All creative genius must work in much the same way. The vision is granted, who shall say just how and whence, and its translation into any form of art must be accomplished by a power as it were outside, above, the artist. Vogl said of Schubert, that he composed in a state of clairvoyance. (That is the reason why the Unfinished Symphony was, and always will be, unfinished. Schubert transcribed the tormenting melody, the awful picture of Fate suddenly reaching a long arm from out the smiling heaven to arrest the blithe jigging mortal so gaily tripping along a flowery path. The overwhelming terror and pity of it all shake the soul. But the vision was withdrawn, the clairvoyant condition left Schubert, and so he wrote no more.) Blake's conceptions were projected in form instantaneously and with extraordinary vividness, and the vision seen with his mind's eye seldom varied or faded till he had transferred its likeness to paper. In this he was indeed unlike those artists who, having but a vague mental conception, build up their designs from without, laboriously selecting and copying, not that which will merely help to perfect the realization of the inward conception, but those things which they conjecture will arrange themselves most successfully in the making of an eye-pleasing picture. Such artists are but little concerned with the innate and obligatory form with which an idea must necessarily clothe itself. Blake writes in the Descriptive Catalogue, "A spirit and a vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all." At the same time in justice we must admit that Blake sometimes failed to make his vivid and living conceptions as clear to the world as he might have done, for the reason that he neglected to refer to Nature for the technique which after all is the language of Art. His art in this respect is somewhat like that of the Italian Trecenti, who uttered burning messages in a tongue which sometimes stammered. His impetuous soul never wholly achieved the mastery of material which only a prolonged and patient drudgery can give, but the images which hurtled from his imagination were so forceful and superabundant that mere fiery creation, the unburdening of the overloaded heart and brain, was the crying obligation which forced him ever onward, seeking relief often in the mere act of projection. It is always a wonder that he makes so few mistakes, his technique being manifestly deficient. When his drawing is right it is heroically, magnificently so, and even when incorrect, it is always of amazing power and almost convincing strength.