A Commonplace Book

Gainsborough was a fashionable portrait-painter. He never painted anything or anybody that any Englishman of the day could not have seen and in his turn observed "from the life." And yet he was as much a fantastic as William Blake in his way. He did not see his sitters, or only saw them in a trance: a very mild, superficial trance, but nevertheless a palpable one. The fancies that hung round them, the flavour of their lives, their illusions about themselves, or about each other, all went to his head as they floated into his studio to be painted, like some enervating bergamot. He was doped with the graceful existence of all these pretty people, and that is how he worked. He saw nothing but pale blue cliches, and never a man or woman. Blake's Jehovah is a far realler person, or at least you can imagine him in the Tottenham Court Road more readily.