the ready inventor as being extremely apt to acquiesce in imperfection. He told the students of the Academy that to rely too much on their powers of invention was to court disaster, for nothing could come of nothing. The mind is but a barren soil, a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop.' It was but natural that Blake, conscious of the amazing fertility of his genius and of his untiring patience in execution, should controvert every one of these statements. The man who would propagate the view that great inventors cannot execute, or execute with inferior technique, he regarded as an impostor. Personally he held that facility in composing was the greatest power of art and given to none but the greatest artists. As for the mind, he asserted that, far from being a barren soil, it was the most prolific of all things and inexhaustible. Sir Joshua's remarks force from him the heart-felt exclamation, 'Thank God that I am not like Reynolds ! '

It is noteworthy how the views of Blake and Reynolds diverge also on the question of generalisation in art. One of the guiding principles which Sir Joshua repeatedly laid down was that the general idea constitutes real excellence, and all minor things, however perfect in their way, are therefore to be sacrificed mercilessly to the greater. The beauty of art consists in rising above all singular forms, local peculiarities and details of every kind. The painter must disregard all local and temporary features and consider only those general habits which are everywhere and always the same. Peculiarities in works of art, Reynolds maintained, are like those in the human figure-they serve to distinguish, but are none the less blemishes. However difficult it may be to escape them, the painter must try to overlook these accidental discriminations of Nature and exhibit distinctly and with precision the general forms of things. Only by concentrating on this central form and leaving out particularities can the artist arrive at perfection. Every natural object is full of defects, but the artist, by creating the type from these faulty individuals, rises to the grand style, which is independent of age and locality. To this Blake answered that the minuteness, the individuality, is everything. Even granting Sir Joshua's assumption of the general or central form, he would not admit that any deviation from it is deformity. All forms are perfect in the poet's mind, but these are not abstracted nor compounded from Nature, but are from imagination.' Minute discrimination is not accidental; it is the foundation of the sublime. As for distinct general form, Blake denied its possibility; generalisation entails vagueness. To lose sight of the parts in a striving after general effect was in his opinion folly. The term 'general Nature' he regarded as an absurdity, for all Nature is particular.

It might be argued that Sir Joshua's love of generalising is not unconnected with the scientific temper of an age that had reduced chaos in Nature to an ordered system of law, and that Blake's emphasis on individuality is appropriate to the generation which saw the birth of nationalism. But we will leave these speculations and confine ourselves to showing that the opinions of Reynolds and Blake on this matter are related to those of the earlier and later eighteenth century writers. There is a passage in Rasselas the thought of which bears a striking and at times a verbal similarity to Sir Joshua's views on generalising. In the tenth chapter the poet Imlac says to the Prince of Abyssinia :

The business of a poet is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances; he does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his portraits of Nature such prominent and striking features as to recall the original to every mind; and must neglect the minuter discriminations, which one may have remarked, and another have neglected, for those characteristics which are alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness. . . . He must divest himself of the prejudices of his age and country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same. . . . He must write as the interpreter of Nature, and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.

Although Blake himself paid little heed to inanimate Nature, his attitude on this question of generalisation was in full sympathy with that of Wordsworth. Even if he does not number the streaks of the tulip, the poet of the swaying daffodils, the violet by the mossy stone, and the yew-trees in Borrowdale had too keen a sense of individuality to allow the contention of Reynolds and Johnson.

The reader who received without cavil Blake's judgment on Reynolds's Discourses would carry away an impression very unfavourable to the older man. There was, indeed, little in them of which Blake approved; here and there he accepted a detail, but in the main his remarks were condemnatory. Only on one occasion did he learn anything from Reynolds, and then he refrained from pointing out his indebtedness. In the catalogue of his exhibition in 1809, anticipating criticism of the incorrect costume of his Brahmins, he pleaded the authority of the ancients, as exemplified by Laocoön, who, though a priest, is represented naked. Apart from this instance, which is mentioned by Reynolds in the seventh discourse, Blake derived nothing from these speeches. Others, who had not such preconceived notions, were perhaps more just. Cowper, for example, writing to William Unwin on February 27, 1780, says:

It is a just observation of Sir Joshua Reynolds, that though men of ordinary talents may be highly satisfied with their own productions, men of true genius never are. Whatever be their subject, they always seem to themselves to fall short of it, even when they seem to others most to excel. And for this reason-because they have a certain sublime sense of perfection, which other men are strangers to, and which they themselves in their performances are not able to exemplify.

