Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/117

WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER vision; but great masters, obeying it, find it in harmony with their own will and occasion. They have, moreover, the power to discern between false and foolish prophecies—between the monitions from a deity, and those from the limbo of dreams, delusions, and bewildered souls.

Did Blake see the apparitions he claimed to see? Did the heads of Edward and Wallace and the Man that built the Pyramids, rise at his bidding, like the phantoms summoned for Macbeth? I have no doubt of it. Neither, I think, will painters doubt it; for I suspect that they also have such visions,—they who are born with the sense that makes visible to the inward eye the aspect of forms and faces which they have imagined or composed, and with the faculty that retains them until the art of reproduction has done its service. We, who are not painters, at times see visions with our clouded eyes,—one face swiftly blotting out another, as if in mockery at our powerlessness to capture and depict them.

Men like Swedenborg and Blake, sensitive in every fibre and exalted by mysticism, accept as direct revelation the visions which other leaders understand to be the conceptions of their own faculty and utilize in the practice of their art.

One of Blake's masterly elements was individuality. His drawings are so original as to startle us; they seem like pictures from some new-discovered world, and require time for our just appreciation of their unique beauty, weirdness and power.

Another element was faith,—unbounded faith in his [103]