Page:William Blake (Chesterton).djvu/75

 WILLIAM BLAKE of the Canterbury Pilgrims. Blake (to summarise the whole matter as simply as it can be summarised) was in the tradition of the best and most educated ideas about Chaucer; Stothard was the inheritor of the most fashionable ideas and the worst. The whole incident cannot be without its moral and effect for all discussions about the morality or unmorality of art. If art could be unmoral it might be all very well. But the truth is that unless art is moral, art is not only immoral, but immoral in the most commonplace, slangy, and prosaic way. In the future, the fastidious artists who refuse to be anything but artists will go down to history as the embodiment of all the vulgarities and banalities of their time. People will point to a picture by Mr Sargent or Mr Shannon and say, "See, that man had caught all the most middle class cant of the early twentieth century."

We can now recur, however, to the general relations of Blake with his later patron. In a phrase of singular unconscious humour Mr Cromek accused Blake of "a want of common politeness." Common politeness certainly can hardly be said to have been Blake's strong 63