Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/187

 all his designs had this help. For at once literal in his translation of word into line, daring and unhacknied in his manner of indicating his pregnant allegories, Blake's conceptions do not always explain themselves at a glance, and without their meaning, half their beauty too must needs be lost.

Looked at merely as marginal book illustrations, the engravings are not strikingly successful. The space to be filled in these folio pages is of itself too large, and the size of the outlines is æsthetically anything but a gain. For such meanings as Blake's, not helped by the thousand charms of the painter's language, can be advantageously compressed into small space. The oft-repeated colossal limbs of Death and Time sprawling across the page—figures too large for the margin of the book, and necessarily always alike—become somewhat uninteresting. How little Blake was adapted to ingratiate himself with the public, the engraved series exemplifies. The general spectator will find these designs, all harping on life, death, and immortality, far from attractive; austere themes, austerely treated, if also sweetly and grandly; without even the relief of so much admixture of worldly topic and image as is introduced in the text of the epigrammatic poet. There is monotony of subject, of treatment, of handling the graver even. Blake's art, never imitative, but the expression of ideas pure and simple, ideas similar to those literature is commonly employed to convey, yet transcending words, is at the very opposite pole to that of the great mass of modern painters. There is little or no individuality in his faces, if more in his forms. Typical forms and faces, abstract impersonations, are used to express his meaning. Everything—figures, landscape, costume, accessory—is reduced to its elemental shape, its simplest guise—'bare earth, bare sky, and ocean bare.'

The absence of colour, the use of which Blake so well understood, to relieve his simple design and heighten its significance, is a grave loss. I have seen one copy of the Young, originally coloured for Mr. Butts, now in the hands of