Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/492

 work before it is irremediably obliterated. His oil pictures are, for the most part, monstrously overloaded in bulk as in style, and not less overloaded in mere slimy pigment. But his sketches in water-wash and pencil or pen and ink, should yet be formed, ere too late, into a precious national collection, including as they do, many specimens, than which not the greatest Italian masters could show greater proofs of mastery.

Blake's natural tendencies were, in many respects, far different from Fuseli's, and it is deeply to be regretted that an antagonism, which became more and more personal as well as artistic, to the petty practice of the art of his day,—joined no doubt to inevitable sympathy with this very Fuseli, fighting in great measure the same battle with himself for the high against the low,—should have led to Blake's adopting and unreservedly following the dogma above given as regards the living model. Poverty, and consequent difficulty of models at command, must have had something to do with it too. The truth on this point is, that no imaginative artist can fully express his own tone of mind without sometimes in his life working untrammelled by present reference to nature; and, indeed, that the first conception of every serious work must be wrought into something like complete form, as a preparatory design, without such aid, before having recourse to it in the carrying out of the work. But it is equally or still more imperative that immediate study of nature should pervade the whole completed work. Tenderness, the constant unison of wonder and familiarity so mysteriously allied in nature, the sense of fulness and abundance such as we feel in a field, not because we pry into it all, but because it is all there: these are the inestimable prizes to be secured only by such study in the painter's every picture. And all this Blake, as thoroughly as any painter, was gifted to have attained, as we may see especially in his works of that smallest size where memory and genius may really almost stand in lieu of immediate consultation of nature. But the larger his works