" ETCHINGS FROM BLAKE."*
Tna exhibition of Blake's works at the Burlington Street Fine-Arts Club has evidently so far increased the public interest in his extraordinary productions, as to deserve to be credited with this instalment of what we may unhesitatingly describe as veritable transcripts of some of the paintings and drawings of the great Art-mystic. Mr. William Bell Scott is in every way worthy to deal with such works as those of Blake. He became known to us first by his Steps in the Journey of Mince Legion, published in 1851, a series of slight but delicate and original designs, exhibiting not merely a satirical view of modern life, but much of that kind of moral and spiritual insight which distinguishes a peculiar class of artists from all others, a class to which belonged Mr. Scott's brother David, whose early death was an irreparable loss to imaginative art, in which William Blake must be allowed to rank among the greatest. Mr. W. B. Scott is to be thanked that he does not refuse his best labour and de- votion to the reproduction of the works of other artists. He has shown these in his etchings from the Life of Albert Darer, pub- lished by him in 1860, and now we have to thank him for the eight etchings and two lithographs from Blake's paintings and drawings just published by Messrs. Chatto and Windus in a thin folio volume.
Mr. Scott's selection may be accepted as fairly representing Blake as an artist, and as exhibiting his peculiar modes of con- ception and his better methods of execution, except, indeed, so far as colour is concerned,—a considerable exception, it must be admitted, the extent of which cannot be understood till more of the coloured works shall be published, or shall find their way into our occasional exhibitions or public galleries. But it must be borne in mind (and Mr. W. B. Scott's brief and sensible introduction confirms us in saying this) that it is almost impossible, and scarcely fair, to treat Blake merely as an artist, for no canons of criticism which are usually applied to other artists can be strictly applied to him. Of many of his produc- tions a republication cannot be expected, or even desired. Poet, mystic, or seer, to him language itself was an inadequate instru-
* lraliant Mac: Etchinos from his Works- By William Bell Scott. with D000rfptivo Toxt. London: Chatto and Windom. 1878. ment, and words could not suffice for his imagery ; and thus he broke through the bonds of verbal expression, and projecting his unutterable visions into strange forms and stranger colours, mingled his pictorial marvels with his rhapsodical text, and so produced the so-called prophetic books, which are a puzzle or a plague to nearly everybody. For the eluci- dation of these arcane a new literature is growing up, which aims to justify the recognition of one more mighty spiritual product of the much-abused eighteenth century. Of this side of Blake's genius, however, we do not here intend to speak. He is presented to us in these etchings as an artist and an illustrator of books, and particularly of Milton's Paradise Lost, for which several series of designs appeared at the Fine-Arts Club Exhibition. Four of the ten plates are from one of these sets, being those numbered 7 to 10 ; the first three being etchings ; the last, unfortunately as we think, a lithograph merely. The four subjects are "The Creation of Eve," "Adam and Eve in Paradise," "The Temptation," and" Eve's Dream of the Redemption." The most powerful of these is the third, but from our recollection of the Burlington Collection we imagine that Mr. Scott has not chosen the finest version of this subject, namely, that described as No. 75 g. in Mr. Rossetti's catalogue of coloured works, in the second volume of Gilchrist's Life of Blake. But this is a fine work and very striking, scarcely lacking for im- pressiveness the weird colouring of the original picture. The etching of "The Creation of Eve" is most delicate, and her rising form exquisitely tender. The vigour with which the scene of wedded love in Paradise is rendered approaches the exuberance and warmth of colour which Blake's pencil has im- parted to the original drawing. The figures of Satan and the serpent hover over the loving pair, and shadow forth their fate. But the more we wonder at these intensely vivid artistic creations, the more do we ask how far they can be regarded as illustrations of Milton's poem? In a sense they are, but with a difference, which is, perhaps, best expressed by Blake himself, who, recount- ing to a friend how Milton had appeared to him and conversed with him, said, " I tried to convince him he was wrong, but I could not succeed. His tastes are Pagan ; his house is Palladian, not Gothic." We had a singular confirmation of this contrast while showing these illustrations to a friend, quite competent to form an opinion, and who said, " These are mediaeval designs." And in fact, the difference we are seeking lies in this distinction between the classic or renaissance element in which Milton thought and wrote and the archaic forms, unrounded and intense, in which Blake both saw and expressed the forms of things. Compare the polite and insidious discourse between Eve and the Serpent, in the ninth book of Paradise Lost, with Blake's " spirited, sly snake," enfolding his beautiful victim, as he presses the fatal fruit into her mouth. Observe the unwarranted introduction of Adam into the picture, his back turned to the action, and his attitude of terror at the ominous signs of approaching storm. The whole design, a central tree, with all the actors grouped about it, might be found without surprise among the carvings on some corner or capital in one of our cathedral churches. But how much more than a mere illustration or secondary design does the subject become in Blake's hands He shows us the direct operation of evil