TIME SPEEDING AWAY
Engraved plate from Young’s “Night Thoughts,” published in 1797
As one turns the pages one is fain to exclaim of the artist that he breathed the fine thin air of the mountain tops, that indeed he lived “in the high places of thought.”
I have an impression that Blake drew much of his inspiration from watching the ever-changing cloud forms of the sky. We know that his designs gained actually very little from the beautiful natural scenery of Felpham, that indeed Nature seemed to close round him like a wall. “Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me,” he wrote in his MS. notes to Wordsworth. Strange words to come from a painter-poet. A top room in London with a good view of the sky were all the conditions which he found necessary for the expression of his genius. In the vastness of the heavens, clear and deeply blue, or peopled with glistening clouds, or set with large peaceful stars, which spread themselves before his upward gaze, Blake found that impetus to creation which most genius finds in nature or humanity.
He had set himself the task of probing the world of appearances, and revealing the world of spiritual causes. To say that he succeeded in representing this pictorially would be to assert that an impossibility had been achieved, but he got nearer to the goal than any other artist before or since, not even excepting D. G. Rossetti and G. F. Watts, whose affinity with Blake’s genius is as close as their manifestation of it is different.
The better to realize his aim Blake stripped his drawing of everything that was not essential to the idea he wished to represent. There is never a single redundant accessory. He never stayed his upward or outward flight to represent a lovely landscape, woman’s dainty dress, flashing jewels, bloomy fruit. Typical or merely suggested natural scenes under a great sky are the usual settings of the human forms who were to him, as to his master Michael Angelo, the only language coherent enough to express the innerness and the infinity of spirit.
He seldom chose to inclose his figures in interiors, and such drawings as he has left of places from which the sky cannot be seen are so rare as to startle when we come across them. It may be that from Blake Walt Whitman learned to say, “I swear I will never mention love or death inside a house.”
The sea fascinated his imagination, and he has left characteristic records of it. But for the most part that which he saw with his “corporeal eye” appeared to him as merely the type of what was unseen. He climbed along the jutting peninsula of sense to its farthest point, where, giddy with the immensity of the unsuspected forces revealed to him, he clung, neither angel nor mortal, but partaking to a certain degree of the conditions of both. When in this mystic condition of consciousness he focussed his mind on the “Night Thoughts,” the pencilled ideas resulting are liberal, spacious, empyrean.
But Blake’s most forcible and poetical thinking on the subject of Death is crystallized in the delicately gleaming drawings for Blair’s “Grave.”
True, the drawings are not reproduced in Cromek’s edition of the poem as they left Blake’s hand. The story of Cromek’s mean transaction has already been retold in these pages. Schiavonetti’s plates, beautiful and fluent in execution as they are, have lost that peculiar rugged character, that almost galvanic energy which stamp the original drawings with Blake’s hallmark. It must be borne in mind that engraving may alter original drawings much in the same way as does the transposition of a musical phrase from the original into a foreign key. The melody is the same, but the mood of it is different. It becomes dull instead of bright, or plaintive instead of triumphant. Schiavonetti’s transposing of Blake has made the designs more sweet and less strong, or perhaps less vehement. It is Blake in a new aspect, one so obviously beautiful that all the world admits its loveliness. It is Blake arranged for the many, not Blake for the intimate few!