El SNIFF test: Medida de hiperinsuflación.

Examining the formats of Blake’s earliest illuminated texts can help us to understand more fully the original functions of the medium. Scholars have struggled to identify Blake’s first illuminated works with accuracy. In the concluding line of his final illuminated manuscript from 1822, Blake announced that his “Original Stereotype was 1788” (“Ghost” 272). Blake’s colophon called attention to the invention of illuminated

printing thirty-four years earlier when, according to the popular anecdote related by Alexander Gilchrist in the Life of Blake (1863), Blake’s deceased brother, Robert, had appeared to the engraver “in a vision of the night” (1: 69).1 _{Robert then revealed to}

Blake “the technical mode by which could be produced a fac-simile of song and design” (1: 69). Gilchrist assumed that the first production of Blake’s “new revelation” (1: 68) was the Songs of Innocence (1789). For over half of a century, the validity of Gilchrist’s assumption was not questioned by Blake scholars: it seemed likely that Blake’s first use of relief etching was in a work that facilitated his desire to publish poems.2 _{After all,}

Blake’s only publication prior to the invention of illuminated printing had been a collection of poems, Poetical Sketches (1783), which concluded with some short pieces of prose and drama. The Sketches, privately printed in letterpress on eleven quarto sheets of laid paper (at the expense of Blake’s patrons John Flaxman and Harriet Matthew), demonstrated Blake’s “poetic power” and “luxuriant promise” (1: 25) to the few individuals who read the pamphlet.3 _{The text closed with Blake’s “daring” attempts to}

produce prose and drama, though these anachronistic Sketches—in Gilchrist’s view— were “confined,” “halting,” and “unsteady” (1: 26). Gilchrist concluded that it was the artistic promise of Blake’s poetry and not of his prose or drama which was eventually realized and facilitated through the invention of relief etching and the subsequent illumination of Innocence.

Gilchrist’s commonly accepted ideas regarding the original motivations of relief etching remained unquestioned by Blake scholars until the publication of the second edition of John Sampson’s The Poetical Works of William Blake (1913). The first edition of this work (1905) had, for the most part, complied with the chronology of previous editions of Blake’s poetry such as those complied by Gilchrist, William Butler Yeats, and Edwin Ellis.4 _{Each of these editors had presented the Songs of Innocence as the first}

1 _{Gilchrist’s story regarding the invention of illuminated printing originated in John Thomas Smith’s Nollekens} and his Times (1828). In this text, Smith described the way in which Blake’s “brother Robert” had “stood before him [Blake] in one of his visionary imaginations, and so decidedly directed him in the way which he ought to proceed” (609).

2 _{These scholars include William Butler Yeats (1893), Arthur Benson (1896), and Richard Garnett (1895), each of}

whom accepted Gilchrist’s identification of Innocence as the first illuminated book.

3 _{Michael Phillips, in “The Reputation of Blake’s Poetical Sketches 1783-1863” (1975), states that “only 23}

copies of the poems are known to be extant and of that number it would appear that only 8 were presented to friends and acquaintances by the author during his lifetime” (19).

4 _{Yet, in spite of Sampson’s initial compliance with the established chronology of Blake’s illuminations, the}

first edition of The Poetical Works of William Blake had still sparked a controversy among contemporaneous Blake scholars. It did so because Sampson’s detailed commentaries on Blake’s poetry had frequently questioned the interpretations which had been advanced by previous critics. Sampson targeted Yeats’s and Ellis’s edition of Blake’s poetry specifically, arguing that this text contained a “somewhat confusing arrangement of the Poems” which

may perhaps be due to the editors’ scheme of interpretation. . . . These editors, in expounding Blake’s system, lay claim to special knowledge ‘produced by the evocations of symbolic magic’;

illuminated book. However, in the second edition of The Poetical Works of William Blake, Sampson defied the assumptions of his predecessors by expressing an alternative and controversial view regarding the origins of illuminated printing:

In 1788 Blake, as he tells us in the colophon to the Ghost of Abel, engraved his ‘original stereotype,’ and it has been commonly supposed that the plate to which he here refers was one of those forming part of the Songs of Innocence. . . . But as I attempt to show . . . , there seems reason to believe that the undated tracts entitled There is No Natural Religion and All Religions Are One and not the Songs of

Innocence were Blake’s first experiments in this new art. . . . Presumptive evidence

of this may be found in the minute size of the plates and general roughness of execution, which seems to point to an early experimental style. (2: xxiv, xxviii)5

The repositioning of “There is no Natural Religion” and “All Religions Are One” from “probably circa 1790” (Sampson 1: 342) to the forefront of Blake’s illuminated oeuvre in 1788 complicated—and continues to complicate—critical ideas regarding the original functions of relief etching. It does so because the verbal contents of these small, illustrated pamphlets were not lyrical: rather, they were philosophical. The widely accepted view that Blake had invented illuminated printing in order to satisfy his desire to publish poems faltered in light of this discovery. Some critics have attempted to resolve this issue through the presumptive claim that the tracts were preparatory experiments which had helped Blake to perfect his printing technique prior to the execution of his original ideas for illuminating the poetry and designs of the Songs of Innocence.6 _{For instance, S. Foster Damon, in William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols}

and some of their remarks would seem to suggest their belief that the possession of these occult powers enables them to produce a text through which Blake’s mind is reflected more accurately than in the MSS. left by himself. (xviii)

