Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/227

William Blake and his Illustrations. most accursed of things, because it makes the imagination revolt from the sovereignty of beauty and pass under the sovereignty of corporeal law, and this is 'the captivity in Egypt.' True art is expressive and symbolic, and makes every form, every sound, every colour, every gesture, a signature of some unanalyzable imaginative essence. False art is not expressive but mimetic, not from experience but from observation, and is the mother of all evil, persuading us to save our bodies alive at no matter what cost of rapine and fraud. True art is the flame of the last day, which begins for every man, when he is first moved by beauty, and which seeks to burn all things until they 'become infinite and holy.'

III. THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF DANTE

The late Mr. John Addington Symonds wrote—in a preface to certain Dante illustrations by Stradanus, a 217