Page:William Blake, painter and poet.djvu/94

78 and speculation, for the world does not easily forgo its interest in what Goethe calls "problematic natures." By another famous saying of Goethe's he cannot profit, "He who has sufficed his own age has sufficed all ages," nor can he be reckoned among those who have been in advance of their age, except in those exquisite early songs which died away before the actual arrival of the better time. But it would not be too much to say of him that he revealed possibilities, both in poetry and painting, which without him we should hardly have suspected, and which remain an unexhausted seed-field of inspiration for his successors. It is labour lost to strive to make him transparent, but even where he is most opaque

Nor is the general tendency of art towards a world of purity, harmony, and joy unrepresented in him; sometimes this even seems the conclusion to which all else is merely subservient, as in the series of illustrations to Job, the ideal representation of his own history.

Sweeping the Parlour in the Interpreter's House.