Ellis responded to these criticisms in The Real Blake: A Portrait Biography (1907). He reproached the way in which Sampson had “stone[d] all editions indiscriminately” (vii-viii, xi), claiming that Sampson had “produced a work which is a monumental record of every error that the hasty pen of Blake himself or any of his previous editors had ever committed. The work shows every ailment from which every text of Blake has suffered, and its long pages of notes are like the words of a hospital” (vii-viii). Sampson’s controversial notes did not end here, however. The second edition of The Poetical Works of William Blake provoked a similar reaction among contemporaneous Blake scholars.

5 _{Sampson went on to write:}

Neither booklet bears a date. In my earlier edition of Blake’s Poems I had conjecturally assigned the two tractates to 1790 circa, guided chiefly by their similarity in doctrine and argument to parts of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I have since, however, come to the conclusion that the tract There is No Natural Religion must have been Blake’s first essay in relief engraving, and consequently should be dated 1788, the companion work All Religions Are One being perhaps a little later. (xxviii)

(1924), argued that “Before Blake began his new book, the Songs of Innocence, he experimented by making plates of various mystical aphorisms” (36). Geoffrey Keynes, in his “Description and Bibliographical Statement” from the facsimile editions of the tracts produced for the William Blake Trust (1970-71), similarly proposed that the “imperfect” plates of “No Natural Religion” and “All Religions Are One” belonged “to a period of experimentation.” It was during this period that Blake “mastered a difficult technique” in preparation for “the surer touch of the Songs of Innocence” (n.p.). Thus, while neither Damon nor Keynes quarreled with Sampson’s re-categorization of “No Natural Religion” and “All Religions Are One” as the first instances of relief etching, both critics maintained Gilchrist’s notion that it was the Songs ofInnocence and not the tracts which was originally considered for illumination by Blake.

Labeling “No Natural Religion” and “All Religions Are One” as experiments has resulted in this pair of tracts receiving little critical attention from subsequent Blake scholars. Even the monumental studies of Northrop Frye and David V. Erdman failed to consider the contents of these works adequately. Joseph Viscomi attempted to amend this omission in Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993) when he acknowledged that the widely accepted but improbable ideas regarding the origins of illuminated printing had “quite simply dismissed the thirty extant plates of No Natural Religion (series a and b) and

All Religions as mere practice in the technique” (197). In Viscomi’s view, it was the two relief etchings which preceded the tracts—“The Approach of Doom” [Fig. 5] and “Charity” (c. 1788) [Fig. 6]—which should be considered as the “early experiments in relief etching” (Book 195). “All Religions Are One” and “No Natural Religion,” on the other hand, should be considered as complete works: “that Blake did not stop after All Religions but created two more sets of tractates . . . refutes that these small works were exercises in preparation for Innocence” (Book 197). Viscomi’s recognition of Blake’s repeated use of the philosophical, aphoristic format on three separate occasions prior to the publication of Innocence clearly indicated that “No Natural Religion” and “All Religions Are One” were not simply experiments. Rather, they were and should be considered as the first completed works of illuminated printing, regardless of the simple nature of their designs, the small size of their printing, and the philosophical subjects of their contents. That is not to say that the philosophical contexts of “No Natural

The difference between Blake’s technique and engraving or letterpress has led to theories that illuminated printing originated in Blake’s rejection of the publishers, in his desire for artistic integrity, financial independence, or the opportunity to show the means of producing an artistic effect . . . The origin has also been found in Blake’s rejection by the publishers, rather than vice versa, which forced him to invent an alternative mode of production. Either implicitly or explicitly, these theories of origin presuppose that poems and designs preceded the invention of illuminated printing. (403n2)

Religion” and “All Religions Are One” can offer a clearer indication of the original functions of illuminated printing any more than the lyrical form of the Songs ofInnocence

could. As Blake would inevitably prove, the written form of his texts—which included aphorisms, poetry, prose, and drama—formed just one aspect of a larger matrix of meaning which was inherent in each of the elements which contributed to the artistic composition and material process of illumination.7

Acknowledging that Blake’s motivation for relief etching was not solely poetic encourages us to reconsider the ways in which we think about and approach Blake’s texts. More often than not, critics have restricted the potential components of Blake’s art by exploring word and design only, overlooking the inconspicuous bibliographical elements which underpin all of Blake’s printed texts. The dimensions of Blake’s impressions and the size of his pages have rarely been preserved in twentieth- and twenty-first century editions of the illuminated books: for that reason, the information which is inherent in these neglected components of Blake’s art has remained mostly unstudied. The decisions involved in the presentation of word and image and the implications of those decisions to the reception of Blake’s texts should not be underestimated. Reviewing the cultures of print within which Blake fashioned his art can help us to identify the overlooked conventions which governed the physical constructions of his illuminated books. The consideration of these conventions in the earliest of Blake’s illuminations might reveal the particular markets that Blake initially sought to enter through the products of his new printing process, offering a fresh perspective on the original functions of illuminated printing.