Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 05.djvu/190

 impervious liquid, and then the remainder of the plate was eaten away with aquafortis, so that the letters and outlines were left prominent as in stereotype and could be printed off in any tint required as the basis of his scheme of colour. He then worked up the pages by hand with great variety of detail in the local hues. Mrs. Blake learned to take off the impressions with delicacy, to help in tinting them, and to do up the pages in boards. Thus the little book was literally made by husband and wife, with a result of unique beauty; and so far as the poems are concerned, taken in conjunction with the companion 'Songs of Experience' by which they were supplemented five years later, they are the most perfect Blake ever achieved. For whilst his powers of design steadily developed and his last completed work, the 'Inventions of the Book of Job' was also his grandest, as a poet his inspiration lapsed more and more into the formless incoherence of the so-called 'Prophetic Books,' which were all engraved and coloured by hand in the above manner. Indeed, the main, if not the whole, value of these 'Prophetic Books,' of which a list is given below, consists in the frequent splendour of the designs interwoven with the text. For here the fullest scope is given to the two antagonistic tendencies of Blake's mind, on the one hand as artist to embody in human forms of terror, sublimity, beauty, or grotesqueness the most abstract ideas, and on the other, as poet and theosophic dreamer, to resolve into shadowy symbolism the realities of human life and the visible world, and to express in the most crude manner his favourite tenet, that 'all things exist in the human imagination alone.'

In 1791 bookseller Johnson employed him to design and engrave six plates to 'Original Stories for Children', by Mary Wollstonecraft, and some to 'Elements of Morality,' translated by her from the German. At Johnson's weekly dinners he met Drs. Price, Priestley, Godwin, Fuseli, Tom Paine, &c., with whom he sympathised ardently in political, but not at all in religious matters. He was the only member of the group who donned the bonnet rouge and actually walked the streets in it. About this time, too, he made the acquaintance of Mr. Thomas Butts, a steady buyer at moderate prices for thirty years of his drawings, temperas, and 'frescoes.'

In 1793 Blake removed to Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, where he spent seven productive years, the most important fruits of which, in design, were 537 illustrations to Young's 'Night Thoughts' for Edwards's edition. Of these only forty-seven, to the first four books, were engraved, the book not proving successful (see description by F. J. Shields in 's Blake, vol. ii. 2nd edit.) Blake's industry throughout life was unceasing, and the mass of work accomplished by the rare union of exhaustless patience with a fiery, restless, creative imagination exceeds belief (see catalogues by W. M. Rossetti in 's Blake). He literally never paused. 'I don't understand what you mean by the want of a holiday,' he would say. Writing and design were his recreation after the tedious toil of engraving.

Flaxman in 1800 introduced Blake to Hayley, who invited him to come and settle at Felpham while engraving the illustrations for 'Life of Cowper.' Here, in a cottage by the sea, he spent three years, during which he executed eighteen tempera heads of the poets for Hayley's library; a miniature of Cowper's cousin, Johnson; two very sweet designs to 'Little Tom the Sailor,' a broad-sheet ballad by Hayley; a series of illustrations to Hayley's 'Ballads on Animals,' besides more engraved books and drawings for Butts. It was not to be expected, however, that Blake could long continue to breathe freely in the atmosphere of elegant triviality and shallow sentiment which surrounded the literary squire. Kindly as he was, and unwearied in endeavours to serve, his entire incapacity to understand the artist's genius or appreciate his work except as an engraver, made the constant intercourse between them blighting to Blake's inner life and to the exercise of his creative faculty. After three years' patient endurance, therefore he determined to return to London at whatever pecuniary sacrifice, that he might 'be no longer pestered with Hayley's genteel ignorance and polite disapprobation.' An absurd charge of sedition was brought against him, just before he finally quitted Felpham, by a drunken soldier whom he had turned out of his garden. The case was tried at Chichester, and Blake was acquitted. On his return he settled at 17 South Molton Street. Cromek, Blake's next employer, purchased of him that fine series of designs to Blair's 'Grave' by which he is most widely known. Never has the theme of death been handled in pictorial art with more elevation and beauty than in some of these, notably in 'Death's Door' and the 'Soul departing from the Body.' Fuseli, always a warm friend of Blake (paying him the naïve tribute of remarking that he was d——d good to steal from'), wrote a laudatory notice of the designs for the preface. But it was a bitter disappointment to Blake that, contrary to the original agreement, he was not permitted to engrave his own designs. They were put