Chatting With The Devil, Dining With Prophets

(2 of 2)

In matters of art, Blake's hates were as passionate and as swollen with moral assurance as his likings. The painters he really disliked relied on color and modeling by tone, "broken lines, broken masses, and broken colors. Their art is to lose form." Whereas his was "to find form, and to keep it"--by means of pure outline drawing. The villains of his scheme were Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt: "a class of artists, whose whole art is fabricated for the purpose of destroying art." True art was linear, clear, like Raphael, Durer, Michelangelo and antique sculpture--and, Blake didn't hesitate to add, his own. The very thought of Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy and the most esteemed and successful painter in Britain, gave Blake fits: Reynolds was a slopping, daubing Antichrist. "This man," Blake scrawled across the title page of his copy of Reynolds' printed lectures, the Discourses, "was Hired to Depress Art:--This is the opinion of Will Blake."

Blake not only despised the way Reynolds painted, but also he was sure Reynolds' malign influence had blasted his career. The sore truth seems to be that Reynolds had scarcely heard of Blake, and would not have felt threatened by him anyway. But time was on Blake's side. Does any Reynolds fix itself in memory with the tragic vividness of Blake's watercolor of King Nebuchadnezzar, a taloned half-beast on all fours, glaring from the confines of his intolerable fate like an animal in a cage? Blake believed he had been appointed by supreme powers to render the most elevated scenes of Milton and the Bible in the language of Michelangelo and Raphael; in this he was wrong, but what an ambition!

His main vehicle for it, the special medium through which he staked his claims as seer, prophet and bard, was the hand-etched and -printed book. Part of Blake's uniqueness is that you cannot separate his writings from his art. He was probably the first major European artist of whom this was true. Illuminated manuscripts had been done for hundreds of years before his birth, but usually the script was by one person and the decoration by another, while the actual text had originally been composed by a third.

Blake, however, did all these things, with the result that his books, tiny and rare as they are, "illuminated" in a form of color etching that was essentially his invention, possess an astonishing integration of clarity, density and richness of organic detail. They ennoble the very idea of illustration and erase the boundaries that supposedly distinguish it from "art." You cannot imagine separating the text from the design, or the design from the text, and so there has hardly been an English book creator since--not even William Morris, the greatest one to emerge since Blake--who did not feel the duty of homage to him.