vering wings vanishes with a cry.
The fading cry is ever dying,
The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy.'

1897.

WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO _THE DIVINE COMEDY_

I. HIS OPINIONS UPON ART

William Blake was the first writer of modern times to preach the
indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol. There had been
allegorists and teachers of allegory in plenty, but the symbolic
imagination, or, as Blake preferred to call it, 'vision,' is not allegory,
being 'a representation of what actually exists really and unchangeably.'
A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence,
a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many
possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and
belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the
other an amusement. It is happily no part of my purpose to expound in
detail the relations he believed to exist between symbol and mind, for in
doing so I should come upon not a few doctrines which, though they have
not been difficult to many simple persons, ascetics wrapped in skins,
women who had cast away all common knowledge, peasants dreaming by their
sheepfolds upon the hills, are full of obscurity to the man of modern
culture; but it is necessary to just touch upon these relations, because
in them was the fountain of much of the practice and of all the precept of
his artistic life.

If a man would enter into 'Noah's rainbow,' he has written, and 'make a
friend' of one of 'the images of wonder' which dwell there, and which
always entreat him 'to leave mortal things,' 'then would he arise from the
grave and meet the Lord in the air'; and by this rainbow, this sign of a
covenant granted to him who is with Shem and Japhet, 'painting, poetry and
music,' 'the three powers in man of conversing with Paradise which the
flood "of time and space" did not sweep away,' Blake represented the
shapes of beauty haunting our moments of inspiration: shapes held by most
for the frailest of ephemera, but by him for a people older than the
world, citizens of eternity, appearing and reappearing in the minds of
artists and of poets, creating all we touch and see by casting distorted
images of themselves upon 'the vegetable glass of nature'; and because
beings, none the less symbols, blossoms, as it were, growing from
invisible immortal roots, hands, as it were, pointing the way into some