Hence there is a spiritual significance in the picture. The pilgrims are real Chaucerian people on a real pilgrimage, grouped by a compelling spiritual kinship. The artist and poet are wedded. Yet the artist never loses his individuality, because the poet is so universal that he allows the artist to read his private experience into his own. The picture may not at first be so attractive as that of Stothard, but when one has grown accustomed to the exterior charms of the two pictures, there still remains in Blake's a rich field for fertile gleaning, while when the eye has become satiated with Stothard's sweetness there remains nothing else as food for the spirit. CHAPTER XI THE SUPREME VISION Blake did well to be angry--so he believed. The years were slipping by, and the gleams of light that had promised a glad day now seldom came. Hayley had passed out of his life. Cromek could make the money out of him that he could not make for himself. Stothard, he believed, had acted with his eyes open. As he brooded on these things, anger and resentment took possession of him. His courage was failing. His resentments secreted poison that was surely spreading through his entire being and threatening to turn the once overtrustful Blake into a disillusioned and bitter old man. Then he turned to the gospel, not like tens of thousands to find comfort, but to justify himself in his attitude of defiance, and to assure himself that his anger was godlike. He fixed his eyes on to the figure of Jesus, and essayed the difficult task of seeing Him as He was. There was not much help coming even from those contemporaries whom he admired. Wesley and Whitefield proclaimed incessantly the death of Jesus as the one availing sacrifice for sin, but they appeared to contemplate the life of Jesus as little as the great Apostle of the Gentiles. William Law, in a sweat of excitement at his finding of Boehme, devoted all his powers to discovering the riches of the mystical indwelling Christ. Since Blake's day the higher critics have given their whole lives to carving out a human Jesus from the mass of myth, legend, and tradition. After this wholesale rejection of the supernatural, it strikes one as comic to hear Samuel Butler solemnly assuring us that there are many gaps in the character of Jesus that we may fill up, as we like, from our own ideals. The old dilemma was, Either Jesus was divine or He was not good: to-day it is, Either Jesus was falsely reported or He was mad. To the old orthodoxy Jesus was all gentleness, meekness, and mildness. To the new heterodoxy He was afraid of reality and life, and in His manners vehement, impatient, and rude. Some see in Him the pattern of obedience: others the flaunter of all authority.