Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/157

 Rh Blake's colour is unearthly, and is used for the most part rather as a symbol of emotion than as a representation of fact. It is at one time prismatic, and radiates in broad bands of pure colour; at another, and more often, is as inextricable as the veins in mineral, and seems more like a natural growth of the earth than the creation of a painter. In the smaller Book of Designs in the Print Room of the British Museum the colours have mouldered away, and blotted themselves together in a sort of putrefaction which seems to carry the suggestions of poisonous decay further than Blake carried them. This will be seen by a comparison of the minutely drawn leviathan of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with the coloured print in the Book of Designs, in which the outline of the folds melts and crumbles into a mere chaos of horror. Colour in Blake is never shaded, or, as he would have said, blotted and blurred; it is always pure energy. In the faint colouring of the Book of Thel there is the very essence of gentleness; the colour is a faultless interpretation of the faint and lovely monotony of the verse, and of its