We find this doggerel in his Note-book:
O dear Mother Outline, of wisdom most sage,
What’s the first part of painting? she said, Patronage.
And what is the second, to please and engage,
She frowned like a fury and said, “Patronage.”
Of patronage during his life Blake had but little, save from Mr. Butts, who, however, had nothing of the conventional patron about him. He merely bought with reverent appreciation whatever Blake pleased to paint, never suggesting alterations or improvements, never blaming or criticising, but merely receiving in faith and love. For which Blake, as we know, “never ceased to honour him.” But let no man think that poverty did not hamper Blake, though he chose it rather than the slavery that would have been the price he would have had to pay for even a moderate income. He himself writes in the Descriptive Catalogue: “Some people and not a few artists have asserted that the painter of this picture would not have done so well if he had been properly encouraged. Let those who think so reflect on the state of nations under poverty, and their incapability of art. Though art is above either, the argument is better for affluence than poverty and though he would not have been a greater artist, yet he would have produced greater works of art in proportion to his means.”
Well, then: it was Blake’s poverty and independence that caused him to work mainly on a small scale, and it was the fact that he was poet as well as artist—his poetry springing from the same creative impulse as his plastic art—that led him to merge the two gifts into a perfect union in the creation of his beautiful and unique books. The process by which they were executed is thus described by Gilchrist: “The verse was written and the designs and marginal embellishments outlined on the copper with an impervious liquid, probably the ordinary stopping-out varnish of engravers. Then all the white parts or lights, the remainder of the plate that is, were eaten away with aquafortis or other acid, so that the outline of letter and design was left prominent, as in stereotype. From these plates he printed off in any tint, yellow, brown, blue, required to be the prevailing or ground colour in his fac-similes; 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.” To read this account when one has seen the product is like pondering the receipt for a miracle. Gilchrist goes on to say, “He taught Mrs. Blake to take off the impressions with care and delicacy.” After, they were done up in boards by her neat hands, “so that the poet and his wife did everything in making the book—writing, designing, printing, engraving—everything except manufacturing the paper: the very ink, or colour rather, they did make. Never before, surely, was a man so literally the author of his own book.”
For the convenience of classifying in some sort of rough way, this chapter will deal with the “Songs of Innocence,” the “Book of Thel,” the “Gates of Paradise,” the “Songs of Experience,” also touching lightly on a very different book, Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Tales for Children,” illustrated by Blake.
The small octavo volume entitled the “Songs of Innocence”—with which the “Songs of Experience,” produced some years later, are also bound—will be a revelation of beauty to all who have not seen it before, for there was nothing like it before, and there has been nothing like it since. The leaves of the Print Room copy, in all probability not a very early one, have become slightly yellowed with age, but the colours remain rare and delicate and iridescent as they were when they were first laid on, a happy accident, for this has not been the fate of all Blake’s coloured prints.
“Every page has the smell of April,” says Mr. Swinburne happily. Linger where you will, a gay and tender harmony pervades every leaf, the smile of an inspired child looks up at you and flashes something intuitive and precious into your soul. The colours are the colours of morning. The limpidness of the verses, the felicity of the designs, recall special morning moods in the morning of life. Hope, innocence, joy, and an all-pervading sense of Divine nearness, are the characteristic notes sounded. Both the draught and the song weave themselves into a spell, each one distinct, each having its own charm, its own perfume.
The words without the embracing design, beautiful as they are, seem to lose some of that delicate and aromatic fragrance diffused from them. And the design without the words is an effect without a cause, and thus loses its expressiveness. It is the union of the two that makes the celestial singing, and, like antiphonal music, one part catches up, transforms and augments the melody of the other, which, ringing silver clear, yet half-hid and half-announced its entire significance.
Our illustrations, in which perforce the colour is left out, are the palest, most spectral of shadows beside the glory of the original plates. They can but be reminders or suggestions, and must be accepted as such.
Plate 2, represents a Shepherd, pipe in hand, following a cherubic vision, his sheep in turn following him. The shepherd, be it remarked, has on a vestment peculiar to Blake. It is indicated only by a line round the ankles, wrists and neck, and a few rather realistic buttons, but it does not hide the muscles and the modeling of the body at all. It is a kind of glorified combination garment, but it is a matter of taste whether the shepherd would not look as well unclothed entirely. The garment, too much recalls the historic drawers which the outraged decency of the Vatican obliged Pontormo to paint on the figures of Michael Angelo’s “Last Judgement” in the Sistine.