And again:
The place is silent and aware,
It has had its scenes, its joy and crimes,
But that is its own affair.
These words of Browning’s are singularly apt to express the delicate and profound hints in this little woodcut. The wonderful thing is that Blake could convey so much on a slip of paper about three inches by one and a half in size.
In all the plates we find this strange accent laid on Nature, her awareness, her sombre fateful moods, her listening, and the long patience of her endless waiting. The oft-repeated motive of the shepherding of flocks is treated in no glib or merely idyllic manner, but has the sort of holy peace that befits that most ancient and most gentle of all the occupations of men.
An appreciative critic has said anent these woodcuts, that they prove conclusively that “amid all drawbacks there exists a power in the work of the man of genius which no one but himself can utter fully.”
The truth of this remark must be felt by all Blake’s admirers with double force and poignancy when they think regretfully of Blair’s “Grave,” wherein the designs, being engraved by another hand than the father of them, have lost some indefinable note of character belonging to Blake’s personality.
And now we come to the greatest series of engravings on a religious subject that have appeared since Albrecht Dürer. The inventions to “Job” are the crown of glorious achievement on the strenuous and austere life of the artist-poet, and of all his work there is nothing so perfect in the dramatic development of the subject, the broad, forceful yet delicate execution, and the poetic sensibility which animates the entire series.
It appears that Blake’s lifelong friend, Mr. Butts, bought from him a series of twenty-one water-colour drawings or “Inventions” from the Book of Job.
(This set of drawings, be it remarked, together with twenty-two brilliant proof impressions on India paper of the engravings afterwards made from them, were sold to Mr. Quaritch on March 31st, 1903, at the sale of the Crewe collection of Blake’s works, for the sum of £5,600.)
I have seen one water-colour (presumably not one of the original set done for Thomas Butts, though probably a repliqua) of Satan pouring a vial containing the plague of boils on the prostrate body of Job. It is interesting to compare it with the final form the design assumed in the engraving (Plate 6 in the Book of Job) done for John Linnell. Owing to the courtesy of Sir Charles Dilke, to whom the picture now belongs, we have been enabled to reproduce it. It will at once be seen that, in the engraving the management of the light is more satisfactory, because it is comprehensible, than in the water-colour; while the cloud-forms are less conventional and rounder. The bat-like wings with which Satan is furnished in the painting have been sacrificed in the engraving. Job’s wife has been put into tone, whereas in the water-colour, the visible side of her, which ought to have been in dense shadow, was in full light. The whole design has been pulled together, gaining an impressiveness and unity altogether wanting in the earlier work. Blake’s passion for “determinate outline” (irrespective of its appearance in Nature), and contempt for truth of tone in colour, gives the water-colour a mapped-out definitive appearance in its background of scenery,—despite the magnificent qualities of imagination and draughtsmanship displayed in the treatment of the figures,—which somehow recalls the work of such masters as Paolo Uccello.