As we look back upon the life and productions of this extraordinary man we are aware of a strange contrast. His life was disciplined, courageous, the complete expression of the great character that we know him to have been. All who were intimate with him agree on his simplicity, straightforwardness, and nobility. No act nor any personal word addressed to any of his friends or enemies is recorded to his discredit, and we feel that Mrs. Blake's assertion that he was an angel might be translated into "a saint" without rhetorical exaggeration. When we consider his difficulties, his strange upbringing, his continual discouragement by the world we wonder, admire, and reverence him. But when we turn to his writings, and to a lesser extent to his designs, we are startled by the contrast. Here achievement and failure, lucidity and extravagance, form and confusion are oddly mingled. It would be difficult to agree that his productions are as balanced as his life, for he is one of the few great artists whose life was more harmonious than his works. The finest express the energy of that life with the added glory that it is the secret of art to confer. The others startle us by their lack of the splendid balance which was the rock of the man's character.

Our knowledge of his circumstances helps us in part to explain this. The boy was apprenticed early to engraving, and his hand did not lose its native inspiration from the very strict discipline to which it was put. His mind received no discipline at all, but its natural energies were nourished on the incommensurable Swedenborgianism of his father; the Bible was the only literature he knew, and the atmosphere of heretical opinion in which he was brought up encouraged his mind to pick and choose quite uncritically from the odd books and works of art that came his way. Westminster Abbey was the school in which his boyish imagination was trained, and there is more than a joke in the saying of one of his biographers that the boy became "almost a Gothic monument himself". However little we may trust even a humane education to cultivate a commonplace imagination or mind, yet its value as a discipline for the mind is undeniable if the mind is already there. We find, as a rule, the force of education stronger than the force of character, and better designed to prune than to nourish talent. With the effect of his apprenticeship to engraving before us, it is difficult to deny that Blake possessed the very mind that would have gained by humanistic studies, and that the hysterical religious atmosphere of his home was bad for him. That he could learn from experience to control his energies his heroic life proves beyond dispute; and that his intelligence might have become as little indisciplined as his life or his graver, if the necessary training had been granted, seems a justifiable inference.

As it was, his abundant imagination, acting from the first in isolation, and with only eccentric religious ideas on which to feed, was left to prey upon itself, and to make its own wilfulness the sole law of its being. This admitted, and remembering that Blake was one of the rare few who was a master of two arts, we can rather wonder that he left as much fine work as he did than lament its extraordinary, and sometimes gratuitous, imperfections. Indeed the practical bounds set to his outward energies, which he never attempted to disregard, probably transferred the currents that these repressed to his imaginative faculties. He indulged in an excessive idiosyncrasy of thought because so little other idiosyncrasy was allowed to him. Blake deserved every opportunity, including that of the criticism of minds equal and more cultivated than his own. He should have been well educated; he should have travelled. With such chances a man of his independent spirit could have been trusted to make the most of them. Imagine Blake with Shelley's opportunities, and Shelley brought up as Blake was, and the influence of circumstances is apparent. Blake was fated to be a man who knew nothing but himself, whose imagination was mainly rich in inward treasures, who, in his most impressionable years, had learnt nothing which can be taught. Like all lonely minds, unfairly deprived of the generous food that his energy demanded, he paid the penalty of his starvation. He became a law unto himself. He made an idol of idiosyncrasy. He elevated his limitations into intellectual dogmas.

A great deal, then, of his mental agility is the disguised defence of his own weakness. Naturally an extreme man, he declared that truth existed only in extremes; that art was nothing but inspiration; that exuberance was the equivalent of beauty; that the remedy of excess was to make it more abundantly excessive. A great romantic born into an age when the classic tradition was withering into formalism, much of this protest was inevitable. With one so dogmatic it is difficult to deal critically unless we bear in mind his relation to his age, and make allowance for the reaction that he heralded. When this is overlooked, and it is easy to forget it in words so challenging, we are compelled to say Yes or No to each of his assertions and are either captivated or dismayed. His great lyrical gift of language, as remarkable in his prose as in his verse, is the literary virtue of his writings. Blake's manner is always convincing, his meaning not always. The consequence is that Blake remains the most inspiring and the most questionable of authors. Confronted by his lyric power of language, critical qualification seems dull. It is easy to accept, and tiresome to weigh, extreme assertions. A hundred years after his death the reaction from his long depreciation is at its height, and adulation threatens to become uncritical. Yet to exalt an extreme individualist into a cult would be to abandon literature to fanaticism. Let Blake be exalted as an inspiration and a seer. His apotheosis as a thinker would be extravagant.

The reason for his translation to a pinnacle can be explained. His character, name, and works were known and reverenced by very few in his lifetime. These disciples, as we have seen, were able men. They recorded their memories, and gradually, one by one, his works began to be sought and preserved. But as late as 1863, when his life was first fully written, practically none of his works was generally known. We may almost say that nothing was accessible, collected or printed, until nearly fifty years after his death, and only in the present year, 1926, have his complete writings been given to the world in bulk, and very many of his designs been reproduced in book form. In other words, Blake's works, with the sanction of an almost mythic reputation, have been issued with something of the excitement of now discoveries. His fame preceded their appearance. Thus, though he has been dead for a hundred years, posterity has had little time to pass judgment. Only now are we in the position in which the death of a great artist usually leaves us. The process which normally follows the death of a famous artist has been reversed in regard to William Blake. The reaction from his reputation has been turned into a reaction in his favour, and is strengthened by fifty years of neglect. Not for another fifty years will the world be fully at home with him. Even then he will be more than usually a figure of legend, and the literature growing round his writings will continue .because of their obscurity. The precise value of his mythology will remain indeterminate however understood its details may come to be. In the prophetic books students of mysticism, religious minds, and literary critics possess a happy hunting-ground. Only a system devised by an unsystematic intelligence succeeds in eluding the verdict of criticism.

