Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/434

330 the body, if turned sufficiently, would become outline, and indeed there is no portion of the exposed superficies which may not be called outline in this sense. It is owing to a one-sided view of the question of drawing, then, that we have to search among the often uncouth and broken shading in the plates of Blake, for that powerful and accurate outline which we are sure, almost universally, to find.* * * It was a fortunate circumstance for Blake, in a professional sense, that he had no children. In many cases, the necessities of a family rouse and develop the resources of the parent mind and discover means of support where none appeared. This would have been impossible with such a nature as Blake's. He might have drudged and slaved at prosaic work with the graver, and so have been prevented from finding his own sphere as an inventor, but he could not have made his works a whit more acceptable to the general taste. He needed no spur; his powers were always awake, always on the stretch; and we have, probably, from his hand all that could ever have been obtained under the most favourable circumstances. Many a man is depressed by poverty and anxiety below the level of his secret capacities. It was not so here. The last touches of his steady graving tool are as cool and strong in the latest of his works as in the earliest. It was not in the power of neglect, or pain, or sickness, or age, or infirmity, to quench a vital force so native and so fervent.* * *

Blake engraved from Stothard and others for the magazines; mortified, sometimes, to see that his own designs had been the foundation, so he said, of the subject he engraved; indeed, Fuseli himself acknowledged that 'Blake was good to steal from.' We may understand the force of this saying, if we only look at a design of early date by Blake, called 'Plague,' engraved in the volume we are reviewing. An inexorable, severe grandeur pervades the general lines; an inexplicable woe, as of Samaria in the deadly siege, when Joram, wandering