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 when 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. [Sidenote: _His critical position and dicta._] So, again, that remarkable expression of the Prophet Isaiah[522] when, as Blake casually mentions, he and Ezekiel “dined with me”—an occasion on which surely any one of taste would like to have completed the quartette. The poet-host tells us that he asked, “Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so make it so?” and that the prophet-guest answered, “All poets believe that it does”—a position from which La Harpism and the reluctance to “surrender disbelief” are at once crushed, concluded, and quelled. In the remarkable engraved page on Homer and Virgil,[523] Blake adventures himself (not with such rashness as may at first seem) against Aristotle (or what he takes for Aristotle), by laying it down that Unity and Morality belong to philosophy, not poetry, or at least are secondary in the latter; that goodness and badness are not distinctions of “character” (a saying in which there is some quibbling but much depth as well); that the Classics, not Goths or Monks, “desolate Europe with wars” (a great enough dictum at the junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); and that “Grecian wit is mathematical form,” which is only “eternal in the reasoning memory,” while Gothic is “living form, that is to say, eternal existence”—perhaps the deepest saying of the whole, though it wants large allowance and intelligent taking.