Having gathered the part that idiosyncrasy, circumstances, and posthumous reputation have played with his reputation, it remains to inquire for what his genius stands. In violent recoil from the academic tradition of his day, he is the egoist of art, and by temper a romantic. He believed in energy, assertion, the subjectivity of ideas, and declared that this was the principle of Christianity. He is the apostle of the exception, and he desired to exalt the worship of the exception into a creed. Everything personal was his cultivation: everything in relation to other things was suspect to him. An admirable summary of his religious ideas, and his relation to Christian teaching, is given by Mr. Sturge Moore in Art and Life (pp. 201-3). In his theological aspect, he invented a heresy of the Holy Spirit, which, like an inverted Arian, he professed to be the whole Trinity in one. In art he measured performance by intensity, and placed vision, the imaginative faculty, so high that he desired to transcribe it literally, without even the means by which vision is communicable. Thus he invented symbols of his own, and his own intuitions had almost an objective reality to him because his mind had been saturated with Gothic forms in the Abbey, forms, works of art, which became to him eternal beings. It was the example of Swedenborg, whom he desired to surpass, which led him to invent a new mythology to embody substantially the story of the Fall and the regeneration of man by the imagination. That a mystic, to whom self-experience suffices, should have been an artist also is the surprising combination in Blake. In art he was at his best a great illustrator, chiefly of religious ideas, and with a magic and simplicity that makes his natural subjects exquisite transfigurations. In lyric poetry the same magic occurs to transfigure the simplest instinctive emotions, but in his poetry he accepts traditional forms, and he startles us by his vivid presentations of religious ideas not by his invention of new metres. Blake was a great lyric poet, a romantic artist, ever aspiring to an unobtainable height. The search for this height is the character of a certain type of art: not the classic, not even the romantic, but a peculiar type of the romantic, the sublime.

The term may detain us a little because it has temporarily lost its meaning to become a word of superlative praise. Before the Romantic Movement dominated our ways of thinking, the word sublime was more critically used. In the eighteenth century, and, indeed, traditionally, it was carefully distinguished from the beautiful. A scholar will inform one that it is characteristic of Christian not of Hellenic thought. Literally the word means up to the lintel, to the top of a tall hat. In anatomy it refers to the surface, the outward superficies of organic things. In medicine it means beyond, or below, the threshold of intellectual consciousness; and, as this state of indefinition may be excited by as yet unrealised aspirations and instincts of great compulsive power, the sublime is readily identified with ecstasy or the indefinable quality of poetry. Thus it is a tantalising term for that which fascinates but eludes, either because we are on the verge of its attainment or because we have lost a consciousness or memory that we would have kept. It may imply a goal ahead or an energy that has passed its zenith. Thus double meaning, the inspiring or the defective, is condensed in the proverb that between the sublime and the ridiculous there is but a step. The art, then, that is busy with aspiration, which carries the mind to something beyond itself, expresses the sublime, and thus is the romantic in excelsis. The art which is content with the utmost that it can achieve, which is content with perfection, which prefers serenity to unrest, is the classical. Romantic art appeals primarily to the emotions: classic art to the emotions married to good sense.

The distinction is important to our understanding of Blake. Fenelon, who was both a religious man and an interesting critic, desired to make the sublime "so simple that all may understand it". Had it been possible for anyone to succeed in this attempt, we should have heard the last of the sublime, since its essence is to remain indefinable. The sublime, then, is a term that describes aspirations in the bud or achievements past their flower. Spring and autumn, adolescence and old age, sunrise and sunset are figures of the sublime. Architecture can be either noble or sublime, but even romantic architecture is not so sublime as a ruin.

That is the quality in a sentence, and to exalt the romantic to its sublime level, as Blake did, is to invite a literature in ruins. The pointed architecture of Christian cathedrals has been called sublime, and yet this architecture has been as justly called frozen mathematics as frozen music. The desire to reveal the stresses and strains by which the building is poised has been found in them no less than the spiritual aspiration which every sensitive eye beholds in them. Cross-vaulting has been compared to a visible network of gravitational forces no less than to "fingers joined in prayer". The building is a monument to science as well as feeling. In literature, in sublime literature, this discipline is rarely found. It isnot found in Blake, and he, therefore, produced the ruins of a system of philosophy. In dethroning a Urizen, who had usurped his province, Blake's mind capitulated to its whims. He sought to make the sublime the norm of artistic endeavour, and it is a relief to turn from his prophetic writings to his designs, because in design only had his hand and intelligence been disciplined.

The reader, then, who would view Blake critically will accept him as a fine lyrical poet, an inspiring writer of lyrical prose, a great coiner of aphorisms, and, unless he is specially drawn to them, will not feel bound to linger over the longer prophecies. He will discover that Blake is at his best when he is disciplined. He will return to the Job designs, to the "Last Judgment", the illustrations to Virgil, and, apart from these great achievements, he will accept the mass of incidental design as the product of a lyric colourist whose purity and brilliance of tone, whose exquisite fancy can be appreciated fully only by first-hand acquaintance with the originals, for they suffer the loss of half their magic even in the more careful reproductions. When we turn from the uneven work left by Blake to the heroic life of the man who made it, the conclusion to which we come is an old distinction: that his life was noble but his work sublime. The man, the artist, the mystic, the lyric poet form a complex appeal which makes it fatally easy to do more or less than justice to his several achievements; and, if he still tantalises, inspires, and yet leaves us unsatisfied, and, it may be, disappointed, let us remember that to tantalise and to disappoint are the very qualities which distinguish sublime from classical art.

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