Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/29

Rh the chance of paying tribute in passing—the author of "Joseph and his Brethren;" a poem which, for strength of manner and freshness of treatment, may certainly recall Blake or any other obscurely original reformer in art; although we may not admit the resemblance claimed for it on spiritual grounds to the works of Blake, in whose eyes the views taken by the later poet of the mysteries inherent in matters of faith or morality, and generally of the spiritual side of things, would, to our thinking, probably have appeared shallow and untrue by the side of his own mystic personal creed. In dramatic passion, in dramatic character, and in dramatic language, Mr. Wells' great play is no doubt far ahead, not of Blake's work only, but of most other men's: in actual conception of things that lie beyond these, it keeps within the range of common thought and accepted theory; falling therefore far short, in its somewhat over frequent passages of didactic and religious reflection, of much less original thinkers than Blake.

One other thing we may observe of these "Sketches;" that they contain, though only in the pieces rejected from our present collection, sad indications of the inexplicable influence which an early reading of the detestable pseudo-Ossian seems to have exercised on Blake. How or why such lank and lamentable counterfeits of the poetical style did ever gain this luckless influence—one, too, which in after years was to do far worse harm than it has done here—it is not easy to guess. Contemporary vice of taste, imperfect or on some points totally deficient education, may explain much and more than might be supposed, even with regard to the strongest untrained intellect; but on