Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/213

William Blake and his Illustrations. whatever is against forgiveness of sin is not of the Father but of Satan, the accuser, the father of Hell.' And again, and this time to Crabb Robinson, 'Dante saw devils where I saw none. I see good only.' 'I have never known a very bad man who had not something very good about him.' This forgiveness was not the forgiveness of the theologian who has received a commandment from afar off, but of the poet and artist, who believes he has been taught, in a mystical vision, 'that the imagination is the man himself,' and believes he has discovered in the practice of his art that without a perfect sympathy there is no perfect imagination, and therefore no perfect life. At another moment he called Dante 'an atheist, a mere politician busied about this world, as Milton was, till, in his old age, returned to God whom he had had in his childhood.' 'Everything is atheism,' he has already explained, 'which assumed the reality of the natural 203