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COLOUR-PRINTED PLATE FROM
“MILTON: A POEM IN TWO BOOKS.” 1804

To see Blake’s work of this kind is to enjoy a new experience. Many of the pictorial representations we have reviewed seem to be disregardful of Nature, if one dare say it, above Nature altogether! Yet so clearly are they discriminated, so minutely are the parts made out, that we are compelled to realize that they are copied from visions definitely seen by Blake’s inner eye, and energetically seized upon by him. And it is this quality in them which so powerfully acts on the spectator, assuring him that indeed “More things exist in heaven and earth than our philosophy dreams of.” But besides these tremendous imaginative creations, there occur touching and beautiful transcripts from Nature, low-lying hills, under a great sky, waving field grasses and delicate spiders’ webs accurately observed and represented, as far as they go, proving that Dame Nature was not so utterly repudiated by Blake but that at times he saw and loved her for her own sake, in spite of all his theories.

Still, the great word for him—the only word fit to bear the burden of his tremendous thoughts—was always, as with Michael Angelo, the human form, which, in its varieties of type and action, seemed to him alone suited to express his deep meanings and spiritual ideas. As for the prophecies themselves, they can never be largely read, nor in any sense popular, though, to use Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s words, “a reader susceptible to poetic influence cannot make light of them; nor can one who has perused Mr. Swinburne’s essay” (or, we may add, Messrs. Ellis and Yeats’ work) “affect to consider that they lack meaning—positive and important, though not definite and developed meaning.” So now we take leave of these mystic books of revelation, which, whatever our personal estimate of them may be, stand alone in literature for intrinsic and unique qualities.

CHAPTER X

WORK IN ILLUSTRATION

Blake’s work in illustration is considered by many persons to be finer than the embodiment of his original conceptions in art.