s.... Flaxman is gone, and we must all soon follow, every one to his
eternal home, leaving the delusions of goddess Nature and her laws, to get
into freedom from all the laws of the numbers,' the multiplicity of
nature, 'into the mind in which every one is king and priest in his own
house.' The phrase about the king and priest is a memory of the crown and
mitre set upon Dante's head before he entered Paradise. Our imaginations
are but fragments of the universal imagination, portions of the universal
body of God, and as we enlarge our imagination by imaginative sympathy,
and transform with the beauty and peace of art, the sorrows and joys of
the world, we put off the limited mortal man more and more and put on the
unlimited 'immortal man.' 'As the seed waits eagerly watching for its
flower and fruit, anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse
to see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array, so man looks
out in tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast, collecting up the
fragments of his immortal body into the elemental forms of everything that
grows.... In pain he sighs, in pain he labours in his universe, sorrowing
in birds over the deep, or howling in the wolf over the slain, and moaning
in the cattle, and in the winds.' Mere sympathy for living things is not
enough because we must learn to separate their 'infected' from their
eternal, their satanic from their divine part; and this can only be done
by desiring always beauty, the one mask through which can be seen the
unveiled eyes of eternity. We must then be artists in all things, and
understand that love and old age and death are first among the arts. In
this sense he insists that 'Christ's apostles were artists,' that
'Christianity is Art,' and that 'the whole business of man is the arts.'
Dante, who deified law, selected its antagonist, passion, as the most
important of sins, and made the regions where it was punished the largest.
Blake, who deified imaginative freedom, held 'corporeal reason' for the
most accursed of things, because it makes the imagination revolt from the
sovereignty of beauty and pass under the sovereignty of corporeal law, and
this is 'the captivity in Egypt.' True art is expressive and symbolic, and
makes every form, every sound, every colour, every gesture, a signature of
some unanalyzable imaginative essence. False art is not expressive but
mimetic, not from experience but from observation, and is the mother of
al