William Blake. Osbert Burdett

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      In 1785, Blake came before the public again with the exhibition of four watercolour drawings in the Royal Academy, and, perhaps feeling that he was beginning to find his own feet, he stopped visiting the Mathews house, whose society was growing irksome to himself too. His hosts and some of their friends began to complain of his “unbending deportment” or, as his adherents called it, his “manly firmness of opinion.” Hard words have been given, at the safe distance of a century, to all Blake’s patrons; even Butts faltered at last, but Blake was never a man easy to help, and the patron’s task is proverbially exacting. The world does not sympathise with the artist, but not even the artist expects to be patient where his patrons are concerned. Blake’s irritation at the polite world that he had entered is reflected in a scurrilous work called An Island in the Moon. It seems to have been written in 1784, and is the first and longest of his grotesque explosions. Unfinished and unfinishable, it has the inconsequence of Sterne[23] without his humour. Except for its record of Blake’s mental irritation at this time, its only point of interest is that the first draft of several of the Songs of Innocence is contained within its pages. One passage also hints at illuminated printing, a mode of producing books that Blake was meditating upon at this time. He was further driven within himself by the illness of his brother Robert, whom he tended night and day during the last two weeks of an illness of which he died in 1787. As Robert breathed his last, Blake saw his soul rising into heaven and “clapping its hands for joy,” after which, overcome with physical exhaustion, Blake took to his bed and slept continuously for three days and nights. This crisis left its imprint on his mind; relating his experience to the artistic project that he had in view, Blake declared that his brother appeared to him in a vision and directed him on how to accomplish his design.

      All ideas that came to Blake’s mind were converted into images, every event was changed into a drama, and as we listen to his words or meditate upon the anecdotes of which he was the hero, we seem to be studying the working of the human imagination itself. It is this that makes critical commentary seem irrelevant, for vividness of impression is the quality for which he was unique. To measure his experiences by the force with which they were conveyed is to mistake the quality of his genius.

      William Blake, Illustration from America, a Prophecy, plate 3, 1793.

      Relief etching, with some wash, 25.2 × 16.5 cm.

      The British Museum, London.

      The Lyrical Poems

      The death of Robert was followed by a disagreement with Parker, and when the partnership was dissolved Blake gave up the house and business in Broad Street and moved to 28 Poland Street, where he remained for five years. It was from here, two years after the death of his brother, that in 1789 Blake issued the Songs of Innocence, his first example of illuminated printing. Like all of Blake’s books except the earlier Poetical Sketches, this work can best be appreciated in all its beauty when read in the original form in which it came from his own hand and press. Since this is not possible except for those who visit museum libraries, the method must be faithfully described. In the words of Mr. John Sampson:

      The text and the surrounding design were written in reverse [a painfully laborious method], in a medium impervious to acid upon small copper plates about 5” by 3” which were then etched in a bath of aqua-fortis until the work stood in relief as in a stereotype. From these plates, which to economise copper were, in many cases, engraved upon both sides, impressions were printed in the ordinary manner, in tints made to harmonise with the colour scheme afterwards applied by the artist.

      The text and the illustration are thus interwoven into a harmonious whole, and the colour can be varied so that no two copies are exactly alike. Little but the use of a press distinguishes the books made from illuminated manuscripts; the etching in reverse, together with the press, makes the new method even more laborious than the old. The consequence has been that Blake has had no successors in this art form which he invented, nor can his originals be copied without great difficulty and expense. Only those who have compared his originals with the printed pages in which his poems are ordinarily read are fully aware of the loss now suffered by his writings, which require to be read as much by the eye as by the mind on pages suffused with life and colour. Blake evidently adopted the method by preference and artistic choice, and because his hand could not write so much as a word without the impulse to trace designs upon the paper. He wished to indulge both his gifts at the same time. The printed sheets of the Poetical Sketches no doubt seemed the death of form to him, and though he would use texts and phrases to decorate his later designs, it is significant that he would hardly ever write without engraving. He was always indifferent to a strictly intellectual appeal, and his writings invite artistic rather than intellectual criticism.

      Henry Fuseli, Prometheus, 1770–1771.

      Pencil, quill, ink and ink wash, 15 × 22 cm.

      Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Kupferstichkabinett, Basel.

      A necessary effect of Blake’s illuminated printing was to decrease his number of readers, in the manner of an artist who displays not books but pictures. Blake often painted in words, and should be judged rather as an artist than an author. Mr. Sampson does not think it probable that the whole impression of the Songs issued by Blake exceeded the twenty-two that he describes. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Blake’s writings were little known. Absorbed in his invention, Blake eventually issued from Lambeth a prospectus defending his method and advertising the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience at five shillings each. In 1793, he wrote: “If a method which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the author is sure of his reward.” As Mr. Symons has said,

      Had it not been for [Blake’s] lack of a technical knowledge of music, had he been able to write down his inventions in that art also, he would have left us the creation of something like a universal art. That universal art he did, during his lifetime, create; for he sang his songs to his own music; and thus, while he lived, he was the complete realisation of the poet in all his faculties, СКАЧАТЬ