Gilchrist is of opinion that the original designs were a little marred—lost somewhat in expression and drawing in transference to the wood; but Mr. Laurence Binyon, who has lately studied them closely, and has reproduced them with admirable truth, holds a different opinion. He writes, “Blake’s conceptions in these illustrations did not take their final form in the drawings; they were only fully realized on the block itself. Hence they have the character of visions called up as if by moonlight out of the darkened surface of the wood, and seem to have no existence apart from it.”
They instance the power Blake had in a remarkable degree of concentrating in a few types the essence of his subject. In these blocks it is pastoral life—flocks feeding in lonely stretches of country, the still peace of hills, the might of tempest—that he concentrates and expresses by the roughly executed but exquisitely felt little scenes which are the consummation of his insight into the large natural life of the earth.
BLAKE’S WOODCUTS, FROM HIS OWN DESIGNS, TO PHILLIP’S “VIRGIL’S PASTORALS.” 1821
Blake did in these woodcuts, what he could never have achieved, had he sought to do so, in any other of the branches of art practised by him,—namely, he gave truthful because extremely simple impressions of Nature as she appears in her rarer moods. Master as he was of linear design, he was too neglectful of tonic values to interpret with any delicacy the effects of landscape in water-colour or engraving. But here, the very nature and limitations of woodcutting, its necessary economy of means, enabled him for once to express effectively and adequately his great simple generalized impressions.
These pregnant suggestions of his induce a mood sympathetic with the deeper and subtler chords of pantheism.
In one of the most beautiful, but at the same time one of the simplest of the blocks, all the witchery and solemn charm of a remote pastoral neighbourhood is represented in a few typical rural images.
A solitary traveller journeys along a road winding deep between hills, in the last beams of the setting sun. Blake has endowed this darkened landscape with I know not what suggestions of watchful intentness. The wayfarer in some mysterious manner is in its power!
Hands unseen
Are hanging the night around him fast.