Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/47

— 47 — running stream, all showing great beauties of colouring and patient carefulness of execution. To Blake's mannerisms, to his preference for long noses and flabby cheeks, to his impossibly contorted figures, I need not draw attention, they are only too apparent from all his works. His innumerable misdrawings which he might easily have corrected, of course lessen the impression his pictures make on us, so does his want of dramatic power; we feel astonishment when we look at the violent passions, the awful scenes Blake puts before our eyes, we never turn away from them with a shudder of dismay. Neither did Blake escape altogether the faults of the century he lived in, often e.g. in the illustrations of Young's Night Thoughts we find the theatrical stiffness and melodramatic effects of the later 18th century painting.

Yet though his faults be many, his work leaves an impression on the mind, and this is one test of vital work; for after all it is expression which counts in art.

It was to rebel against the total want of expression in works of art that in the autumn of 1848 the celebrated Praeraphaelitic Brotherhood was constituted. The story of the origin of the brotherhood has been told again and again, so I may assume it to be generally known and will not repeat it here. The central idea of it was a revolt against conventionality. As Blake had done thirty years before, they stood up in arms against the degeneration of the English art, now in the hands of men like Wilkie, Leslie and Mulready, men who traded with cheap emotions and conventional optimism, who had no fundamental conception, no imagination, no force of expression. William Rossetti thus enumerates the Praeraphaelitic aims:

a) To have genuine ideas to express;

b) To study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;

c) To sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote.