To-day, however, there is an undercurrent of popular opinion—a small stream, but strong—that recognizes him for what he is, and his name is sacred as that of the great High Priest of Spiritual Art, to those who compose it.
It is noticeable that none of those who were personally acquainted with him, save perhaps Crabb Robinson, ever gave credence to the prevailing notion that he was mad: strongly do they condemn such a verdict. He was eccentric, abnormally developed on the spiritual side, and undisciplined in thought and speech. The mystic in him finally all but destroyed the poet, though it never arrested the magnificent development of his artistic genius. Again, much that is strange and difficult of apprehension in Blake may be traced to the fact that his mind lacked the firm basis, the just and right power of thinking, that comes from a sound education. As a matter of fact, capriciously self-educated as he was, his ignorance of ordinary rudimentary knowledge was as extraordinary as his acquaintance with much that is caviar to the ordinary intellect.
“Celui qui a l’imagination sans érudition a des ailes et n’a pas de pieds.” And so it was with Blake. But it does not detract one iota from the illuminating quality of the thoughts which flash as it were from a heaven in his brain in times of creative inspiration. Blake on the wing has a strange beauty, a swift, direct and strenuous flight that thrills and awes the imaginative spectator. It is only when this wild wonderful creature is caught and entangled in theories and systems and human reasoning, that we may not give him our intellectual adherence.
Other causes which appear to give colour to the theory that he was mad are the following: Blake had no curious regard or nice care for words, but used them at random in speech, just as they came to hand, and as he cherished numerous violent prejudices it naturally followed that he often expressed them in very emphatic and often unreasonable language. Passionate partisan as he was of the world of imagination as against the world of fact, he assumed an attitude of defiance to natural science and its oldest established facts which seemed to those who had not the key to Blake’s mind simply insane or at the best puerile.
So accustomed was he to misunderstanding, that when strangers tried to draw him out he seems purposely to have indulged in exaggeration and symbolic language to baffle and mystify them. In ordinary intercourse, as in his art and poetry, he seems to have had no care to put his mind and his listeners or spectators en rapport with his own. That magical sympathy which some men know so well how to establish like a living current between their own and other minds before “speaking the truth that is in them,” was not one of Blake’s gifts. The sympathetic standpoint for observance or understanding he expected from those who would be at the pains to find out his meaning. “Let them that have ears, hear—if they can, and if they be not too tightly shut into their selfhoods, and their senses not clogged beyond cleansing with the dust and litter of materialism,” he would seem to say.
Examining into the vexed question of Blake’s visions, whether they were the apparitions of an unsound mind, the automatic picture-making of a vivid imagination, or the visual apprehension of supernatural appearances, we shall see that madness is not the key to them, though we shall have to admit a certain want of balance and proportion in his intellectual life.
Sometimes one is tempted to think that he had eyes that saw the visible loveliness and manifest images in which Plato supposes that Ideas exist in the spiritual universe. Which being so, it is not wonderful that he was called mad, for the Greek philosopher himself said that “this is the most excellent of all forms of enthusiasm (or possession), and that the lover who has a share of this madness is called a lover of the beautiful.” Our artist was a seer such as Plato meant, but his is a figurative rather than an actual description of the mental operations which suspend such visions before the prophet’s eye.
All the writers on Blake—Allan Cunningham, Alexander Gilchrist, James Smetham, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, Sir Richard Garnett—have discussed the subject, but I find the most illuminating passage in an article by James Smetham included in the second volume of Gilchrist’s “Life,” which I shall take leave to quote, for its matter could never be better stated: “Thought with Blake leaned largely to the side of imagery rather than to the side of organized philosophy, and we shall have to be on our guard, while reading the record of his views and opinions, against the dogmatism which was more frequently based on exalted fancies than on the rock of abiding reason and truth. The conceptive faculty working with a perception of facts singularly narrow and imperfect, projected every idea boldly into the sphere of the actual. What he thought, he saw, to all intents and purposes, and it was this sudden and sharp crystallization of inward notions into outward and visible signs which produced the impression on many beholders that reason was unseated.... We cannot but on the whole lean to the opinion that somewhere in the wonderful compound of flesh and spirit, somewhere in those recesses where the one runs into the other, he was ‘slightly touched,’ and by so doing we shall save ourselves the necessity of attempting to defend certain phases of his work” (such as much of the literary part of the prophetic books) “while maintaining an unqualified admiration for the mass and manner of his thoughts.” This seems a just opinion. The colloquialism “slightly touched” (just that and nothing but that) is the very phrase to express this elusive, almost indefinable condition of mind. In all mankind living in conditions of time and space, a certain adjustment of themselves to these conditions, and to each other, is a necessary function of existence. The failure to comply with such an adjustment was Blake’s strength and weakness—the defect of his quality.
As I have said before, he firmly believed in his own inspiration, and with reason. For a mood of trance-like absorption would come upon him, his soul would be rapt in an ecstasy, he was disturbed by no impressions of earthly persons or surroundings, but was for the time being alone with his quickening vision. At such moments his mind’s eye was but the retina on which God Himself projected the image. And he would permit no criticism, no questioning of work which seemed to him not his own, but produced through divine agency.
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.)