|
have given away his heart to them; or if he have, he must conceal his love, or not carry his expressions of it beyond that point of rapture, which the occasional tourist thinks it not overstepping decorum to betray, or the limit which that gentlemanly spy upon Nature, the picturesque traveller, has vouchsafed to countenance. He must do this, or be content to be thought an enthusiast.—Review of Wordsworth's Excursion. |
The whole question as to the sanity of the prophetic books lies in the question whether their images are inspired by definite ideals that can be expressed in no fitter way, whether, that is, the imaginative life is disciplined by purpose, by good to be won. Of this there can, I think, be no question whatever.
Blake's imagination was essentially Gothic. Or perhaps, if I had more accurate knowledge, I should say that in comparison with the more disciplined Gothic, his art was Byzantine. His hatred of fine faultless line and shallow harmony; his love of roaring cavern depths and masses of mystic shadow; his bold recognition, not to be gainsaid under penalty, of the interdependence of so-called right and wrong, of freedom and bondage; recall Ruskin's description of the
