THE LIFE MASK OF WILLIAM BLAKE.

WW

HOEVER has studied with somewhat more than usual attention the only two considerable portraits1 of William Blake which his times have left us, I mean that painting of Philips and the miniature of Linnell,

must have concluded with himself somewhat in this way, that, setting aside the variant manners of their painters, and the different ages at which they were done, if they are true records of the man, they are records of contrary moods, and that the facts of the face recorded in each are those only that express and insist upon their several tempers. Though we are justly careless of the aspect of most men, yet some we desire to know for a prohibition, others for an example. But of whom, seeing we are not so happy as to possess the Veronica, would we ask a likeness rather than of those priests of men on whom were laid the very hands of God, and whose lives are the seals of their ordination, of those to whom it is said, "Thy whole body is full of light?" For the light of the body is in the eye, and the face is, as it were, but the shadow of the mind.

And though at the first we may be repelled by his limitations, yet ultimately, I think, William Blake must be counted of the number of these silent priests; and of him then a true likeness will be asked. But it is hard to reconcile the only two portraits that we have of him.

1 For I cannot account as considerable that little sketch of himself which you will find in Gilchrist's Life, nor that other sketch by his wife, drawn in profile and with his hair flaming, which it is now my fortune to possess.

We are in need of impartial witness to the truth of either, or, if it may be so, of both. Such witness, so far as it relates to the moods expressed in them, we already have in his writings and inventions and in the record of his life. But where shall we find such a witness to the truth of the facts of his face, of the outward "show of things?" Happily it is preserved to us in the Life Mask of which we are enabled, through the kindness of Mr. George Richmond, to give the accompanying photogravure. It was taken by Deville the Phrenologist when Blake was about fifty years of age. Much of the forced expression of the nostrils, and more particularly of the mouth, is due to the discomfiture which the taking of the cast involved; many of Blake's hairs adhering to the plaster until quite recently.

It is with such considerations as these, that I would have the student of Blake approach his Life Mask. I have purposely avoided going into the conclusions to which these considerations would lead; yet I will add one word more about portrait painting in general.

To paint a great portrait is not merely to select "the chief lines and master-strokes of a face.". Portraiture is the criticism of painting. Not criticism as it is commonly understood, but rather a faint, though sweet and harmonious echo of that first and most merciful of acts, "Fiat lux." That opening page of the Jerusalem where the old man is taking a star, the sun of a planet like ours, but of greater magnitude and of a keener brightness, to search into the inscrutable caverns of the mind is a happy figure of it. More is required of the painter of a great portrait than the power to express himself with a brush and pigments on canvas. He must descend into the wells of the being of him whom he would deliver living to all time. He must make the master-strokes of his mind shine through the chief lines of his face, that thereby we may know him: for "he whose face gives no light shall never become a star." HERBERT P. HORNE.

NOTES ON THE NATIONAL GALLERY

(Continued).

ANDREA DI CIONE [ORCAGNA].

1308-1368.

CHRIST'S CORONATION OF HIS MOTHER."

Room XVII., No. 569.

"And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,
As the earth had done her best in my passion to scale the sky."

B

ESIDES the more proper work of making fit and fair the material of life, the artist's labour is to dignify the expression of ideas by the choicest craftsmanship: to refine them of that earthy crust of the common place in which they lie embedded in the virgin soil of the mind. To free imagination from mean or coarsely figured thought, to furbish ideas of noble origin with eloquent effect and with sensuous form seized from the outside world, art labours and loves to labour sternly evermore. And having in some measure accomplished this, the ideal, made flesh to dwell among us, is at length matured, lives its hour, its ages, and passes away the idea returning to the Eternal Being of thought about us, to re-appear later in the youth of some fairer mould. For the idea is eternal: the mould is of the hour. And if the art be imperfect, it is so only from the inadequacy of the clothing as we

might weave it in this our elder day. Interesting it does not cease to be, since its spiritual intention, which is its living force, is of the nature of things that know neither the failing of time nor the fortunes of skill. Age after age is impressed by the same motive; age after age gets some grip of it; age after age, "eager to do and die," attempts to give it shape and substance, only at last to give it up, and leave it at once a monument of its own heaven-sent desire, a motive of untaught desire for its sons. The open secrets of life, ever as open, ever as secret, suffer only some change in the intricacy of the pattern-here exceedingly simple, there wondrously subtle-that ornaments the veil now in part disclosing, now in part disguising them. And here it is exceedingly simple, because the painter has yet had but small practice with his material, understanding, as yet he does, only its most palpable powers, and by not so much as a dream anticipating its hidden possibilities. But these will disclose themselves as experiment widens the vision, and then the painter will be able to borrow more largely from the outside world. For the present, however, the Italian uses his tempera as habit has taught him to use his enamel or his mosaic. Light and shade, effects of atmosphere, mystery, tone and texture, his materials never before could shape to poetic ends, and little encouraged his mind to dwell on these ineffectual sources of imagery in nature. Consequently in his painting, colours are varied only by simple counter-change of tint, and figures are grouped but in the conventional way suggested by materials incapable of dealing with effects of distance; as in this group of saints, where the one most palpable fact in the aspect of any mass of men does service for all others.

From the point of view of the toy painter of to-day, this picture is most childishly simple, but from the point of view of the man of to