Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/154

to him from elsewhere, Blake's genius was essentially Gothic, and took form, I doubt not, during those six years of youth when he drew the monuments in Westminster Abbey, and in the old churches about London. He might have learned much from the tombs in the Abbey, and from the brasses, and from the carved angels in the chapels, and from the naive groups on the screen in the chapel of Edward the Confessor, and from the draped figures round the sarcophagus of Aymer de Valence. There is often, in Blake's figures, something of the monumental stiffness of Gothic stone, as there is in the minute yet formal characterisation of the faces. His rendering of terrible and evil things, the animal beings who typify the passions and fierce distortions of the soul, have the same childlike detail, content to be ludicrous if it can only be faithful to a distinct conception, of the carvers of gargoyles and of Last Judgments. Blake has, too, the same love of pattern for its own sake, the same exuberance of ornament, always living and organic, growing out of the structure of the design or out of the form of the page, not added to it from