The harmless Hayley, who was a fool, but a gentleman and a poet (a country gentleman and a very minor poet), provoked Blake’s indignation by giving him commissions for miniatures when he wanted to do something else, probably frescoes as big as the house. Blake wrote the epigram—
“If Hayley knows the thing you cannot do,
That is the very thing he’ll set you to.”
And then, feeling that there was a lack of colour and warmth in the portrait, he lightly added, for no reason in particular, the lines—
“And when he could not act upon my wife,
Hired a villain to bereave my life.”
There is, apparently, no trace here of any allusion to fact. Hayley never tried to bereave anybody’s life. He lacked even the adequate energy. Nevertheless I should not say for a moment that this startling fiction proved Blake to be mad. It proved him to be violent and recklessly suspicious; but there was never the least doubt that he was that. But now turn to another poem of Blake’s, a merely romantic and narrative poem called “Fair Eleanor,” which is all about somebody acting on somebody else’s wife. Here we find the same line repeated word for word in quite another connection—
“Hired a villain to bereave my life.”
It is not a musical line; it does not resemble English grammar to any great extent. Yet Blake is somehow forced to put it into a poem about a real person exactly as he had put it into an utterly different poem about a fictitious person. There seems no particular reason for writing it even once; but he has to write it again and again. This is what I do call a mad spot on the mind. I should not call Blake mad for hating Hayley or for boiling Hayley (though he had done him nothing but kindness), or for making up any statements however monstrous or mystical about Hayley. I should not in the least degree think that Blake was mad if he had said that he saw Hayley’s soul in hell, that it had green hair, one eye, and a serpent for a nose. A man may have a wild vision without being insane; a man may have a lying vision without being insane. But I should smell insanity if in turning over Blake’s books I found that this one pictorial image obsessed him apart from its spiritual meaning; if I found that the arms of the Black Prince in “King Edward III.” were a cyclops vert rampant, nosed serpentine; if I found that Flaxman was praised for his kindness to a one-eyed animal with green bristles and a snaky snout; if Albion or Ezekiel had appeared to Blake and commanded him to write a history of the men in the moon, who are one-eyed, green-haired, with long curling noses; if any flimsy sketch or fine decorative pattern that came from Blake’s pencil might reproduce ceaselessly and meaninglessly the writhing proboscis and the cyclopean eye. I should call that morbidity or even madness; for it would be the triumph of the palpable image over its own intellectual meaning. And there is something of that madness in the dark obstinacy or weakness that makes Blake introduce again and again these senseless scraps of rhyme, as if they were spells to keep off the devil.
In four or five different poems, without any apparent connection with those poems, occur these two extraordinary lines—