Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/90

 these tentative essays, carefully preserved by Blake during life, and afterwards forming part of the large accumulation of artistic treasure remaining in his widow's hands: the sole, but not at all unproductive, legacy, he had to bequeath her. Some are in pencil, some in pen and ink outline thrown up by a uniform dark ground washed in with Indian ink. They unmistakably show the beginner—not to say the child—in art; are naïf and archaic-looking; rude, faltering, often puerile or absurd in drawing; but are characterized by Blake-like feeling and intention, having in short a strong family likeness to his brother's work. The subjects are from Homer and the poets. Of one or two compositions there are successive and each time enlarged versions. True imaginative animus is often made manifest by very imperfect means; in the composition of the groups, and the expressive disposition of the individual figure, or of an individual limb: as e.g. (in one drawing) that solitary upraised arm stretched heaven-ward from out the midst of the panic-struck crowd of figures, who, embracing, huddle together with bowed heads averted from a Divine Presence. In another, a group of ancient men stand silent on the verge of a sea-girt precipice, beyond which they gaze towards awe-inspiring shapes and sights unseen by us. This last motive seems to have pleased Blake himself. One of his earliest attempts, if not quite his earliest, in that peculiar stereotype process he soon afterwards invented, is a version of this very composition; marvellously improved in the treatment—in the disposition and conception of the figures (at once fewer and better contrasted), as well, of course, as in drawing; which was what Blake's drawing always was—whatever its wilful faults—not only full of grand effect, but firm and decisive, that of a Master.

With Blake and with his wife, at the print-shop in Broad Street, Robert for two happy years and a half lived in seldom disturbed accord. Such domestications, however, always bring their own trials, their own demands for self-sacrifice. Of which the following anecdote will supply a hint, as well as