Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/491

 the manuscript beside him and adding to it, at intervals, while the graver continued its task almost without intermission. He despised etching needles, and worked wholly with the graver in latter years.

He used to say 'Truth is always in the extremes,—keep them.' I suppose he meant the same thing in saying, 'If a fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.'

He hated the bold, abrupt, off-hand style of drawing. 'Do you work in fear and trembling?' he asked a student who came to him for advice. 'Indeed I do, sir.' 'Then you'll do,' was the rejoinder. All the grand efforts of design, he thought, depended on niceties not to be got at once. First put in the action, then with further strokes fill up. So, he believed, worked the great masters.

He felt his way in drawing, notwithstanding his love of a 'bold determinate outline,' and did not get this at once. Copyists and plagiarists do that, but not original artists, as it is common to suppose: they find a difficulty in developing the first idea. Blake drew a rough, dotted line with pencil, then with ink; then colour, filling in cautiously, carefully. At the same time he attached very great importance to 'first lines,' and was wont to affirm;—'First thoughts are best in art, second thoughts in other matters.'

He held that nature should be learned by heart, and remembered by the painter, as the poet remembers language. 'To learn the language of art, copy for ever, is my rule,' said he. But he never painted his pictures from models. 'Models are difficult—enslave one—efface from one's mind a conception or reminiscence which was better.' This last axiom is open to much more discussion than can be given it here. From Fuseli, that often-reported declaration of his, 'Nature puts me out,' seems but another expression of the same wilful arrogance and want of delicate shades, whether of character or style, which we find in that painter's works. Nevertheless a sentence should here be spared to say that England would do well to preserve some remnant of Fuseli's