Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/230

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
206
WILLIAM BLAKE

in Earnest. Milton was in Earnest. They believed that God did visit Man Really and Truly.' Further, 'Knowledge of Ideal Beauty is not to be Acquired. It is born with us. . . . Man is Born Like a Garden ready Planted and Sown. This World is too poor to produce one Seed.'

What Blake meant by vision, how significantly yet cautiously he interchanged the words 'seen' and 'imagined,' has been already noted in that passage of the Descriptive Catalogue, where he answers his objectors: 'The connoisseurs and artists who have made objections to Mr. B.'s mode of representing spirits with real bodies would do well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, the Apollo, which they admire in Greek statues are, all of them, representations of spiritual existences, of Gods immortal, to the ordinary perishing organ of sight; and yet they are embodied and organised in solid marble. Mr. B. requires the same latitude, and all is well.' Then comes the great definition, which I will not repeat: 'He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments.'

'The world of imagination,' he says else-