Note 267, l. 4 — VOLUME III.

There have been times—perhaps they are not quite over—when the admission of William Blake[519] into the category of critics would have been regarded as an absurdity, or a bad jest. Nothing is more certain, however, than that the poet-painter expresses, with a force and directness rather improved by that lack of complete technical sanity which some of his admirers most unwisely and needlessly deny, the opinions of the “Extreme Right,” the high-fliers of the Army of Romanticism. He may often be thinking of painting rather than of poetry; but this is sometimes expressedly not the case, and many of his most pointed sayings apply to the one art just as well as to the other—if indeed it would not be still more correct to say that, except 267when they concern mere technique, they always apply to both. His work, despite the attention which it has received from hands, sometimes of the most eminent, during the last forty years, has never yet been edited in a fashion making its chaos cosmic or the threading of its labyrinths easy: and it may be well to bring together some of the most noteworthy critical expressions in it. That which has been referred to in a former passage,[520] “Every man is a judge of pictures who has not been connoisseured out of his senses,”[521] is in itself almost a miniature manifesto of the new school of criticism. For “connoisseurship”—the regular training in the orthodox system of judgment by rule and line and pattern—is substituted the impression of the natural man, unconditioned except by the retirement that it shall be impression, and not prejudice.