EPIGRAMS AND SATIRICAL PIECES ON ART AND ARTISTS.

1

I asked of my dear friend orator Prig:

What's the first part of oratory?' He said: 'a great wig.'
And what is the second?' Then, dancing a jig

And bowing profoundly, he said: a great wig.'

And what is the third?' Then he snored like a pig,
And, puffing his cheeks out, replied: A great wig.'

So if to a painter the question you push,

'What's the first part of painting?' he'll say: 'A paint-brush.' 'And what is the second?' with most modest blush, He'll smile like a cherub, and say: "A paint-brush."

'And what is the third?' he'll bow like a rush,

With a leer in his eye, and reply: "A paint-brush."

Perhaps this is all a painter can want:

But look yonder,-that house is the house of Rembrandt.

2

'O dear mother Outline, of wisdom most sage,

What's the first part of painting?' She said: 'Patronage.
And what is the second to please and engage?'
She frowned like a fury, and said: 'Patronage.'
'And what is the third?' She put off old age,
And smiled like a syren, and said: 'Patronage.'

3

On the great encouragement given by English Nobility and Gentry to Correggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Catalani, and Dilberry Doodle.

Give pensions to the learned pig,
Or the hare playing on a tabor;
Anglus can never see perfection
But in the journeyman's labour.

As the ignorant savage will sell his own wife
For a button, a bauble, a bead, or a knife,-

So the taught savage Englishman spends his whole fortune
On a smear or a squall to destroy picture or tune:

And I call upon Colonel Wardle

To give these rascals a dose of caudle.

All pictures that's painted with sense or with thought
Are painted by madmen, as sure as a groat;

For the greater the fool, in the Art the more blest,
And when they are drunk they always paint best.
They never can Raphael it, Fuseli it, nor Blake it:
If they can't see an outline, pray how can they make it?
All men have drawn outlines whenever they saw them;
Madmen see outlines, and therefore they draw them.

4

Seeing a Rembrandt or Correggio,

Of crippled Harry I think and slobbering Joe;
And then I question thus: Are artists' rules

To be drawn from the works of two manifest fools?
Then God defend us from the Arts, I say;
For battle, murder, sudden death, let's pray.
Rather than be such a blind human fool,
I'd be an ass, a hog, a worm, a chair, a stool.

5

To English Connoisseurs.

You must agree that Rubens was a fool,
And yet you make him master of your school,
And give more money for his slobberings
Than you will give for Raphael's finest things.

I understood Christ was a carpenter,

And not a brewer's servant, my good Sir.

6

Sir Joshua praises Michael Angelo ;

"Tis Christian meekness thus to praise a foe:-
But 'twould be madness, all the world would say,

Should Michael Angelo praise Sir Joshua.

Christ used the Pharisees in a rougher way.

7

To Flaxman.

You call me mad; 'tis folly to do so,-
To seek to turn a madman to a foe.

If you think as you speak, you are an ass;
If you do not, you are but what you was.

8

To the same.

I mock thee not, though I by thee am mockèd; Thou call'st me madman, but I call thee blockhead.

9

Thank God, I never was sent to school

To be flogged into following the style of a fool!

PROSE WRITINGS.

DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE.

PUBLIC ADDRESS.

SYBILLINE LEAVES.

A VISION OF THE LAST JUDGMENT.

[Or the prose writings which now follow, the only ones already in print are the Descriptive Catalogue and the Sybilline Leaves. To the former of these, the Public Address which here succeeds it forms a fitting and most interesting pendant. It has been compiled from a very confused mass of MS. notes; but its purpose is unmistakeable as having been intended for an accompaniment to the engraving of Chaucer's Pilgrims. Both the Catalogue and Address abound in critical passages on painting and poetry, which must be ranked without reserve among the very best things ever said on either subject. Such inestimable qualities afford quite sufficient ground whereon to claim indulgence for eccentricities which are here and there laughably excessive, but which never fail to have a personal, even where they have no critical, value. As evidence of the writer's many moods, these pieces of prose are much best left unmutilated. Let us, therefore, risk misconstruction in some quarters; there are others where even the whimsical onslaughts on names no less great than those which the writer most highly honoured, and assertions as to this or that component quality of art being everything or nothing as it served the fiery plea in hand, will be discerned as the impatient extremes of a man who had his own work to do, which was of one kind as he thought against another, and who mainly did it too, in spite of that injustice without which no extremes might ever have been chargeable against him. And let us remember that, after all, having greatness in him, his practice of art included all great aims, whether they were such as his antagonistic moods railed against or no.

The Vision is almost as much a manifesto of opinion as either the Catalogue or Address. But its work is in a wider field, and one which, where it stretches beyond our own clear view, may not necessarily therefore have been a lost road to Blake himself. Certainly its grandeur and the sudden great things greatly said in it, as in all Blake's prose, constitute it an addition to our opportunities of communing with him, and one which we may prize highly.

The constant decisive words in which Blake alludes, throughout these writings, to the plagiarisms of his contemporaries, are painful to read, and will be wished away; but still it will be worth thinking whether their being said, or the need of their being said, is the greater cause for complaint. Justice, looking through surface accomplishments, greater nicety and even greater occasional judiciousness of execution, in the men whom Blake compares with himself, still perceives these words of his to be true. In each style of the art of a period, and more especially in the poetic style, there is often some one central derivative man, to whom personally, if not to the care of the world, it is important that his creative power should be held to be his own, and that his ideas and slowly perfected materials should not be caught up before he has them ready for his own use. Yet, consciously or unconsciously, such an one's treasures and possessions are time after time, while he still lives and needs them, sent forth to the world by others in forms from which he cannot perhaps again clearly claim what is his own, but which render the material useless to him henceforward. Hardly wonderful, after all, if for once an impetuous man of this kind is found raising the hue and cry, careless whether people heed him or no. It is no small provocation, be sure, when the gazers hoot you as outstripped in your race, and you know all the time that the man ahead, whom they shout for, is only a flying thief.]