Page:William Blake (Chesterton).djvu/202

WILLIAM BLAKE and insist upon the traditional ideal of the sexes—the broad shoulders of the god and the broad hips of the goddess. Blake detested the sensuality of Rubens. But if he had been obliged to choose between the women of Rubens and the women of Rossetti, he would have flung himself on the neck of Rubens. For we have a false conception of what constitutes exaggeration. The end of the eighteenth century (being a dogmatic period) believed in certain things and exaggerated them. The end of the nineteenth century simply did not know what things to exaggerate; so it fell back upon merely underrating them. Blake tried to make Wallace look even bolder and fiercer than Wallace can possibly have looked. That was his exaggeration of Wallace. But Burne-Jones' exaggeration of Perseus is not an exaggeration at all. It is an under-statement; for the whole fascination of Burne-Jones' Perseus is that he looks frightened. Blake's figure of a woman is aggressively and monstrously womanly. That is its fascination, if it has any. But the fascination of a Beardsley woman (if she has any) is exactly that she is not quite a woman. 190