Page:William Blake, painter and poet.djvu/93

Rh illustrations, which comprise the previously unpublished "Vala," have striven to present Blake's mysticism as a coherent system of thought. Valuable monographs are also prefixed to the editions of Blake's poems by Rossetti (1883) and Yeats (1893), and to the selection from his literary works by Mr. Housman (1893), this last perhaps on the whole, after Gilchrist's biography, the most desirable possession for the literary student of Blake. Of the numerous detached essays upon Blake the most important, perhaps, are that by the late Mr. Smetham, republished in his Essays, and in the second volume of Gilchrist's biography, and that by James Thomson, author of The City of Dreadful Night, appended to his Shelley, a Poem (1884).

It is exceedingly difficult to obtain a proper idea of Blake as an artist, from the extent to which his designs depend upon colouring, and the great inequality of this colouring, which is often not his own. In Mr. Gilchrist's opinion, the copy of The Song of Los, in the Print Room of the British Museum, and a volume of miscellaneous designs, in the same collection, represent him with adequate fairness; and these fortunately are public property. The finest specimens of his work seen by his biographer are apparently in the collection of the Earl of Crewe, and therefore not generally accessible. Those belonging to private collectors must of necessity be continually changing hands, and few students have the time or the opportunity to make the thorough investigation of them accomplished by Mr. Rossetti. Fortunately the illustrations in Gilchrist's biography, where the whole of the Job series is reissued, suffice to establish Blake's genius as a designer, even though destitute of the charm of colour. Mr. Bell Scott has executed effective etchings after him; Mr. Quaritch has republished the drawings for Comus; in 1876 the Songs of Innocence and Experience and the Prophetic Books up to Los were reprinted together, but only to the extent of a hundred copies, nor was the execution very satisfactory. It cannot be said that Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have entirely overcome the difficulties of reproduction; yet, perhaps, for those unable to obtain access to the copies tinted by the artist, or even to the uncoloured plates in the original edition, nothing so well displays the wilder and more weird aspects of his genius as the reprints in their third volume, especially those from Jerusalem.

Blake's character and works will long remain the subject of criticism