PAINTERS AND ENGRAVERS.
of Earl Godwin ' (probably in water-colours) at the
Royal Academy. In 1783 appeared, at the cost of
friends, the slim octavo volume ' Poetical Sketches
by W.B.,'nowextremelyrare. 'Poetical Sketches'
was printed and published in the ordinary way.
But four years later came a little book which in
twenty-seven pages presents examples of nearly
every one of its author's extraordinary character-
istics. This was the famous ' Songs of Innocence,'
which, along with its companion, ' Songs of Experience,' is now universally admitted to contain
some of the most clearly inspired and perfectly
beautiful poetry in the literature of the world.
The songs comp 'Sing the volume were involved in
marginal decorations of a beauty and originality
only less than the songs' own, and the whole work
was written, embellished, engraved, printed and
bound by the poet and liis wife. Even the ink
was of their own making. As for the technical
method, it is thus described by Gilchrist: "It was
quite an original one. It consisted of a species of
engraving in relief, both words and dt-signs. The
verse was written and the designs and marginal
embellishments outlined on the copper mth an
impervious liquid, probably the ordinary stopping-out varnish of engravers. Then all the white parts
or h'ghts, the remainder of the plate, that is, were
eaten away with aqua fortis or other acid, so that
the outline of letter and design was left prominent
as in stereotj-pe. From these plates he printed off
in any tint, yellow, brown, blue, required to be the
prevailing or ground colour in his facsimiles; red
he used for the letterpress. The page was then
coloured up by hand in imitation of the original
drawing, with more or less variety of detail in the
local hues." The secret of this serviceable process
Blake firmly believed himself to have learned one
night in a drenm from the spirit of his dead brother
Robert, and it is on record that, next morning,
after Mrs. Blake had paid one shilling and tenpence
for the materials required to test its efiScacy, only
eightpence remained in the common purse. The
experiment succeeded, and Blake, whose writings
(with the exception of ' Poetical Sketches' and part
of a poem on the French Revolution) never tempted
a publisher till after his death, became his own
printer and bookseller. The result, as in nearly all
the crucial issues of his life, was a further pressing
in of the artist upon himself, and the loss of influences
which some think would have corrected and
balanced his strong natural endowment, while
others hold that they would have weakened and
blurred it. Accustomed to and even preferring a
frugal and busy hfe, Blake fell into a habit of
writing only to please himself — a superficially
admirable choice which generally ends in ignominious unintelligibility. The 'Prophetic Books '
('Visions of the Daugliters of Albion,' 'America,'
'Europe,' 'The Book of Urizen,' 'The Song of
Los,' 'The Book of Ahania,' 'Jerusalem,' and
'Milton'), which, along with 'The Book of Thel,'
'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,' and 'The
Gates of Paradise,' complete the tale of works en-
graved by Blake according to the method of the
ghostly Robert, are coveted by collectors for their
rarity, and by artists for their powerful illustrations
and decorations. But, despite the enthusiastic
labours of commentators to elucidate their obscurities
and to magnify their importance, it is almost certain
that they will ultimately be regarded as turbid
streams of inscrutable verbal symbols in which a
lyrical fire of almost unequalled liveliness and
purity was extinguished. Fortunately, however,
while Blake the poet was wandering in blind alleys,
Blake the designer kept pushing onward along so
straight a path that the twenty-two pieces illustrating the Book of Job, though executed when the artist
was well over sixty years old, are not only his finest
achievement, but one of the noblest sequences of
designs in the rich domain of religious art In
the ' Job ' Blake returned to more familiar methods,
using the graver alone, without etching ; and
although many of his admirers have bemoaned the
long estrangement from what proved to be his
most congenial and effective medium, it might be
maintained with equal cogency that without these
fallow years the fine luxuriance of ' Job ' had been
impossible. The illustrations to Dante's ' Divina
Comraedia ' (for the purposes of which the man of
seventy acquired a working knowledge of Italian)
bade fair to equal the ' Job,' but Blake's death cut
the work short when only seven of the hundred
water-colour designs had been engraved. Among
earlier engravings by Blake may be mentioned
forty-three plates illustrating Young's ' Night
Thoughts' (the residue of the five hundred and
thirty-seven designs for this work existing as
coloured drawings only). The well-known illustrations to Blair's ' Grave,' though designed by Blake,
were engraved by Schiavonetti, a successful pupil
of Bartolozzi. This arrangement was disingenuously manipulated by Cromek, a publisher,
who followed it up by an act of double-dealing in
respect of Blake's ' Canterbury Pilgrims ' which led
on the one hand to a lifelong breach of old friend-
ship with Stothard, and on the other hand to the
exhibition and to the ' Descriptive Catalogue '
noticed below. Of wood-engravings Blake produced onlj' the brilliant set of seventeen tiny
illustrations for Phillips' ' Pastorals,' executed in
1820-1821. As a painter Blake is easier to study
in his opinions than in his achievements. The
National Gallery has his 'The Spiritual Form of
Pitt guiding Behemoth,' and ' Return from Calvary,'
and the British Museimi hai some of his drawings ;
but by far the greater part of his work is inaccessible or has perished. In many cases tlie destruction must be blamed either on an indifEerent public
or on fanatics who burned innumerable poems and
designs on the ground that, though they were
certainly inspired, their inspiration was from the
devih In other cases, Blake's technical methods
must be held responsible. In the memorable
'Descriptive Catalogue' to an exhibition of his
pictures held in 1809 the artist wrote : ' Clearness
and precision have been the chief objects in painting these pictures — clear colours unmuddied by oil,
and firm and determinate lineaments unbroken by
shadows which ought to display and not hide form,
as is the practice of the latter schools of Italy and
Flanders." His frescoes, as he called them, were
rather a kind of tempera, painted in water-colour
on a ground of glue and whiting, applied to a
panel or linen or canvas, and it seems that many
of them cracked or were spoilt by damp. As for
their contents, the painter himself, while confessing
his inferiority to Raphael and Michael Angelo, said,
"I do pretend to paint finer than Rubens or
Rembrandt or Correggio or Titian." With his
engraver's training it was difficult for him to escape
from a narrow view of drawing. " I assert," he
added, " that he who thinks he can engrave or paint
either, without being a master of drawing, is a
fool. Painting is drawing on canvas, and engrav-
141
