"The Wise and Foolish Virgins" is much more characteristic of him. The wise virgins in the foreground are ranged in a row, their lamps by their sides. Their bodies and faces are smitten with a cold unearthly white light, presumably, but not obviously, thrown by the lamps. The modelling of their forms is most careful. Behind them, issuing from a small hut, the foolish virgins, in wild confusion, implore oil for their lamps. The landscape in which the scene is laid is anything but Eastern. Dark, intensely green downs undulate and swell to meet the sky. A lurid light defines the horizon, and in the swathed masses of gray cloud above, an angel blowing a trump (suggesting a Last Judgement) wings his fateful way. It may easily be urged (and the prosaic mind which only rejoices in the precise and neat imitation of what it can _see_ is sure to exclaim) that here is a defiance of all artistic rules, a pitiable inability to copy the most ordinary natural phenomena, proclaiming Blake a wilful "poseur" or an unobservant madman. "Here," they exclaim, "is little atmosphere, no distance, no attempt at truth of tone, and no comprehensible rendering of the light." Blake rendered it as he did because he _chose_; because his masterly sense of style (that is, the treatment best suited to the representation of the idea, his subjective vision) required it to be so painted and thus only, because he considered himself free to take from Nature just what he needed for his purpose, and never felt himself obliged to make an entire and wholly truthful representation of her. To emphasize the light on the figures of the foreground, he overcharged the colour in the sky and the downs behind, and by this treatment obtained an effect productive of strange and solemn emotion in the beholder. Nature was to him shadow or reminiscence only, and here he has defiantly subordinated the truth of the landscape to the spiritual truth of his subject. [Illustration: OBERON, TITANIA AND PUCK WITH FAIRIES DANCING Water-colour. Undated. Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. A. A. de Pass] The most significant types were revealed in his soul, and owned a relationship to the visible creation only in so far as this relationship was necessary to render his art-work intelligible to the world. His decorative sense approved of the white virgins set so statue-pale against the dark green of the downs. The suddenness of the contrast, the livid and supernatural effect, were part of his deliberate intention. So does the white fire of an intense spiritual alertness contrast with the opaque darkness of natural physical life. For this scene, taken from the parable of Jesus, is only another of those types which Blake regarded in so wide and catholic a sense, and which by his treatment he has lifted above all merely historical association into a realm of pure spiritual symbolism.