International studio (30.1906/1907(1907))

Reviews and Notices

“ As a poet Blake stands on a level with his peers,
yet apart from them—a lonely voice before the
dawn; a singer of the silent hour, before a wonder-
ful burst of lyric melody hailed the birth of the
nineteenth century. As a painter his fame has
spread more slowly, owing to the difficulty of seeing
his works, which are still, for the most part, in
private collections; nevertheless, they now find an
ever-widening circle of admirers. Every scrap of
Blake’s long-neglected writings is eagerly sought
for and discussed; the despised pictures emerge
from the cellars and attics where they have spent
the greater part of a century and find their way into
salesrooms, with results highly gratifying to their
bewildered owners. William Blake has come to his
own at last, extolled alike by poets and painters as
one of the supreme magicians of the pen and brush.
“For, in the case of this artist, his two chosen forms
of expression must be studied side by side; Blake
the poet and Blake the painter must both speak to
us in their different languages, the one amplifying
and sustaining the other, until we begin to know
the third Blake—Blake the seer, the philosopher,
and the teacher.
“Flaxman, who himself paid many tributes to
his genius, mentions, in sending to Hayley a copy
of Blake’s Poetical Sketches, ‘ That Air. Romney

thinks his historical drawings rank with those of
Alichelangelo.’ The drawings seen by Air.
Romney were possibly the design for Job—‘What
is man that Thou shouldst try him every moment ?’
-—and The Death of Ezekiel’s Wife, from which
engravings were afterwards executed. In pictorial
art Blake’s finest work is probably to be found
in the Inventions to the Book of Job, that sublime
series of designs which alone suffice to place their
author among the immortals. To produce any-
thing approaching adequate translation into line of
the world’s greatest poem would seem an impossible
feat, but Blake’s pictures crown it with an added
glory. The subject seems to have fascinated him
through life, and it is interesting to see how little
the general conception, once formed, changed with
lapse of years.
“The early sepia drawing (engraved in 1794) of
the lamenting Job with his wife and three friends,
in its grandeur and silent majesty of sorrow, might
well have found a place in the final series of 1826.
The same vastness is there; the same suggestion
that these Titanic forms, enduring giant woes in
some vague land beyond Time and Space, are
symbols of all humanity; the sorrows of the world
weigh down the crouching figures, and from their
lips comes the cry of suffering creation.”


SEPIA DRAWING
BY BLAKE

From Life of William Blake, John Lane Company
JOB: “WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU
SHOULDST TRY HIM EVERY MOMENT?”

283