Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/21

Rh that Blake desired to put his Songs into circulation through the medium of a publisher is altogether at variance with that characteristic independence which led him throughout his life to do most things for himself in his own way, regardless of toil which he loved, and disdainful of external assistance. In the case of Blake's earlier work, the Poetical Sketches, the sheets of which, printed in letterpress at the expense of Mathew and Flaxman, were, as Smith tells us, handed to the author to publish or sell privately as he saw fit, he seems to have made no attempt to dispose of the copies through a bookseller or even to sell them personally. While there is no positive evidence that such was the case it is not improbable that he himself may have destroyed the greater part of this small edition. Blake, it must be remembered, was an artist as well as a poet, and the same attitude of mind which caused him on being shown a number of the Mechanic's Magazine to exclaim 'these things we artists HATE!' doubtless led him to regard as unworthy of him a book in which his conceptions were inadequately presented by a merely mechanical and somewhat unlovely process. His deliberate exclusion of the Poetical Sketches from the catalogue of his works offered for sale in 1793—a list which includes books produced by ordinary engraving as well as by 'illuminated printing'—seems to me to support this view.

It is more reasonable to conclude that Blake brought out his books himself by his own process, because no publisher or printer could have produced for him the new kind of illustrated work which he had in his mind. The method then in vogue admitted of artistic embellishments only in the shape of steel or wood engravings, stiffly surrounding or clumsily placed in juxtaposition to the type of the text, while that of Blake interwove text, design, and colouring into one harmonious whole with the happiest and most exquisite effect.

Relating the story of the invention of this process, Blake's biographers have represented it rather in the