Page:William Blake (IA williamblake00ches).pdf/36

 the simplest and strongest designs of his pencil, which at its best (to do him justice) tended to the simple and the strong. Nothing (for instance) could well be more comic or more tragic than the fact that Blake should illustrate Blair's elephantine epic called "The Grave." It was as well that Blake and Blair should meet over the grave. It was about all they had in common. The poet was full of the most crushing platitudes of eighteenth century rationalism. The artist was full of a poetry that would have seemed frightful to the poet, a poetry inherited from the mystics of all ages and handed on to the mystics of to-day. Blake was the child of the Rosy Cross and the Eleusinian Mysteries; he was the father of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and even of the "Yellow Book." But of all this the excellent Mr Blair was innocent, and so, indeed, in all probability was the excellent Mr Blake. But the really interesting point is this: that the illustrations were efficient and satisfactory, from the Blair as well as the Blake point of view. The cut, for instance, with the figure of the old man bowing his head to enter the black grotto of the grave