ut them into;" and others say, "Give me the
designs; it is no matter for the execution."... Ideas cannot be given but
in their minutely appropriate words, nor can a design be made without its
minutely appropriate execution.' Living in a time when technique and
imagination are continually perfect and complete, because they no longer
strive to bring fire from heaven, we forget how imperfect and incomplete
they were in even the greatest masters, in Botticelli, in Orcagna, and in
Giotto.

The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits are as the more
phantastical errors in their lives; as Coleridge's opium cloud; as
Villiers De L'Isle Adam's candidature for the throne of Greece; as Blake's
anger against causes and purposes he but half understood; as the
flickering madness an Eastern scripture would allow in august dreamers;
for he who half lives in eternity endures a rending of the structures of
the mind, a crucifixion of the intellectual body.

II. HIS OPINIONS ON DANTE

As Blake sat bent over the great drawing-book, in which he made his
designs to _The Divine Comedy_, he was very certain that he and Dante
represented spiritual states which face one another in an eternal enmity.
Dante, because a great poet, was 'inspired by the Holy Ghost'; but his
inspiration was mingled with a certain philosophy, blown up out of his
age, which Blake held for mortal and the enemy of immortal things, and
which from the earliest times has sat in high places and ruled the world.
This philosophy was the philosophy of soldiers, of men of the world, of
priests busy with government, of all who, because of the absorption in
active life, have been persuaded to judge and to punish, and partly also,
he admitted, the philosophy of Christ, who in descending into the world
had to take on the world; who, in being born of Mary, a symbol of the law
in Blake's symbolic language, had to 'take after his mother,' and drive
the money-changers out of the Temple. Opposed to this was another
philosophy, not made by men of action, drudges of time and space, but by
Christ when wrapped in the divine essence, and by artists and poets, who
are taught by the nature of their craft to sympathize with all living
things, and who, the more pure and fragrant is their lamp, pass the
further from all limitations, to come at last to forget good and evil in
an absorbing vision of the happy and the unhappy. The one philosophy was
worldly, and established for the ordering of t