Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/25

Rh essayed to follow with more or less success Blake's almost untrodden path, the converse is rather the case,

That Blake's life was to himself a harmony is undoubted, nor is it less clear that it was also in the fullest sense, borrowing the phrase which Shelley applied to his own, an 'impassioned pursuit of virtue.' To represent this mental, moral, and artistic harmony is the difficult work awaiting him who would present Blake aright, grasping at such pieces of self-revelation as the writings afford, studying the influences which touched him and the degree in which they were modified by a naturally heretical mind; and tracing step by step through the surviving Prophetic Books the evolution of the extraordinary system of mythology created by him for the expression of his philosophical and religious views.

This true line of investigation first apprehended by Wilkinson, and finely expressed with entire insight and sympathy by the author of The City of Dreadful Night, has been carried further by Swinburne in that Essay which, were Blake's remaining works destroyed by a new Tatham, would still remain a sufficing monument to his genius.

The chief sources of our knowledge of Blake's life are particularized below.

1. Autobiographical. Despite the destruction of the greater part of the MSS. much autobiographical material survives in his pictures, MS. Book, letters, marginalia, and published and unpublished writings, delineating Blake in his 'threefold' character of artist, poet, and mystic.

Blake's pictorial art may be studied at first hand from examples preserved in the British Museum or in private collections, as also in his engraved works or in various facsimiles. His views on the province of art, and criticisms