Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/119

WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER might have been; he was what he was, and as great as he could be. There is no gainsaying his marvellous and instant imagination. He saw not the sunrise, but an innumerable company of the angelic host, crying, "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty!" Heaven and Hell are spirits, alike naked and alike clothed with beauty, rushing together in eternal love. Job and his friends are almost pre-Adamite in mould and visage. His daughters are, indeed, they of whom we are told, that there were not found others so fair in all the land. Jehovah himself came within Blake's vision; the dreamer walked, not only with sages and archangels and Titans, but with the very God.

Among his other qualities were a surprisingly delicate fancy, human tenderness and pity, industry and fertility in the extreme. He had ideas of right and government, and was grandly impatient of dulness and of hypocrisy in life or method. Finally, even his faults, and the grotesqueness which repeatedly brings his mark below the highest, add to the fascination that attends the revival and study of this artist. All that I say of his drawings applies in many respects to his rhymed and unrhymed verse. But his special gift was the draughtsman's. It would not be correct to say that he often hesitated with the pen, but never with the pencil, since, whether as an artist or as a maker of songs and "prophetic books," his product was bold and unstinted; but his grotesque errors are found more frequently in his poetry than in his designs, while his most original and exquisite range of [105]