William Blake, the Immortal Artist - Complete Drawings & Engravings in One Edition. Уильям Блейк

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      I.

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      A subtle fluid streams through Blake’s work, which has in it the germ of intoxication; hence people find it hard to judge of it without a certain extravagance, either of admiration or repulsion. Possibly indeed a quite “sane” estimate of it misses something of its essence. But, after all, he is an artist among the artists of the world, with affinities among them, if few of these are to be found among those of his own race, and fewer still among those of his own time. There is no need to judge him by a strange and special standard, as if he were a wholly isolated phenomenon. He is one of the greatest imaginative artists of England.

      The first edition of “The Golden Treasury” contained none of Blake’s poems: now his songs are in every anthology. He has come into his kingdom as a poet. As a seer and as a quickening influence on the thought of later generations he is recognized. As an artist, also, he has of late years begun to receive more general homage. But Blake’s art, in its great qualities as in its frequent blemishes and deficiencies, is still not understood and appreciated as it should be; and chiefly because it is little known. Yet it is as painter, draughtsman and engraver that Blake is greatest. Nothing perhaps in his pictorial art quite matches the aerial radiance and felicity of his best songs. But nothing in his poetry has the sustained grandeur of the Job engravings, or of a whole series of splendidly imagined designs.

      We are here concerned with Blake solely as an artist. And first let me lay stress on his range and inventiveness as a technician. Were there no mystical ideas or original imagination to attract us to his work, we could still admire the artist who, in a time when the fashionable academicians hardly seemed to know of the existence of any art but that of painting in oils, engraved his own designs, painted in water-colours and in distemper, invented two methods of etching in relief, revived (doubtless without consciousness of any predecessor) the “monotype,” engraved original woodcuts, and made at least one experiment in lithography. He was also the printer of his own “illuminated” books. If Blake had had the means and opportunity of being a sculptor, I feel sure that he would have rejected with scorn the accepted modern way of modelling a figure to be copied in marble by workmen, but would have taken a chisel and a block of stone and gone to work like the carvers of the Gothic cathedrals. But I am far from thinking that, if Blake had had an empty mind and dull imagination, these merits of the innovator and technician would have sufficed of themselves to give him a hold on the world’s memory. Indeed he would not have been driven to find new methods if he had been interested in technique merely for its own sake. He had intense ideas and a peculiar imagination which he wanted to express, and he found the methods in fashion inadequate or uncongenial. The youth of that day who burned with ambition to paint “history” — the term was comprehensively used in the eighteenth century — would naturally aspire above all things to use the medium of oils on a large scale. But Blake hated the oil medium. He said absurd things about the great masters of oil painting — Rubens and Rembrandt and Reynolds — but he was instinctively right in discarding it himself. He made many experiments with one medium or another, though he never arrived at a quite successful solution of his problem, except in water-colour; and here, too, he made experiments, discovering, by a mixture of painting and printing, a way of giving force to the medium adequate to the power of his grandest designs. And he employed similar means for enriching the books which he engraved and printed himself, giving his work a peculiarly original character. As an engraver, he only arrived after long years and towards the end of his life in finding a congenial method. In all this he was not interested in technique for its own sake; he was seeking the expressive counterpart of his imaginative ideas. But neither would these imaginative ideas give him rank as an artist, were they not directly expressed through pictorial design.