The other five designs to Dante merit a description and attention which space does not allow us to give them here. They are of great power, but whether the unflinching realization of the terrible imaginings of Dante is permissible in pictorial art—where the visual representation attacks the emotions and intellect with a poignancy that words, however forcible, can never attain—is a question the discussion of which may provide food for argument to critics of the school of Lessing. For my own part, I incline to the opinion that they overstep the bounds of terror authorized in art, and approach the confines of the horrible in the treatment of the main motive of each design—“Admirably horrid,” Mr. W. M. Rossetti pronounces them. The unwavering truth to Dante’s detailed descriptions is beyond question, however.

The inmost sanctuary of an artist’s mind is far more accessible through his pencil sketches than through his final consummated pictures and designs. There is something so intimate, so personal in these manifestations of himself, that in regarding them I have something of the feeling of one who listens unseen to a man thinking aloud. Nothing convinces one of the labour, the thought, the balancing, the rejections, the careful choice, that go to make up a picture like the study of the sketches made for it.

The peculiarity of Blake’s pencil sketches is their vehemence, and the absence in them of all hesitation. He seems from the first moment of conception to know exactly what he means to do, and rough, almost hieroglyphic, as the first shadow of his idea may appear at first sight, we have only to compare it with the design or picture which eventually resulted from it, to see that all the rapid “short-hand” lines of the sketch, block out accurately the disposition of the main parts of the design, the final attitude of the figures therein, without as a rule any real variation from the first idea having taken place in the working out.

This testifies more than anything else to the distinctness of the vision seen by Blake, and his eager passionate discernment of it. Among such sketches of clearly apprehended vision is that for “The Soul exploring the recesses of the Grave,” the final design of which we are already very familiar with. It is executed with a broad-ended chalk pencil, in quick unhesitating lines. There is not a single touch that cannot be traced, that is not an essential development, in the finished picture, so that we know Blake saw it all from the first, complete then in his mind’s eye as on the day when he finished the detailed drawing for the engraver.

Another sketch of the same order is one which, although it does not belong to any public collection, is so important as to excuse a reference to it here. Through the great kindness of Mr. Frederick Shields, to whom it belongs, I am enabled to reproduce it. The two motives of the picture in Blair’s “Grave,” called “Death’s Door,” had been favourite ones with Blake, and used by him separately in “The Gates of Paradise,” “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” and “America,” before he combined them so felicitously in the noble design which ranks among his best works. The sketch by Blake belonging to Mr. Shields would seem to represent the moment when he first realized the power and significance and beauty to be obtained by their incorporation in one design. Of this conception it must be admitted that it grew in Blake’s mind after the first flashing vision of it, and was not from the beginning discernible in all the splendour to which it was eventually developed.

Here is another beautiful and careful sketch of a female figure diving through the air. The force of her perpendicular flight, the attitude of one leg (the left, not the right, however) recall the “Reunion of the Soul and the Body,” but this figure is undraped, and the arms are extended downwards, and indeed the differences are so numerous that it cannot be regarded as a sketch for that picture. In all probability it is a preliminary study for one of the numerous figures in the “Last Judgment” which he executed for the Countess of Egremont in 1807.

Looking at the terse expressive little drawing, we are reminded of Blake’s “golden rule of art”—“that the more distinct, sharp, and wiry the boundary line, the more perfect the work of art.” Ah! but how he played with his line! “Wiry” at least it never was, say what Blake would! He never “painted” it, but felt his way along with sympathetic accuracy. And with what infinite inflexions of tenderness and strength did his pencil impress itself on the paper, indicating by that rare quality of touch more than form and modelling—almost, one had said—the very nature of the flesh of the figures he drew.

Speaking of Blake’s drawings, the manner in which he drew the muscular form of the male leg is very noticeable and strangely characteristic of him. Another line he felt very tenderly was the curved sweep of a woman’s back from shoulder to indented waist, and downwards to delicate ankles and heels.

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