Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/433

Rh And so we have these three grand, but uncouth, blocks printed before us—in one of which the shepherd is eloquent among the ewes and sucking lambs—another where a traveller walks solemnly on among the hills, alone—while in a third 'the young moon with the old moon in her arms,' rises over fallen ranks of wheat. Thought cannot fathom the secret of their power, and yet the power is there.

Blake's reverence for 'a firm and determinate outline' misled him chiefly where his works are intended to be elaborately shaded. The importance of right outline to all noble drawing cannot be over-estimated. It must never be forgotten, however, that outline only represents the surface of objects in their extreme confines right and left, above and below, nor that the eye recognises the intermediate spaces with all their projection and depression as clearly as it sees the limit which is called outline.

To take a simple illustration of this. The outline of an egg, with its lovely tapering lines, is primarily needful to record the image of an egg on paper or canvas. If Flaxman draws the egg from which Castor and Pollux issued, the oval boundary is sufficient. It is accepted as a type of the egg, just as the flat figures of his designs from Homer or Hesiod are accepted as the types of men. But the case is altered if the relief of the whole has to be given by shading. An egg all outline in the midst of a shaded design would look as flat as a small oval kite. To produce its proportion of resemblance the outline must be filled with its pale moon-shine gradations up to the central 'high light,' by means of which the surface appears to swell forward to the eye. These gradations and shaded forms must be in their true place as much as the bounding line, or it will not yield the correct impression. If we apply this rule to each single feature of the human face and figure, we shall see that, while the firm and decided outline must be given correctly, it is only a hundredth part of the truth. Each point of the surface of