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British Museum Illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts |
It seems that William Blake was fairly well
known in his lifetime although poorly understood. Among the
men who were acquainted with Blake and wrote biographic
accounts about his life and work are Benjamin Malklin, John Thomas Smith, Crabb Robinson, and Allen Cunningham. The
accounts that they published were based on source material
collected from close acquaintances of Blake, such as Varley,
Linnell, Tatum, Fuseli, and Cromek.
The Scotsman Allan Cunningham included William Blake in his
in his six volume work, Lives of the Most Eminent
British Painters, Sculptors and Architects published
shortly after Blake died. Cunningham was not personally
acquainted with
Blake but men who did know Blake acted as his sources.
Cunningham first met Cromek in 1809 when he was touring Scotland. The
following year Cunningham moved to London with Cromek's encouragement. It was twenty years later that Cunningham wrote of Blake's life.
On William Blake
"He was by nature a poet, a dreamer, and an
enthusiast. The eminence which it had been the first ambition
of his youth to climb, was visible before him, and he saw on
its ascent or on its summit those who had started earlier in
the race of fame. He felt conscious of his own merit, but was
not aware of the thousand obstacles which were ready to
interpose. He thought that he had but to sing songs and draw
designs, and become great and famous.The crosses which genius
is heir to had been wholly unforeseen, and they befell him
early. He wanted, too, the skill of hand, and fine tact of
fancy and taste, to impress upon the offspring of his thoughts
that popular shape which gives such productions immediate
circulation. His works were, therefore, looked coldly on by
the world, and were only esteemed by men of poetic minds,
or those who were fond of things out of the common way.
He earned a little fame, but no money by these speculations,
and had to depend for bread on the labours of the graver.
All this neither crushed his spirit nor
induced him to work more in the way of the world; but it had
a visible influence upon his mind. He became more seriously
thoughtful, avoided the company of men, and lived in the
manner of a hermit, in that vast wilderness, London.
Necessity made him frugal, and honesty and independence
prescribed plain clothes, homely fare, and a cheap
habitation. He was thus compelled more than ever to retire
to worlds of his own creating, and seek solace in visions of
paradise for the joys which the earth denied him. By
frequent indulgence in these imaginings he gradually began
to believe in the reality of what dreaming fancy painted the
pictured forms which swarmed before his eyes assumed, in his
apprehension, the stability of positive revelations, and he
mistook the vivid figures which his professional imagination
shaped, for the poets, and heroes, and princes of old.
Amongst his friends he at length ventured to intimate that
the designs on which he was engaged, were not from his own
mind, but copied from grand works revealed to him in
visions; and those who believed that would readily lend an
car to the assurance that he was commanded to execute his
performances by a celestial tongue!
Of these imaginary visitations he made good
use, when he invented his truly original and beautiful mode
of engraving and tinting his plates. He had made the designs
of his Days of Innocence, and was meditating, he said, on
the best means of multiplying their resemblance in form and
in line; he felt sorely perplexed. At last he was made aware
that the spirit of his favourite brother Robert was in the
room, and to this celestial visitor he applied for counsel.
The spirit advised him at once: "Write," he said, "the
poetry, and draw the designs upon the copper with a certain
liquid (which he named, and which Blake ever kept a secret):
then cut the plain parts of the plate down with aquafortis,
and this will give the whole, both poetry and figures, in
the manner of a stereotype." The plan recommended by this
gracious spirit was adopted; the plates were engraved, and
the work printed off. The artist then added a peculiar
beauty of his own. He tinted both the figures and the verse
with a variety of colours, amongst which, while yellow
prevails, the whole has a rich and lustrous beauty, to which
I know little that can be compared. The size of these prints
is four inches and a half high by three inches wide. The
original genius of Blake was always confined, through
poverty, to small dimensions. Sixty-five plates of copper
were an object to him who had little money. The Gates of
Paradise, a work of sixteen designs, and those exceedingly
small, was his next undertaking. The meaning of the
artist is not a little obscure; it seems to have been his
object to represent the innocence, the happiness, and the
upward aspirations of man. They bespeak one
intimately acquainted with the looks and the feelings of
children. Over them there is shed a kind of mysterious halo
which raises feelings of devotion. The Songs of Innocence
and the Gates of Paradise became popular among the
collectors of prints. To the sketch-book and the cabinet the
works of Blake are unfortunately confined.
...
An overflow of imagination is a failing
uncommon in this age, and has generally received of late
little quarter from the critical portion of mankind.
Yet imagination is the life and spirit of all great works
of genius and taste; and, indeed, without it, the head
thinks and the hand labours in vain. Ten thousand
authors and artists rise to the proper, the graceful, and
the beautiful, for ten who ascend into "the heaven of
invention." A work — whether from poet or painter —
conceived in the fiery ecstasy of imagination, lives through
every limb; while one elaborated out by skill and taste only
will look, in comparison, like a withered and sapless tree
beside one green and flourishing. Blake's misfortune was
that of possessing this precious gift in excess. His fancy
overmastered him — until he at length confounded "the
mind's eye" with the corporeal organ, and dreamed himself
out of the sympathies of actual life...."
Europe, PLATE 2, (E 61)
"Unwilling I look up to heaven! unwilling count the stars!
Sitting in fathomless abyss of my immortal shrine.
I sieze their burning power
And bring forth howling terrors, all devouring fiery kings.
Devouring & devoured roaming on dark and desolate mountains
In forests of eternal death, shrieking in hollow trees.
Ah mother Enitharmon!
Stamp not with solid form this vig'rous progeny of fires.
I bring forth from my teeming bosom myriads of flames.
And thou dost stamp them with a signet, then they roam abroad
And leave me void as death:
Ah! I am drown'd in shady woe, and visionary joy.
And who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band?
To compass it with swaddling bands? and who shall cherish it
With milk and honey?"
I see it smile & I roll inward & my voice is past.
She ceast & rolld her shady clouds
Into the secret place."
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