Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/229

Rh right senses. Posterity will judge by our works. Woollett's and Strange's works are like those of Titian and Correggio, the life's labour of ignorant journeymen, suited to the purposes of commerce, no doubt, for commerce cannot endure individual merit; its insatiable maw must be fed by what all can do equally well; at least it is so in England, as I have found to my cost these forty years. Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts or to empires that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.

Woollett's best works were etched by Jack Browne; Woollett etched very ill himself. The Cottagers, and Jocund Peasants, the Views in Kew Garden, Foot's-Cray, and Diana and Actæon, and, in short, all that are called Woollett's, were etched by Jack Browne; and in Woollett's works the etching is all, though even in these a single leaf of a tree is never correct. Strange's prints were, when I knew him, all done by Aliamet and his French journeymen, whose names I forget. I also knew something of John Cooke, who engraved after Hogarth. Cooke wished to give Hogarth what he could take from Raphael, that is, outline, and mass, and colour; but he could not. Such prints as Woollett and Strange produce will do for those who choose to purchase the life's labour of ignorance and imbecility in preference to the inspired monuments of genius and inspiration.

In this manner the English public have been imposed upon for many years, under the impression that engraving and painting are somewhat else besides drawing. Painting is drawing on canvas, and engraving is drawing on copper, and nothing else; and he who pretends to be either painter or engraver without being a master of drawing, is an impostor. We may be clever as pugilists, but as artists, we are, and have long been, the contempt of the Continent. Gravelot once said to my master Basire: 'De English may be