So much otherwise has it fared with the books themselves, that (we are compelled in this case to say it) the clothes are all right and the body is all wrong. All the criticism included as to the illustrative parts merely, is final and faultless, nothing missed and nothing wrong this could not have been otherwise, the work having fallen under hands and eyes of practical taste and trained to actual knowledge, and the assertions being therefore issued by authority.
Better have done nothing than have done this and no more.
On all grounds, therefore, and for all serious purpose, such notices as some of those given in this biography are actually worse than worthless. The confusion, the clamour, the jar of words that half suffice and thoughts that half exist-all these and other more absolutely offensive qualities-audacity, monotony, bombast, obscure play of licence and tortuous growth of fancy-cannot quench or even wholly conceal the living purport and the imperishable beauty which are here latent.Īnd secondly we are to recollect this that these books are not each a set of designs with a text made by order to match, but are each a poem composed for its own sake and with its own aim, having illustrations arranged by way of frame or appended by way of ornament.
Doubtless, nothing quite like them was ever pitched out headlong into the world as they were. Let all readers and all critics get rid of that notion for good-clear their minds of it utterly and with all haste let them know and remember, having once been told it, that in these strangest of all written books there is purpose as well as power, meaning as well as mystery. It must be enough to reply here that he was by no means mad, in any sense that would authorise us in rejecting his own judgment of his own aims and powers on a plea which would be held insufficient in another man's case. We shall not again pause to rebut the familiar cry of response, to the effect that he was mad and not accountable for the uttermost madness of error. Now, first of all, we are to recollect that Blake himself regarded these works as his greatest, and as containing the sum of his achieved ambitions and fulfilled desires: as in effect inspired matter, of absolute imaginative truth and eternal import.
Before entering upon any system of remark or comment on the Prophetic Books, we may set down in as few and distinct words as possible the reasons which make this a thing seriously worth doing nay, even requisite to be done, if we would know rather the actual facts of the man's nature than the circumstances and accidents of his life.
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