RAINE PRAEGER PUBLISHERS New York Washington • i , To Kerrison Preston, honoured friend and interpreter to all who come to learn from Blake BOOKS THAT MATTER Published in the United States ofAmerica in 1971 by Praeger Publishers, Inc. in Fourth Avenue, New York, N.Y.10003 © 1970in London, England, by Thames and Hudson Ltd All rights reserved Library ofCongress Catalog Card Number: 70-121081 Printed in Great Britain Contents Introduction 7 CHAPTER ONE II Apprentice to Antiquity CHAPTER TWO 27 'The lost art ofthe Greeks' CHAPTER THREE 41 A New Mode ofPrinting CHAPTER FOUR 63 'Lovely Lambeth' CHAPTER FIVE 95 Night Thoughts CHAPTER SIX 101 Natural Friends CHAPTER SEVEN 109 The Line ofthe Almighty CHAPTER EIGHT 133 Spiritual Enemies CHAPTER NINE 155 Visions ofAlbion CHAPTER TEN 175 The Interpreter CHAPTER ELEVEN 185 King and Priest in his own Household Chronology 208 Select Bibliography 208 List ofIllustrations 210 Index 215 Introduction Prophet, poet, painter, engraver - and according to tradition a composer of melodies as well - Blake's unique greatness lies in no single achievement, but in the whole ot what he was, which is more than the sum of all that he did. It belongs to a few great imaginative minds that they can create a world which seems to possess a reality, a coherence, a climate and atmosphere ofits own. Shakespeare, Dante, Dlirer, Blake's own favourite painters Fra Angelico, Claude and Michelangelo, seem to offer us fragments of worlds whose bounds extend beyond any of those portions their work has embodied; and that is one of the delights of the kind of art I have in mind. Blake was such an artist; and his work, as he believed, repre- sents 'portions of eternity' seen in imaginative vision. Blake himselfwrites of'ever Existent Images' which may be seen 'by the Imaginative Eye ofEvery one according to the situation he holds' - a collective archetypal world whose reality is more credible in our century than it was in his own. 'To different People it appears differently, as everything else does.' Such art comes from a source deeper than the individual experience of poet or painter, and has a power of communication to that same level in the spectator. To our superficial selves this is a source ofthe 'obscurity' ofvisionary art; to our deepest selves, ofits lucidity. Blake's work is on a small scale. His engravings and illumi- natedpages are measurable ininches hispaintings too tend to be ; small. But though he executed nothing monumental, his imaginings were on the grandest scale. 'The Artist having been taken in vision into the ancient republics, monarchies and patriarchates ofAsia, has seen those wonderful originals called in the Sacred Scriptures the Cherubim, which were sculptured and painted on the walls of Temples, Towers, Cities, Palaces and erected in the highly cultivated states of Egypt, Moab, Edom, Aram, among the Rivers of Paradise. . . .' There is in Blake's minutest designs the sense that he is showing us a portion ofthose 'stupendous originals' ofhis vision, fragments of some unfallen world 'among the Rivers of Paradise' - a world ofthe unhindered energy ofspiritual life. It is his gift of communicating his vision, rather than his technical accomplish- ment as a painter or engraver, that entitles Blake to so high a place. 'The Nature ofVisionary Fancy, or Imagination, is very little Known. .' Very little known because consciously possessed . . by few in our materialist civilization. Yet, with the aid ofthose who possess a faculty latent in all, we can participate through art in the enjoyment ofan interior universe whose exploration is the theme of the religious and mythological art of all ages. For those to whom the outer world of the senses alone seems real, Blake, in common with all symbolic art, offers little; for others 'the end of a golden string' to thread the labyrinth of the psyche. Nor is this world cloudy or vague. 'A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing they are organized and minutely : articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all. The painter ofthis work [The Bard, from Gray] asserts that all his imaginations appear to him infinitely more perfect and more minutely organized than anything seen by his mortal eye. Spirits are organized men.' Not content with defending the 'minute particulars' of vision, Blake pointed out that the copying ofnature must lead in the end to loss ofform: 'Men think they can Copy Nature as Correctly as I copy Imagination. This they will find Impos- & sible, all the Copiers or Pretended Copiers ofNature, from Rembrandt to Reynolds, Prove that Nature becomes to its Victim nothing but Blots & Blurs. Why are Copiers ofNature Incorrect, while Copiers ofImagination are Correct?' 8