Page:William Blake, painter and poet.djvu/81

Rh though others of Blake's designs may be more transcendent of ordinary human faculty, he has scarcely executed anything displaying all his faculties so well combined and in such perfect equilibrium; and, were it necessary to rest his fame upon one set of works, this would probably be selected. As a scriptural theme it appealed with especial strength to English sympathies, and having been selected by Gilchrist for reproduction, it is more widely known than any of his works except the illustrations to Blair's Grave. "The original water-colour designs," Rossetti says, "are much larger than the engravings, and generally pale in colour, with a less full and concentrated effect than the engravings, and by no means equal to them in power and splendid decorative treatment of the light and shade. On the other hand, they are often completer and naturally freer in expression, and do not exhibit a certain tendency to over-sturdiness of build and physiognomy in the figures." Fine as is the figure of Satan in The Destruction of Job's Sons and Daughters, it is, Mr. Rossetti thinks, much finer in the water colour. On the other hand, "the effect of sublimity and multitude in When the morning stars sang together is centupled in the engraving by adding the upraised arms of two other angels to right and left, passing out of the composition." The whole account suggests how desirable it would be to have many of Blake's unpublished water colours Woodcut from Thornton's Pastoral. translated into black and white, could engraver or etcher of the needful force be found.

In 1821 Blake had performed another work of moment, his first and last wood-engravings. These were to illustrate Phillips s imitation of Virgil's first pastoral, republished by Dr. Thornton, a physician and botanist. Blake was a novice in this branch of art, and the cuts answer to Dr. Thornton's own description of them: "They display less of art than of genius." But nothing could more effectually confirm the principle enunciated by their critic in the Athenæum: "Amid all drawbacks there exists a power in the work of the man of genius which no one but himself