We never cease to marvel that persons who are “mad” can create or copy so masterfully that the admiration of contemporaries is compelled and the gratitude of posterity earned. This, despite the long list of accomplishments in the world of art and letters by men who have been potentially or actually mad.
Mr. Bruce opens one of his chapters with the sentence: “Blake, in other words, was neurotic.” Now, the word “neurotic” must have some very specific meaning for our young author, otherwise he would not declare himself in this dramatic way. If William Blake was neurotic, there is no indication of it in Mr. Bruce’s book. William Blake was psychotic. He had what is called for purposes of facile designation a manic-depressive temperament. The manic-depressive temperament can be described with the same specificity as pneumonia; practically the only thing about it that we do not know is its cause, but it is only very recently that we have known the cause of pneumonia. I do not consider that this is the proper place for the disquisition on the individual psychic functions, particularly on the one known as affectivity, which would be necessary were I to make a readily comprehensible description of the manic-depressive psychosis, whether it reveals itself in shadowy outlines or majestic proportions. Mr. Bruce writes, “To say confidently that Blake suffered from mythomania, or from automatism, or from occasional hyperæsthesia, or from manic-depressive tendencies, or that he did not tend toward a definite schizophrenia is to add polysyllables rather than illumination to the discussion of his state.” This is an attitude of preciosity on the part of Mr. Bruce that is very offensive to me. If he does not know what “schizophrenia” means, then he should consult a dictionary and not display his infirmities to the world. If he knows a better word, that is a more comprehensive or a more descriptive word for personality cleavage, I suggest that he submit it. What further illumination concerning the mental processes of an individual can be desired than is conveyed in the statement that he is a manic-depressive personality, or that he displayed the manifestations of the mental disorder known as the manic-depressive psychosis?
A few years ago, in a book entitled Idling in Italy, I said anent Giovanni Papini (who in 1920 was quite unknown to the American public) that no one unfamiliar with the disorder of the mind called manic-depressive psychosis could fully understand him.
There is no one more sane and businesslike than the former Futurist, yet the reactions of his supersensitive nature have great similarity with this mental disorder, present, in embryo, in many people. In every display of the manic-depressive temperament, there is a period of emotional, physical and intellectual activity that surmounts every obstacle, brushes aside every barrier, leaps over every hurdle. During its dominancy, the victim respects neither law nor convention; the goal is his only object. He does not always know where he is going and he is not concerned with it; he is concerned only with going. When the spectator sees the road over which he has travelled on his winged horse he finds it littered with the débris that Pegasus has trampled upon and crushed.
This period of hyperactivity is invariably followed by a time of depression, of inadequacy, of emotional barrenness, of intellectual sterility, of physical impotency, of spiritual frigidity. The sun from which the body and the soul have had their warmth and their glow falls below the horizon of the unfortunate’s existence and he senses the terrors of the dark and the rigidity of beginning congelation. Then, when hope and warmth have all but gone and only life, mere life without colour or emotion remains, and the necessity of living forever in a world perpetually enshrouded in darkness with no differentiation in the débris remaining after the tornado, then the sun gradually peeps up, illuminates, warms, revives, fructifies the earth, and the sufferer becomes normal—normal save in the moments or hours of fear when he contemplates having again to brave the hurricane or to breast the deluge. But once the wind begins to blow with a velocity that bespeaks the re-advent of the tornado, he throws off inhibition and goes out in the open, holds up the torch that shall light the whole world, and with his megaphone from the top of Helicon shouts: “This way to the revolution.”
I contend that any one who will read even the summaries of the chapters of Mr. Bruce’s book will need no further evidence to be convinced that William Blake, who had “everywhere the poet’s firm persuasion that things were so, who stuck to a choice that was contemned, to a taste that was laughed at”; who was as immune to ridicule as a tortoise is to admonition; who spoke his mind on all occasions even when it clashed with authority; who, like the master potter, knew, knew, knew; who swung backward and forward from high exaltation to pits of melancholy; who listened to messengers from heaven daily and nightly and composed under their dictation a poem which he considered the grandest that this world contained, even though he was never able to find one purchaser; who received Richard Cœur-de-Lion at a quarter past twelve, midnight, and painted his portrait though he had been dead several centuries; who displayed a persecutory state of mind when he was depressed, and a self-sufficiency that brooked no curbing when he was exalted; who took no thought for the morrow and was as unable to take care of himself as a two-year-old child, was of manic-depressive temperament. That he escaped being sent to Bethlehem Hospital, vulgarly called Bedlam, entitles him to our belated congratulations.
When Mr. Bruce ceases to be annoying about adjectives, he is both amusing and amazing. “William Blake had the neurotic’s need for dependence on some one outside himself.” A neurotic is an individual who has some nervous disorder or disease, functional or organic. A typical nervous disorder is migraine, sick headache. I could easily enumerate a score of the world’s great men and women who were thus afflicted. What was their need for dependence on some one outside themselves? “He had the neurotic’s sense of time.” What can that possibly be? Was it the sense of time that Dostoievsky had just before the convulsions appeared that attended his epileptic attacks? Dostoievsky was a neurotic—one of the most typical that ever lived, perhaps. He maintained that the few seconds previous to the motor manifestation of an attack were a timeless eternity. If it lasted another fractional part of a second, he could not possibly survive it. Did William Blake have this kind of sense of time?
He could not tolerate a pedantic, pretentious, stupid, pachydermatous patron, William Hayley. According to Sinclair Lewis there are only two races of people, the neurotic and the stupid: William Hayley was stupid, William Blake was neurotic. At least, it can be said of this reasoning that it offers a better foundation for Mr. Bruce’s thesis than that which he has heretofore provided.
William Blake was a happy man, for he believed in himself. He was a lucky man—his wife believed in him. He was a courageous man: he threw a trespassing sailor, emboldened by strong drink, out of his garden and was tried for high treason. Yet he patiently tolerated the inquisitive visits of the greatest bore of his time, Crabb Robinson, without even threat of assault. He did not get his just deserts from his contemporaries, but posterity has more than made up for their niggardliness, and Mr. Bruce has given posterity a leg up. Had he dwelt more on the value and significance of Blake’s art and less on his “neurosis” he would have served us better. But his book is a snappy, concise, readable account of a man who had faith in himself and who, finally, compelled others to acknowledge his merit.