attack the 'dots and lozenges' with
even more than usually quaint symbolism, and praise expressive lines. 'I
know that the majority of Englishmen are bound by the indefinite ... a
line is a line in its minutest particulars, straight or crooked. It is
itself not intermeasurable by anything else ... but since the French
Revolution'--since the reign of reason began, that is--'Englishmen are all
intermeasurable with one another, certainly a happy state of agreement in
which I do not agree.' The Dante series occupied the last years of his
life; even when too weak to get out of bed he worked on, propped up with
the great drawing-book before him. He sketched a hundred designs, but left
all incomplete, some very greatly so, and partly engraved seven plates, of
which the 'Francesca and Paolo' is the most finished. It is not, I think,
inferior to any but the finest in the Job, if indeed to them, and shows in
its perfection Blake's mastery over elemental things, the swirl in which
the lost spirits are hurried, 'a watery flame' he would have called it,
the haunted waters and the huddling shapes. In the illustrations of
Purgatory there is a serene beauty, and one finds his Dante and Virgil
climbing among the rough rocks under a cloudy sun, and in their sleep upon
the smooth steps towards the summit, a placid, marmoreal, tender, starry
rapture.

All in this great series are in some measure powerful and moving, and not,
as it is customary to say of the work of Blake, because a flaming
imagination pierces through a cloudy and indecisive technique, but because
they have the only excellence possible in any art, a mastery over artistic
expression. The technique of Blake was imperfect, incomplete, as is the
technique of well-nigh all artists who have striven to bring fires from
remote summits; but where his imagination is perfect and complete, his
technique has a like perfection, a like completeness. He strove to embody
more subtle raptures, more elaborate intuitions than any before him; his
imagination and technique are more broken and strained under a great
burden than the imagination and technique of any other master. 'I am,'
wrote Blake, 'like others, just equal in invention and execution.' And
again, 'No man can improve an original invention; nor can an original
invention exist without execution, organized, delineated and articulated
either by God or man ... I have heard people say, "Give me the ideas; it
is no matter what words you p