Exhibitions 1

William Blake

(Tate Britain, till 11 February)

Moments of true greatness

Martin Gayford

There is no question that he was a man of genius, T.S. Eliot remarked of Wynd- ham Lewis, but genius for exactly what it would be remarkably difficult to say. Some- thing of the sort is also true of William Blake. Blake was a great lyric poet, so much is indisputable. Songs of Innocence and of Experience must be, both for con- tents and illustrations, among the most beautiful books ever produced. But, beyond that, Blake is a problem. Was he a lone visionary — a nutter, to put it bluntly — or was he a man of his time, addressing the great questions of the age: the Enlightenment, the revolutions, both French and Industrial. Or was he, as one rather suspects, a lone nutter addressing those questions in terms both breathtakingly trenchant and confusingly homemade? Was he a great painter, as well as a great poet? And how does he stand as a thinker? One can read a good deal of William Blake, and indeed examine the vast array of his work as a print-maker and painter currently assem- bled at Tate Britain, without being quite sure of the answers to these conundrums.

Blake produced immortal one-liners, both visual and literary. The 'Proverbs of Hell', for example, from the Marriage of Heaven and Hell are almost all wonderful (if not necessarily good advice). 'You never know what is enough unless you know what IS, more than enough', 'Prudence is a rich Old ugly maid courted by Incapacity' (one for the Chancellor, that). Or how about this, from the same work? 'If the doors of Perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.' And `Everything that lives is holy.'

Similarly, there are one-off images that are utterly memorable, more or less inde- pendently of what Blake meant them to mean (and he seems often to have thought of the image first, then assigned it a mean- ing). Among these are 'Albion rose', the naked male figure standing in a burst of light and perfectly evoking the Blakean notion that 'energy is eternal delight'.

Another is The Ancient of Days', the crouching, older figure measuring out the cosmos with dividers — though who would guess that he is supposed to be a baddy, Urizen (i.e. your reason), the cold, calculat- ing bad father-figure of the Blake pan- theon? And who would guess the same of the noble if a trifle irritable-looking figure of Newton, also occupied with dividers, this time at the bottom of the sea. The truth is that Blake's figures convey the idea of spir- itual beings — through their translucency and weightlessness — but in a completely non-specific way. And if his lyric and epigrams are lumi- nously clear, his epics are dauntingly obscure. There is much of his work which is scarcely penetrated by the most intrepid reader — dense forests of mythic allegory populated by figures bearing Tolkeinish names: Urizen, Loc, Ore, Bromion, Oothoon, Theotormon.

To read the words of these prophetic books, as Blake called them, and look at the pictures of writhing nudes in Blake's patent neo-classical-gothic is a little like being given a verbatim transcription of someone else's dream (Blake resembles Stanley Spencer in this). There is meaning, esoteric and psychological, to be extracted from these works, but to a degree they remain simply muddled, to use Kenneth Clark's words. Part of the problem is that — despite the efforts of the catalogue to put him in his- torical context — Blake was an artist almost without a public. The sales of his illustrated books tended to be numbered in single digits. He was kept going by a few patrons. Therefore he was able to concoct — as did Spencer for different reasons an imaginary world fully comprehensible only to himself.

That may be why, as Clark pointed out, Blake is often at his best as a visual artist when illustrating somebody else's myth, particularly in his watercolours after Dante. There the story is clearer, probably to Blake as well as to us. In the case of many of his own allegorical inventions, 'The Sea of Time and Space' of 1821, for example, `the precise meaning' as the catalogue puts it, 'has long been uncertain'. Recently an explanation has been put forward — to do with Isaiah and Greek philosophy — but what one mainly sees are seething masses of ladies in robes in an imaginary land- scape.

As a painter, he had clear limitations. He couldn't manage large scale, as is clear from the near-life-size 'Adam naming the Beasts' and 'Eve naming the Birds' near the beginning of the exhibition. There is a cartoon quality to those heads, and others of his paintings, that is off-putting. Blake famously despised oil paint. He was also plainly not cut out to use it. His gifts as a painter were for small-scale, strongly graphic work. Among the most successful images, however, are those etchings such as 'God Judging Adam' (1795) — in which the colour has been transferred in such a way that gives it a splodgy, spongy texture. Otherwise it can all be a bit too smooth.

His best work tends to be on the scale of a book, albeit sometimes quite a large Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car; from Blake's Illustrations to Dante's 'Divine Comedy' book. And in fact it may be best examined in a book. One loses a certain amount of quality in a facsimile such as the excellent Complete Illuminated Books (Thames and Hudson, £39.95), but it seems much more natural to look at these small images together with their text — in the sitting- room on one's knee rather than in an art gallery.

Certainly, this exhibition, though admirably comprehensive, is also indi- gestible, with its enormous quantities of small images. 'There's a limit to how much I can take in,' I overheard a visitor com- plaining to her companion as she entered the third room. And I must admit I sympa- thised.

But still, for all the sense one sometimes gets of an imagination run to seed, Blake had moments of true greatness. What he stood for in general is clear, even if his imagery is not: the life of the imagination, liberation from the tyranny of conventional religion and morality (Damn braces: Bless relaxes').

One might not always agree with him (high-security prisons are full of those who would 'sooner murder an infant in its cra- dle than nurse unacted desires'). But his contempt for the mundane manner of look- ing at the world is irresistible.

`It will be questioned,' Blake wrote, `when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea — Oh no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty".' I bet he didn't really, but there are moments when he half convinces us that we could ourselves.