Page:William Blake (Chesterton).djvu/173

WILLIAM BLAKE his own point of view really did think that the Eternal Isaac Newton as God beheld him was more of an actuality than the terrestrial gentleman who happened to be elderly or happened by some sublunary accident to wear clothes. Therefore, when he calls it a "portrait" he is not, from his own point of view, talking nonsense. It is the form and feature of someone who exists and who is different from everyone else, just as if it were the ordinary oil-painting of an alderman.

The most important conception can be found in one sentence which he let fall as if by accident, "Nature has no outline, but imagination has." If a clear black line when looked at through a microscope was seen to be a ragged and confused edge like a mop or a doormat, then Blake would say, "So much the worse for the microscope." If pure lines existed only on the human mind, then Blake would say, "So much the better for the human mind." If the real earth grew damp and dubious when it met and mixed itself with the sea, so much the worse for the real earth. If the idea of clean-cut truth existed only in the intellect, that was the most actual place in which anything 161