Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/498

 so prone to new paths as was that of William Blake, it may be well to allude, however briefly, to those succeeding British artists who have shown unmistakably something of his influence in their works. Foremost among these comes a very great though as yet imperfectly acknowledged name,—that of David Scott of Edinburgh, a man whom Blake himself would have delighted to honour, and to whose high appreciation of Blake the motto on the title-page of the present book bears witness. Another proof of this is to be found in a MS. note in a copy of the Grave which belonged to Scott; which note I shall here transcribe. I may premise that the apparent preference given to the Grave over Blake's other works seems to me almost to argue in the writer an imperfect acquaintance with the Job.

'These, of any series of designs which art has produced' (writes the Scottish painter), 'are the most purely elevated in their relation and sentiment. It would be long to discriminate the position they hold in this respect, and at the same time the disregard in which they may be held by some who judge of them in a material relation; while the great beauty which they possess will at once be apparent to others who can appreciate their style in its immaterial connection. But the sum of the whole in my mind is this: that these designs reach the intellectual or infinite, in an abstract significance, more entirely unmixed with inferior elements and local conventions, than any others; that they are the result of high intelligence, of thought, and of a progress of art through many styles and stages of different times, produced through a bright, generalizing and transcendental mind.

The errors or defects of Blake's mere science in form, and his proneness to overdo some of its best features into weakness, are less perceptible in these than in others of his works. What was a disappointment to him was a benefit to the work,—that it was etched by another, who was able to render it in a style thoroughly consistent, (but which