Page:Life of William Blake, Pictor ignotus (Volume 1).djvu/306

 r. ] oPnIos: NOTES O OLDS. 261

' or philosopher, who learns or acquires all he knows from others, ' must be full of contradictions' And elsewhere, more definitely, on this subject of generalization he says: ' effect is making out ' the parts, and it is nothing else but that.'

Expressive of the special creed of Blke, to whom invention and menlng were all in all, and of his low estimate of the great rhetoricians in palnting,--Correggio, the Venetians, Rubens, and those whom we weak morta]s have been wont to admire as great colourists,--is such a note as this, at the beginning of the rso :' The laboured ' works of journeymen employed by Correggio, Titian, �eronese, and ' all the Venetians, ought not to be shown to the young aist as the ' works of original conceptio any more than the works of Strange, 'Bartoloz, or Woolle They are works of manual labour.'

Blake cherished his visionaxy tendency as an essential function of imaginatioL ' Mere enthusiasm,' he here declares, ' is the all in all.' And ageing--' The man who asserts that there is no such thing 'as softness in art, and that everything is definite and determinate' (which is what Blake was ever asserting),' has not been told this by ' practice, but by inspiration and vision; because vision is determinate ' and perfect and he copies d without fatigue. Everything seen is � definite and determinate. Softness is produced by comparative strength and well, hess, alone, in the marking of the forms. I say ' these principles would never be found out by the study of nature, ' without con- or in- hate science.'

With no more than justice he remarks on the very weakest feature in Sir Joshua's system: ' Reynolds' opinion was, that genius may be taught, and that all pretence to inspiration is a lie or ' deceit, to say the least of it. If it s deceit, the whole Bible is � madness. This opinion' (of Sir Joshua's) ' originates in the Greeks ' clling the Muses daughters of Memory.' In the same spirit, and with truth too, he of the TMJ Dscouse energetically avers: ' The following D/scous is particularly interesting to blockheads, � Digitized by GOOdie