sic, even in
dancing--certainly in the symbolic dancing of Isadora Duncan--even
in the stage decorations of our Little Theatres, one traces the
mystical impulse he set in motion, and the austere lineaments, not
exactly classical or mediaeval, but partaking of the nature of both, of
his elemental evocations.

It were, of course, not really possible to suppose that all these
people--all the most imaginative and interesting artists of our
day--definitely subjected themselves to the influence of William Blake.
The more rational way of accounting for the extraordinary
resemblance is to conceive that Blake, by some premonitory
inspiration of the world-spirit "brooding upon things to come,"
anticipated in an age more emotionally alien to our own than that of
Apuleius or of St. Anselm, the very "body and pressure" of the
dreams that were to dominate the earth.

When one considers how between the age of Blake and the one in
which we now live, extend no less than three great epochs of
intellectual taste, the thing becomes almost as strange as one of his
own imaginations.

The age of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen, of Wordsworth and
Byron, followed immediately upon his. Then we have the age of
Thackeray and Tennyson and the great Mid-Victorians. Then finally
at the end of the nineteenth century we have the epoch dominated in
art by Aubrey Beardsley, and in literature by Swinburne and Oscar
Wilde.

Now in our own age--an age that feels as though Wilde himself were
growing a little old-fashioned--we find ourselves returning to
William Blake and discovering him to be more entirely in harmony
with the instincts of our most secret souls than any single genius we
could name actually working in our midst. It is as though to find our
completest expression, the passionate and mystical soul of our
materialistic age were driven back to an author who lived a hundred
years ago. This phenomenon is by no means unknown in the history
of the pilgrimage of the human spirit; but it has never presented
itself in so emphatic a form as in the case of this extraordinary
person.

In the early ages of the world, the result without doubt would be
some weird deification of the clairvoyant prophet. William Blake
would become a myth, a legend, an avatar of the divine Being, a
Buddha, a Zoroaster, a wandering Dionysus. As it is, we are forced
to confine ourselves to the fascinating pleasure of watching in
individual cases, this or that modern soul,