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PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM
THE BRITISH MUSEUM COPY OF THE
“MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL,”
PRODUCED 1790

The aphorisms are followed by five “Memorable Fancies,” wild dreams full of paradoxes, and allegories both spiritual and grotesque. The designs to this book are very fine, but I cannot help thinking that this particular copy was not coloured by Blake’s hand. In comparison with the one formerly belonging to Lord Crewe, which in all respects is magnificent, the Library copy is coloured too crudely, to be in the least characteristic of Blake. Particularly unlike him are the heavy gray shadows disfiguring the nude figures. There is no impasto work here as in the Crewe copy, but the colour is put on with no uncertain or unpractised hand, though in a manner unlike Blake. Far more delightful are the renderings of several of these plates as seen in the small “Book of Designs.” They are worked up with the utmost care and finish, and the distinctive qualities of Blake’s colour, the unmistakable impress of his hand, are there exhibited in their highest manifestations. The sense of mystery, innate to their conception, is preserved, nay, accentuated! whereas the Library copy, through its unpleasant, and I cannot but think un-Blakean passages of colour, has lost in some places this romantic and inimitable quality. The title-page alive with leaping flames, a nude woman bathing, salamander-like, in fire, the heaving body of a patterned water-snake writhing in foamy water, and a male figure seated on a mound prophetic of the design presently to be consummated in “Death’s Door,” are among the most notable of the pictures in the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Many of the pages are faintly tinted, while delicate suggestive ornaments cling about the writing.

In 1791 Blake designed and engraved for Johnson six plates to “Tales for Children,” by Mary Wollstonecraft. The book is in the Print Room, somewhat yellow and musty. In no sense is it attractive, and it would find small favour with the modern child. The fact is that Blake worked in dire constraint when illustrating homely scenes of actual life. He had no pleasure in the invention of accessories. In his art all is left out that may be, and the bare, the sparse, the elemental, and the austerely beautiful alone receive his attention, but always adjusted to meet the requirements of his own rigid sense of harmony in composition.

Then again single vision, “the vision of Bacon and Newton,” concerned only with actual appearances, did not seem to him worth the transcribing. He could only work with freedom when the fact could be treated as merely the symbol of an idea. So that in these plates the homely domestic scenes he tries to represent have a cold and ghastly appearance. They are like nothing we have ever seen, because Blake was so curiously unobservant of details not interesting to him that he simply did not know about them when he came to draw them. His work is only of a high order when his imagination is excited. His spiritual insight not being called into play renders many of these engravings weak, dull and archaic-looking.

There are among them suggestions of the terrible, and of significances beyond this world however. They form grim and foreign accompaniments enough to the milk-and-water stories, and are about as suitable as the Orcagna frescoes in the Pisan Campo Santo would be to adorn the walls of a child’s nursery. We willingly shut up the book and turn to one produced two years later called the “Gates of Paradise.” The title-page says it was designed, engraved and published by Blake, but adds Johnson’s name too. But we know that the book is all Blake, and it is probable that Johnson gave his name to the venture through a kindly, perhaps pitying, desire to help Blake with the public.

“The Gates of Paradise” it is called, though no glory of colour, no beautiful angels, no city of gold, such as the title might lead us to expect, are displayed in its pages. Indeed, to some the first glance may bring disappointment.

These elemental and direct designs, sixteen in number, are very rough, even rudimentary, as engravings. But they are true art-work, for they concentrate and express conceptions and ideas of a rare order, and with a piercing directness that drives them home to our most intimate, most central consciousness.

Either you will feel their power and charm, and come under the subtle spell at once, or else you will glance through them unmoved, and perhaps contemptuously, and wonder what people can profess to see in this rude and Gothic draughtsmanship. If this latter is the case, then Blake has nothing to say to such an one, for it is no use to expect a literal and exact interpretation tacked on to all his designs. Blake must and will be discerned intuitively by his true lovers, and few words will suffice to indicate the track of his thoughts to such; to others, all the explanation in the world would never reveal him, for, to use his own phrase, “the doors of their perception” are not sufficiently cleansed to admit his conceptions.