itian a talisman as powerfully charged with
intellectual virtue as though it were a jewel-studded door of the city
seen on Patmos?

To cover the imperishable lineaments of beauty with shadows and reflected
lights was to fall into the power of his 'Vala,' the indolent fascination
of nature, the woman divinity who is so often described in 'the prophetic
books' as 'sweet pestilence,' and whose children weave webs to take the
souls of men; but there was yet a more lamentable chance, for nature has
also a 'masculine portion' or 'spectre' which kills instead of merely
hiding, and is continually at war with inspiration. To 'generalize' forms
and shadows, to 'smooth out' spaces and lines in obedience to 'laws of
composition,' and of painting; founded, not upon imagination, which
always thirsts for variety and delights in freedom, but upon reasoning
from sensation which is always seeking to reduce everything to a lifeless
and slavish uniformity; as the popular art of Blake's day had done, and as
he understood Sir Joshua Reynolds to advise, was to fall into 'Entuthon
Benithon,' or 'the Lake of Udan Adan,' or some other of those regions
where the imagination and the flesh are alike dead, that he names by so
many resonant phantastical names. 'General knowledge is remote knowledge,'
he wrote; 'it is in particulars that wisdom consists, and happiness too.
Both in art and life general masses are as much art as a pasteboard man is
human. Every man has eyes, nose and mouth; this every idiot knows. But he
who enters into and discriminates most minutely the manners and
intentions, the characters in all their branches, is the alone wise or
sensible man, and on this discrimination all art is founded.... As poetry
admits not a letter that is insignificant, so painting admits not a grain
of sand or a blade of grass insignificant, much less an insignificant blot
or blur.'

Against another desire of his time, derivative also from what he has
called 'corporeal reason,' the desire for a 'tepid moderation,' for a
lifeless 'sanity in both art and life,' he had protested years before with
a paradoxical violence. 'The roadway of excess leads to the palace of
wisdom,' and we must only 'bring out weight and measure in time of
dearth.' This protest, carried, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds, to
the point of dwelling with pleasure on the thought that 'The _Lives of the
Painters_ say that Raphael died of dissipation,' because dissipation is
better tha