Page:William Blake (Chesterton).djvu/142

 WILLIAM BLAKE exquisite hands) is hardly equal. In short, Browning wishes almost unscrupulously to get to the point. Mr James refuses to admit (on the mere authority of Euclid) that the point is indivisible. But Blake's obscurity is startlingly different to both, it is at once more simple and more impenetrable. It is not a different diction but a different language. It is not that we cannot understand the sentences; it is that we often misunderstand the words. The obscurity of Blake commonly consists in the fact that the actual words used mean one thing in Blake and quite another thing in the dictionary. Mr Henry James wants to split hairs; Browning wants to tear them up by the roots. But in Blake the enigma is at once plainer and more perplexing; it is simply this, that if Blake says "hairs" he may not mean hairs, but something else—perhaps peacocks' feathers. To quote but one example out of a thousand; when Blake uses the word "devils" he generally means some particularly exalted order of angels such as preside over energy and imagination.

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