Cowper here deduces from the Discourses that never-ending struggle for perfection which led Browning, according as the artist was or was not impelled by it, to praise Raphael and pity Andrea del Sarto. It would, however, be futile to scoff at Blake for not seeing what others saw. Art was to him a crusade; only one side was in the right, and that was his. He approached the Discourses not as an objective critic, but as a passionate partisan. With the burning conviction which, had he lived some generations earlier, would surely have placed him in the ranks of Cromwell's Ironsides, he swept onwards, his watchword The Lord of Hosts,' his battle-cry Smite and spare not.' In his encounter with Reynolds we see the clash of two ages. Sir Joshua defends the ideas of the passing age, Blake champions the new.

On whichever side our sympathies may lie, we are moved by the spectacle of Blake, poor and unknown, throwing down the gauntlet to the all-powerful Reynolds and the artistic creed which was then triumphant all over Europe. Thanks to his unfaltering faith in the divine inspiration of his work, Blake knows no doubts or fears. His self-confidence amidst dire poverty and bitter discouragement borders on the sublime. He boldly claims his engraving of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims as the finest that has been or is likely to be done in England. To his rivals he cries: 'I am mad or else you are so; both of us cannot be in our right senses. Posterity will judge by our works.' He declares that if all the princes in Europe were to patronise inferior art, he would remain unshaken: I, William Blake, a mental prince, should decollate and hang their souls as guilty of mental high treason.' Referring to the patrons of art, he says haughtily:

I demand the encouragement which is my due; if they continue to refuse, theirs is the loss, not mine, and theirs is the contempt of posterity. I have enough in the approbation of fellow-labourers; this is my joy and exceeding great reward. I go on, and nothing can hinder my course.

The same spirit breathes from another passage in his catalogue, where he says with engaging candour:

If a man is master of his profession, he cannot be ignorant that he is so; and if he is employed by those who pretend to encourage art, he will employ himself, and laugh in secret at the pretences of the ignorant, while he has every night dropped into his shoe, as soon as he puts it off,

and puts out the candle, and gets into bed, a reward for the labours of the day, such as the world cannot give, and patience and time awaits to give him all that the world can give.

These are proud words, but posterity has indorsed them.

HERBERT Wright.

AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CLERIC1

STEPHEN EATON, the future Archdeacon of Middlesex, was born in 1737 at the family home, Deene Place, Deene, in Northamptonshire. He was the youngest son of Daniel Eaton, of Deene, who was agent to Lord Cardigan, of Deene Park.

Stephen was the youngest of three brothers. Daniel, the eldest, seems to have succeeded his father as agent to the great man at Deene Park. William, the second son, who died at twenty-four, passes, unhappily, straightway out of our history. He was, Mr. Lamb tells us, remarkably handsome and a great singer. His beauty, his talent, his early death, and, not least, his occupation shroud him in romantic mystery. This charming and good-looking youth, the son of Lord Cardigan's well-to-do agent, was keeper to his father's employer. And while William was a gamekeeper, his younger brother, Stephen, went to Eton.

This curious anomaly, as it seems to our modern eyes, sets us wondering. We have all known sons of English country houses, bred at Eton, whose heart was in the woods, and who, had they been able to take the line they loved and exercise perhaps the only talent God had given them, would have turned gamekeeper gladly and fallen, perhaps not so gladly, to the level of the groom and the gardener. In those days before the Enclosure Acts of the later eighteenth century, when England was still largely a warren, was it as natural for the younger son of the lord or his agent to don the velveteen and shoulder his musket as it was later, when a Regular Army had been finally established, to wear the King's uniform or take the family living? Or was William Eaton something of an original and sport?

We cannot say. All that we know is that while the sylvan William was, as we may imagine, completing his education in the gunroom at Deene Park, and wandered singing

In the elm-woods and the oaken,
There where Orpheus harped of old,

1 This article is composed from data compiled by the late Mr. Edmund Lamb, Borden Wood, Liphook, Hants, whose mother was an Eaton. The article is published with the permission of his widow.