he preferred to call "the Mind." Into this Flaxman went when he died, Blake wrote, and he himself expected to follow Flaxman there. Into this the fool cannot go, and to plead personal holiness is not to be admitted, for "holiness is not the price of entrance into heaven" (Preface to Jerusalem). In heaven all is brotherhood. "In eternity all is vision. There is a socialism of the soul there, and communism of property. Those of us who would understand Blake's designs when still alive are invited by him to go to this heaven and study them there.

CHAPTER V

WHEN ART PUT ASIDE LETTERS

IN 1778 Blake's apprenticeship came to an end, and he did some artistic study in the life-schools of the Royal Academy, then a new institution. It is said that at Parr's when he was ten he only studied from casts, though Parr's was called a life-school. It is probable that he was now so deeply interested in the human form that he left off' writing poetry altogether. It is a crucial moment in life when a boy begins to draw from life, to see what the men and women among whom he is to live are like without their clothing. From casts and from the glass Blake had already learned that form exists. This seems a most unnecessary thing to say, yet those of us who are not artists do not so much as suspect what it means, any more than children suspect what a lover sees in the offered lips that he loves besides what they see in the lips of their playmates.

Let us turn from words to form itself for a moment, and consider how much new mental action goes to seeing even a portion. If we look at the shoulder of a woman, and follow the line down its slope to the fullest part that already belongs to the arm, and is one-third of the way to the elbow; if now we go down to the elbow and see the curve's fresh entrance, like a fresh paragraph of the page, revealing the poetry of the upper part with new meaning, as in architecture the column gives new meaning to the arch; if we begin again to read what the form has written where the flesh widens for the smooth face of the lower arm, and then learn the outer slope that goes to where the centre line of the wrist, a little more curved than the back of the hand, dies down into it as a wave sinking dies into the flat shining surface of sea-water upon sand; if we compare the two sides of the arm, and listen to the form as to the metre of a verse, perceiving how its curves are not opposite to one another, but spring at different points,

fading off with different spaces; and if we do the same to the body, rooted into the thighs as the throat into the back and chest, and to the thighs, tapering with such slight difference from straightness on the inner side, and so bold a swing on the outer, we have fifty new and amazing rhymes and melodies to learn, more beautiful than those of shells or of fruits or flowers, and more dignified and less coquettish than pretty schemes of clothing, and therefore more modest.

An ardent boy hungering for the touch and breath, for the mere nearness and voice of womankind, goes to a studio, and passing in to see for the first time the female form entirely undraped, probably catches his breath and wonders. whether he will be able to sustain his self-control. He is amazed at the serenity of nerve and the new fascination of mind with which he finds the world's white flower offered without its leaves. Here is something that he had not foreseen. Here is a scheme, a harmony, in beauty. Here generally is also some lapse from beauty, hitherto hidden by costume, a lapse that is positive and aggressive, that repels and startles him, for the fairest of the fair are not always to be obtained in art schools. But at the worst he has a great experience. He expected only to find in woman what man desires. He finds what man admires, and above all what man, especially if pretending to be an artist, should thoroughly learn. For a while the passion of this learning absorbs him, and in the delight of the mental understanding of form he forgets that bodily attraction from one sex to another exists. The novelty of silent cadences will also completely take from him the wish to express himself in poetic words. Here is a poetry without words, yet of more universal meaning.

If experience derived from studying the male form in the same way gives a youth less surprise, it is chiefly because passion is absent, and he knows something of male beauty already. But here also he soon finds-like those who read a great poem complete after only knowing of it from quotations

that there is a bewildering beauty in the harmony, exhilarating to learn, and in itself equally able to put all things out of the mind until it is learned.

Above all, it puts out literature and landscape; and music itself, like love, is for a time forgotten. Later on, it produces preference, taste, and distaste. The young artist, in learning what form is, learns what it might be and generally is not. If he is too quick and enthusiastic he comes to this stage, as Blake did, too soon, and turns from the terribly imperfect

and sometimes even grotesque types that are offered to him as "nature." He thinks he dislikes "nature." In happy ancient Greece nature was generally sunny, well balanced, easily beautiful, neither knotty nor scraggy. Men were

more often like the stems of beech-trees. Now we are too frequently like wind-blown oaks. Their best of art was the produce of their best of luck.

