Katharine Ada Esdaile

“ As a pioneer in Blake criticism Crabb Robinson has never received his due; Gilchrist resents his suggestion that Blake was not entirely sane, others have repeated the reproach; and no one has thought to clear his memory in that respect by reprinting that forgotten paper which he wrote in the winter of 1809-10 to introduce Blake to the notice of German students—a paper based on a first-hand study of all the pictures, poems and engravings on which he could lay his hands, and on such personal information as he could glean from friends. ”

“ A still more remarkable little book of poems by our author exists, which is only to be met with in the hands of collectors. It is a duodecimo entitled 'Songs of Innocence and Experience, shewing the two contrary states of the human soul. The Author and printer W. Blake.' The letters appear to be etched, and the book is printed in yellow. Round and between the lines are all sorts of engravings; sometimes they resemble the monstrous hieroglyphs of the Egyptians, sometimes they represent not ungraceful arabesques. Wherever an empty space is left after the printing a picture is inserted. ”

“ His name is nevertheless to be found under some very commonplace plates to children's books; [6] but while he cherished artistic visions utterly opposed to the taste of connoisseurs, and regarded more recent methods in drawing and engraving as sins against art, he preferred, in his phrase, to be a martyr for his religion—i.e., his art—to debasing his talents by a weak submission to the prevailing fashion of art in an age of artistic degradation. ”

“ In one of his best drawings, the 'Death of the Strong Wicked Man,' the body lies in the death agony, and a broken vessel, whose contents are escaping, indicates the moment of death, while the soul, veiled in flame, rises from the pillow. The soul is a copy of the body, yet in altered guise, and flies from the window with a well-rendered expression of horror. In other engravings the soul appears hovering over the body, which it leaves unwillingly ”

“ We will only recall the phrase of a thoughtful writer, that those faces are the most attractive in which nature has set something of greatness which she has yet left unfinished; the same may hold good of the soul. ”

“ No printer's name is given on the title-page, and in the preface it states that the poems were composed between his thirteenth and twentieth years. They are of very unequal merit. The metre is usually so loose and careless as to betray a total ignorance of the art, whereby the larger part of the poems are rendered singularly rough and unattractive. On the other hand, there is a wildness and loftiness of imagination in certain dramatic fragments which testifies to genuine poetical feeling. An example may serve as a measure of the inspiration of the poet at this period. ”

“ As this belief of our artist's in the intercourse which, like Swedenborg, he enjoys with the spiritual world has more than anything else injured his reputation, we subjoin another remarkable passage from his Catalogue. ”

“ The most strong they melted before and dissolved in his presence;
The most ugly they fled with outcries and contortions of their limbs. The picture represents these three beings fighting with the Romans; but we prefer to let the artist speak of his own works. ”

“ In his Catalogue we find still further vindication of the reproaches brought against his earlier work. 'Shall painting be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile representations of merely mortal and perishing substances, and not be, as poetry and music are, elevated into its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception?' He then alleges that the statues of the Greek gods are so many bodily representations of spiritual beings. 'A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy asserts, a cloudy vapour or a nothing ”

“ That the more distinct, sharp and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art' [and so on down to the end of the text to No. XV. of the 'Descriptive Catalogue'] . This passage is sufficient to explain why our artist was not permitted to engrave his own designs [for Blair's 'Grave'] . In the same spirit he proclaims the guilt of the recent distinction between a painting and a drawing. 'If losing and obliterating the outline constitutes a picture, Mr. B. will never be so foolish as to do one.... ”

“ Suffice it to say that he does justice, both in his own words and in his quotations from the Catalogue, to Blake's doctrine of the 'great and golden rule of art, a fine and determinate outline.' Passing on, we come to another point on which Mr. Crabb Robinson's unpublished papers throw a new light; he continues:] He does not conceal the ground of this preference [for Raphael and Michael Angelo] , and the following passage, while it reveals the artist's views on the technique of his art, contains a truth which cannot be denied, and which underlies his whole doctrine. ”

“ No one can deny that, as even amid these aberrations gleams of reason and intelligence shine out, so a host of expressions occur among them which one would expect from a German rather than an Englishman. ”

“ Careful examination of all Crabb Robinson's miscellaneous papers at Dr. Williams' Library, Gordon Square, led not, alas, to the discovery of any part of the original MS.—the complete copy must, of course, have been sent to Germany in 1809—but to that of various notes on the subject, including copies of sixteen of Blake's poems, extracts from the 'Europe' and 'America' a fragment of unpublished prose, and a note of the address of the Exhibition of 1809, all of which must be discussed in their proper place. ”

“ The following Song of Experience probably represents man after the loss of his innocence, as, bound by the commandment and the priests its servants, he looks back longing to his earlier state, where before was no commandment, no duty, and nought save love and voluntary sacrifice. ”

“ The original consists of a veritable olio of fragmentary utterances on art and religion, without plan or arrangement, and the artist's idiosyncracies will in this way be most clearly shown. The vehemence with which, throughout the book, he declaims against oil painting and the artists of the Venetian and Flemish schools is part of the fixed ideas of the author. [The quotations are here given from the text of the ' Descriptive Catalogue,' and not merely retranslated from Crabb Robinson.] ”

“ And all the overflowing stars rain down prolific pains.
[This passage and the preceding are written by Crabb Robinson on the same old letter that contains the prose passages already referred to. Transcripts of Holy Thursday and the Introduction do not exist among the Crabb Robinson papers, but the other poems quoted in this paper exist in his autograph, together with copies of fourteen of Blake's other poems drawn from the Poetical Sketches and the Songs, the Dedication from Blair's Grave, and the Poison Tree.] ”

“ Julius' translation of the poems therein given by Mr. Sampson in his recent Oxford edition of Blake's works, but not to Crabb Robinson's paper itself. The same applies to other recent works on Blake. ↑ The above passage is taken from the Diary as published. The quotations from Crabb Robinson's own MSS. are printed in full for the first time by Mr. Arthur Symons in his 'William Blake.' ↑ Cf. the first entry on Blake in Crabb Robinson's 'Reminiscences,' 'shall I call Blake artist, genius, mystic, or madman? ”