Page:Bryan's dictionary of painters and engravers, volume 1.djvu/219

 of Earl Godwin ' (probably in water-colours) at the Royal Academy. In 1783 appeared, at the cost of friends, the slim octavo volume ' Poetical Sketches by W.B.,'nowextremelyrare. 'Poetical Sketches' was printed and published in the ordinary way. But four years later came a little book which in twenty-seven pages presents examples of nearly every one of its author's extraordinary character- istics. This was the famous ' Songs of Innocence,' which, along with its companion, ' Songs of Experience,' is now universally admitted to contain some of the most clearly inspired and perfectly beautiful poetry in the literature of the world. The songs comp 'Sing the volume were involved in marginal decorations of a beauty and originality only less than the songs' own, and the whole work was written, embellished, engraved, printed and bound by the poet and liis wife. Even the ink was of their own making. As for the technical method, it is thus described by Gilchrist: "It was quite an original one. It consisted of a species of engraving in relief, both words and dt-signs. The verse was written and the designs and marginal embellishments outlined on the copper mth an impervious liquid, probably the ordinary stopping-out varnish of engravers. Then all the white parts or h'ghts, the remainder of the plate, that is, were eaten away with aqua fortis or other acid, so that the outline of letter and design was left prominent as in stereotj-pe. From these plates he printed off in any tint, yellow, brown, blue, required to be the prevailing or ground colour in his facsimiles; red he used for the letterpress. The page was then coloured up by hand in imitation of the original drawing, with more or less variety of detail in the local hues." The secret of this serviceable process Blake firmly believed himself to have learned one night in a drenm from the spirit of his dead brother Robert, and it is on record that, next morning, after Mrs. Blake had paid one shilling and tenpence for the materials required to test its efiScacy, only eightpence remained in the common purse. The experiment succeeded, and Blake, whose writings (with the exception of ' Poetical Sketches' and part of a poem on the French Revolution) never tempted a publisher till after his death, became his own printer and bookseller. The result, as in nearly all the crucial issues of his life, was a further pressing in of the artist upon himself, and the loss of influences which some think would have corrected and balanced his strong natural endowment, while others hold that they would have weakened and blurred it. Accustomed to and even preferring a frugal and busy hfe, Blake fell into a habit of writing only to please himself — a superficially admirable choice which generally ends in ignominious unintelligibility. The 'Prophetic Books ' ('Visions of the Daugliters of Albion,' 'America,' 'Europe,' 'The Book of Urizen,' 'The Song of Los,' 'The Book of Ahania,' 'Jerusalem,' and 'Milton'), which, along with 'The Book of Thel,' 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,' and 'The Gates of Paradise,' complete the tale of works en- graved by Blake according to the method of the ghostly Robert, are coveted by collectors for their rarity, and by artists for their powerful illustrations and decorations. But, despite the enthusiastic labours of commentators to elucidate their obscurities and to magnify their importance, it is almost certain that they will ultimately be regarded as turbid streams of inscrutable verbal symbols in which a lyrical fire of almost unequalled liveliness and purity was extinguished. Fortunately, however, while Blake the poet was wandering in blind alleys, Blake the designer kept pushing onward along so straight a path that the twenty-two pieces illustrating the Book of Job, though executed when the artist was well over sixty years old, are not only his finest achievement, but one of the noblest sequences of designs in the rich domain of religious art In the ' Job ' Blake returned to more familiar methods, using the graver alone, without etching ; and although many of his admirers have bemoaned the long estrangement from what proved to be his most congenial and effective medium, it might be maintained with equal cogency that without these fallow years the fine luxuriance of ' Job ' had been impossible. The illustrations to Dante's ' Divina Comraedia ' (for the purposes of which the man of seventy acquired a working knowledge of Italian) bade fair to equal the ' Job,' but Blake's death cut the work short when only seven of the hundred water-colour designs had been engraved. Among earlier engravings by Blake may be mentioned forty-three plates illustrating Young's ' Night Thoughts' (the residue of the five hundred and thirty-seven designs for this work existing as coloured drawings only). The well-known illustrations to Blair's ' Grave,' though designed by Blake, were engraved by Schiavonetti, a successful pupil of Bartolozzi. This arrangement was disingenuously manipulated by Cromek, a publisher, who followed it up by an act of double-dealing in respect of Blake's ' Canterbury Pilgrims ' which led on the one hand to a lifelong breach of old friend- ship with Stothard, and on the other hand to the exhibition and to the ' Descriptive Catalogue ' noticed below. Of wood-engravings Blake produced onlj' the brilliant set of seventeen tiny illustrations for Phillips' ' Pastorals,' executed in 1820-1821. As a painter Blake is easier to study in his opinions than in his achievements. The National Gallery has his 'The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth,' and ' Return from Calvary,' and the British Museimi hai some of his drawings ; but by far the greater part of his work is inaccessible or has perished. In many cases tlie destruction must be blamed either on an indifEerent public or on fanatics who burned innumerable poems and designs on the ground that, though they were certainly inspired, their inspiration was from the devih In other cases, Blake's technical methods must be held responsible. In the memorable 'Descriptive Catalogue' to an exhibition of his pictures held in 1809 the artist wrote : ' Clearness and precision have been the chief objects in painting these pictures — clear colours unmuddied by oil, and firm and determinate lineaments unbroken by shadows which ought to display and not hide form, as is the practice of the latter schools of Italy and Flanders." His frescoes, as he called them, were rather a kind of tempera, painted in water-colour on a ground of glue and whiting, applied to a panel or linen or canvas, and it seems that many of them cracked or were spoilt by damp. As for their contents, the painter himself, while confessing his inferiority to Raphael and Michael Angelo, said, "I do pretend to paint finer than Rubens or Rembrandt or Correggio or Titian." With his engraver's training it was difficult for him to escape from a narrow view of drawing. " I assert," he added, " that he who thinks he can engrave or paint either, without being a master of drawing, is a fool. Painting is drawing on canvas, and engrav-