No wonder, then, that for the artist of to-day the new El Greco is of capital importance. For it shows us the master at the height of his powers, at last perfectly aware of his personal conception and daring to give it the completest, most uncompromising expression. That the picture is in a marvellous state of preservation and has been admirably cleaned adds greatly to its value. Dirty yellow varnish no longer interposes here its hallowing influence between the spectator and the artist’s original creation. Since the eye can follow every stroke of the brush, the mind can recover the artist’s gesture and almost the movements of his mind. For never was work more perfectly transparent to the idea, never was an artist’s intention more deliberately and precisely recorded.
THREE PICTURES IN TEMPERA BY WILLIAM BLAKE[42]
Blake’s finished pictures have never received the same attention nor aroused the same admiration as his wash-drawings, his wood-cuts, or his engravings. It is difficult to account for this comparative neglect, since they not only show command of a technique which admits of the completest realisation of the idea, but they seem actually to express what was personal to Blake in a purer form than many of his other works, with less admixture of those unfortunate caprices which the false romantic taste of his day imposed too often even on so original and independent a genius. The explanation may perhaps lie in the fact that to most people Blake, for all his inimitable gifts, appears as a divinely inspired amateur rather than as a finished master of his art, and they are willing to tolerate what they regard as his imperfect control of form in media which admit only of hints and suggestions of the artist’s vision.
There assuredly never was a more singular, more inexplicable phenomenon than the intrusion, as though by direct intervention of Providence, of this Assyrian spirit into the vapidly polite circles of eighteenth-century London. The fact that, as far as the middle classes of England were concerned, Puritanism had for a century and a half blocked every inlet and outlet of poetical feeling and imaginative conviction save one, may give us a clue to the causes of such a phenomenon. It was the devotion of Puritan England to the Bible, to the Old Testament especially, that fed such a spirit as Blake’s directly from the sources of the most primeval, the vastest and most abstract imagery which we possess. Brooding on the vague and tremendous images of Hebrew and Chaldæan poetry, he arrived at such indifference to the actual material world, at such an intimate perception of the elemental forces which sway the spirit with immortal hopes and infinite terrors when it is most withdrawn from its bodily conditions, that what was given to his internal vision became incomparably more definite, more precisely and more clearly articulated, than anything presented to his senses. His forms are the visible counterparts to those words, like _the deep, many waters_, _firmament_, _the foundations of the earth_, _pit_ and _host_, whose resonant overtones blur and enrich the sense of the Old Testament. Blake’s art moves us, if at all, by a similar evocation of vast elemental forces. He deals directly with these spiritual sensations, bringing in from external nature the least possible content which will enable him to create visible forms at all. But though he pushed them to their furthest limits, even he could not transcend the bounds which beset pictorial language; even he was forced to take something of external nature with him into his visionary world, and his wildest inventions are but recombinations and distorted memories of the actual objects of sense.