Blake got far enough into the knowledge of modern figure to falsely suspect the types in Greek statues of being mechanically composed; and then he turned away from the actual men offered to him for nude study because of their lack of architectural harmony and of open-air colouring. His drawing from himself naked, done in 1780, and called Morning or Glad Day by Gilchrist, is his triumphant announcement that he had found at home the solution of the artistic problem of form.

We are not told by Gilchrist (who reproduced the print at the head of his fifth chapter) that the limbs are Blake's own, but that they are so is undoubted. To be certain of this, it is only necessary to compare the way in which the arms grow from small, smooth, and oval shoulder muscles, and from very large chest muscles, with either the Greek or the English types of strength. If we alter them in outline just enough to make them feminine instead of masculine we shall see that they belong to the well-known type of Irish beauty, which is admired, year after year, in evening dress at the Castle balls in Dublin, and still more in London drawing-rooms, where it is more rare.

We

Blake's source
It could only

The whole form is also exactly the same as that of the figure called "William" in Milton, page 29, and even of the "Robert" which on page 33 repeats it in reverse. cannot but see that whatever model sat was of reference for anatomy during many years. be himself. The Los on page 21 is of the same type. The way in which the full and rounded thighs grow from the body further identifies it. This is not the figure of a tall man, but certainly of a very strong one. Blake was not tall but remarkably strong. He defines the type of greatest strength as that which shows its power concentrated in the trunk and tapering to the extremities, and that of greatest beauty as the one that varies least from infancy to old age. If he had trained from childhood he could have become a "Strong Man" at a fair, and earned his living much more easily by lifting big brass balls than by scraping little copper plates. It would have been much less of a tax on his vitality and

endurance. In Job, 1827, his last work, the same figure is repeated, undistorted by time,-varied little "from infancy to old age."

With the pedantry of an enthusiast, Blake became at once intolerant of all art that was weak in the places where his own artistic tastes were strong, and with his usual uncalculating and simple truthfulness he entirely forgot that he might seem to be a "hater of dignitaries" if he uttered aloud what was in his heart. His interview with Moser, Keeper of the Academy, is quite natural, like his interview with the Dean of Westminster, when one remembers that he had never been taught the fear of the schoolmaster as a little boy. He recalls it in a note, pencilled on the margin of Reynolds' Discourses. The date of the incident cannot be later than 1782, as Moser died and was buried in the month of January 1783. Blake was probably a student at the time,—if so, the incident related belongs to 1778, when he was twenty-one.

I was once looking over the prints from Raffaele and Michelangelo in the library of the Royal Academy. Moser came to me and said, "You should not study those old dry and stiff unfinished works of art. Stay a little and I will show you what you should study." He then went and took down Le Brun and Ruten's galleries. How did I secretly rage! I also spoke my mind. I said to Moser, "These things which you call finished are not even begun; how then can they be finished?”`

The fact that even genius can be mingled with a quality so much the contrary of itself as mental vulgarity has been proved to us lately by Gustave Doré, and in literature by other gods of a day. But Blake reverenced the word genius, and would not hear of such a thing-a picture was only begun to him when it had begun to have that line which is the apostolic succession of the elect among artists. "True art and science," he has laid down, "cannot exist but by naked beauty displayed." To him it was unfortunately never really displayed enough.

In his faculty of "vision" he had a substitute for nature which enabled him to work with less return to study, and less loss by the lack of such return, than any other artist known. He also had more advantage than most from the habitual inspection of his own and his wife's figures undraped. His imagination suffered less from this home-study than from any other kind, though he says, "Nature does and always did weaken, deaden, and destroy imagination in me." It always does this to all of us, as a hearty meal reduces (at the moment) muscular strength. He did not always remember