Page:The sanity of William Blake.djvu/23

 Rh of them, even if they deny it. It is to this consciousness that Blake makes appeal. Because of it he knows he must reject the ways and manners of the schools.

Indeed, the way of the imaginative artist is the way of the child. He rejects his facts as too painfully trivial to be worth attention as such, though he uses them right freely and truthfully in his own fashion. But he strips them of all precision so as to disabuse his public of any supposition that he uses them as argument or evidence. The anatomy of the lark and its biological position are entirely irrelevant facts to the true poet who appeals to the greater life in our hearts. To him facts lose their gravity, words their precision; they rise upon the wings of the bird, and scatter themselves for harvest, as the lark's song reaches ever wider realms of earth as he mounts into heaven. And this is the way with the child. He cannot easily comprehend the ways of men, to whom the only serious things are money and means, success and failure. And his soul, a power growing daily in its supremacy to mere things of matter, because blossoming out of the abyss of eternal potentialities, almost declines to be happy unless using the B