Page:William Blake (Chesterton).djvu/72

 WILLIAM BLAKE armour and armorial bearings; it was too much to expect him to understand them. He had learnt to draw a horse; it was too late to ask him to ride one. His whole business was somehow or other to make pictures; and therefore when he looked at Chaucer, he could see nothing but the picturesque.

Against this sort of sound technical artist, another type of artist has been eternally offered; this was the type of Blake. It was also the type of Michael Angelo; it was the type of Leonardo de Vinci; it was the type of several French mystics, and in our own country and recent period, of Rossetti. Blake, as a painter among other things, belongs to that small group of painters who did something else besides paint. But this is indeed a very inadequate way of stating the matter. The fuller and fairer way is this: that Blake was one of those few painters who understood his subject as well as his picture. I have already said that I think Stothard's picture of the Canterbury Pilgrims in a purely technical sense better than his. Indeed, there is nothing to be said against Stothard's picture of the Canterbury Pilgrims, except that it is not a picture 60