Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/234

 210 divine forces as in this whirling cloud of angels, cast out and swept round by the wind of God's speed, like a cascade of veined and tapering wings, out of which ecstatic and astonished heads leap forward. But in the midst of the wheel a fierce old man, with outstretched arms (who is an image of God certainly not corrected out of any authentic vision), and, below, the extinguished figure of Job's friends, and Job, himself one of Blake's gnome-like old men with a face of rigid awe and pointing fingers of inarticulate terror, remain no more than statements, literal statements, of the facts of the imagination. They are summarised remembrances of vision, not anything 'imagined in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than the perishing mortal eye can see.'

Or, might it not be said that it is precisely through this minute accuracy to the detail of imagination that this visionary reality comes to seem to us unreal? In Blake every detail is seen with intensity, and with equal intensity. No one detail is subordinated to another, every inch of his surface is equally important to him; and from this unslackening emphasis come alike