in body and soul, in man and nature, and leaps as if by intuition to the essence and result of the event which the poet, bound by rules of taste and obedience to classical authorities, draws out with so much detail and circumstance. The subject of the second design is no less vividly compressed and presented. Fruits and flowers, glowing with congenial beauty and ripeness, deck the marriage-bed of our first parents ; while over their heads hovers the ruined Archangel, entwined about with the serpent to which he is imparting his fatal purpose. If illustrations of poetry are to bo restricted to a pictorial imitation of the scene as the poet has exactly described it, these etchings err both in difference and in excess ; but we accept them for the sake of both, when the difference and excess are themselves no less the results of genius than the poetry which they in the widest sense inform and illus- trate. But for the better understanding of Blake's illustrations of a work like Paradise Lost, we require to have a whole series before us, and though we have many things to be thankful for in the present collection, we cannot but regret that a requirement which was some time back ex- Tressed in our columns—to have one of the Milton series Published complete—yet remains unsatisfied. By means of a complete set of illustrative designs, we should be able to find out 4:he general method of the designer, and also to obtain an in- tel.-sting comparison between the literary and pictorial treatment of a "sunon subject. Suppose we were presented for the first time with a selection of three or four designs only from the "In- ventions of the Book of Job "—perhaps the most complete as well as the best known of William Blake's works—how impos- sible it would be to gather from them any idea of the unity of plan which runs through that marvellous set of designs,—of the perfect manner in which the interlocutors and events of the sacred drama, the celestial agents, the subjects of description and contemplation are at once so kept severally distinct, and yet so, blended in the successive designs, as to produce a vivid repre- sentation of the story and a marvellous commentary on its con- tents There are at least two complete sets of Blake's illustra- tions of Paradise Lost and one or more of Paradise Regained, and we hope that an entire series may yet be published by as con- genial and careful a transcriber as Mr. Scott.
Of the remaining designs in these elegant folio covers we have not left ourselves much space to speak. They are various its their styles, and exhibit, as far as possible, the wide range which the artist's works cover. The first of these is a family group ascending to heaven, the forms very sweet and flowing, with a trembling, vibrating movement, such as Blake used so fre- quently to represent spiritualised human forms. It is, however, a fragment of a larger design, and probably from one of the many pictures the artist drew of the Last Judgment, and one of which is included in Schiavonetti's series of illustra- tions to Blair's Grave. The second design is a very striking representation of the Deluge—a dark, seething sea, under a troubled sky, barely relieved by the aro of a rainbow —both suggesting immensity in an impressive manner. The absence of any human element in the scene (unless the rain- bow may serve by association to give the subject a human interest) adds to a feeling of the void amounting to the sublime. The little picture called " Help " in The Gates of Paradise is not unlike this design ; it is equally simple, but it has a different and a sharper pathos. We pass over the grotesque " Elephant," which we could have spared from the series without much regret, to "The Nativity," an etching of very great power, and in which the attempt to deal with light and shade has been made with no little success, by an artist who must have had in his mind the rare effects exhibited in the master's best works, and notably in the "Inventions of the Book of Job." The halo of glory about the new-born child, and the light of the Star, seen of those " in the East," which sheds its mild splendour into the travail-chamber where the feeding oxen share the•narrow room, are well brought out by the etcher, who has had to transcribe his effects from a painting wrought, if we remember it correctly, in deep and strong colour. The nova• manner of Blake's treatment of a subject which the old painters may be said to have worn out must strike every one as an in- stance of the artist's originality. Why is the next design called "St. Matthew" ? It realises to us the idea of Ezekiel, with the dreadful roll presented to him by the hand of the angel. Surely it is the prophet, looking with terror on the written scroll, rather than an apostle receiving plenary inspiration. Yet Blake's bold- ness would not shrink from including the parchment and its writing as part of the miraculous revelation. In Rossetti's cata- logue this drawing appears as one of a series of three Evangelists-, and there may therefore be authority from the artist for its present name. It is a simple and noble design, and is admirably rendered. The last of the series now to be briefly noticed is not the least charac- teristic design of the set. It represents the Mother of Abominations. We will not attempt to describe its terrible force, or the serious purpose in it, which removes it far above the merely grotesque. It is a fine specimen of the power of the artist in delineating images of evil. Of this kind a good instance occurs in the " Wife of Bath" in Blake's " Canterbury Pilgrims," an engraving, we take the opportunity to say, that ought to be republished, for it is the best pictorial representation of the immortal group, and worthy to adorn the walls of a library of English literature.
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