blake’s poetry, with the exception of four or five lovely lyrics and here and there in the other pieces a startling gleam of unquestionable genius, is mere drivel. a sensible person can easily distinguish between that which he cannot understand and that in which there is nothing to be understood. mr. w. rossetti, who is an enthusiast for “the much-maligned paris commune” and for blake’s poetry, says of some of the latter, where it is nearly at its worst, “we feel its potent and arcane influence, but cannot dismember this into articulated meanings.” this sentence, if put into less exalted english, expresses tolerably well the aspect of mind with which we regard much of the writing of the prophets and of the great ancient and modern mystics. some light of their meaning forces itself through the, in most cases, purposely obscure cloud of their words and imagery; but when, by chance,{98} a glimpse of the disk itself is caught, it is surprisingly strong, bright, and intelligible. such writers are only spoken of with irreverence by those that would have given their verdict in favour of the famous irishman who, being confronted with one witness swearing to having seen him take a handkerchief from another gentleman’s pocket, brought four who testified with equal solemnity to not having seen him do any such thing. the obvious rule in regard to such writers is, “when you cannot understand a man’s ignorance, think yourself ignorant of his understanding.” again, if a man’s sayings are wholly unintelligible to us, he may claim the benefit of a small possibility of a doubt that his meanings may be too great and necessarily “arcane” for our powers of reception. but when a writer’s works consist of a few passages of great beauty and such simplicity that a child may understand them—like blake’s “chimney-sweep,” “tiger,” “piping down the valleys wild,” “why was cupid a boy?” and “auguries of innocence”—and a great deal more that is mere ill-expressed but perfectly intelligible platitude and commonplace mixed with petty spite, and a far larger quantity still which to the ear of the natural understanding is mere gibberish, he has no right to claim, as blake does, that the latter shall be regarded as plenarily inspired, or, indeed, as being{99} anything better than the delirious rubbish it obviously is.
mr. w. rossetti, though he goes a great way further in his admiration of blake than reason can be shown for, does the cause of reason a good service in declaring his opinion that the poet was probably mad. “when,” says he, “i find a man pouring forth conceptions and images for which he professes himself not responsible, and which are in themselves in the highest degree remote, nebulous, and intangible, and putting some of these, moreover, into words wherein congruent sequence and significance of expression or analogy are not to be traced, then i cannot resist a strong presumption that that man was in some true sense of the word mad.” as pope “could not take his tea without a stratagem,” so blake could not “mix his colours with diluted glue” without declaring that “the process was revealed to him by st. joseph”; and it was the ghost of his brother who taught him the new, though, had we not been told otherwise, the not supernaturally wonderful device of saving the expense of ordinary typography by etching the words of his verses on the copper plate which bore their illustrations. blake was morally as well as intellectually mad; proposing on one occasion, for example, that his wife should allow him to introduce a second partner to his bed, and{100} doing so with a bona fide unconsciousness of anything amiss in such a suggestion as perfect as that with which shelley urged his wife to come and share the delights of a tour in switzerland with him and his mistress mary godwin.
that “great wits to madness nearly are allied” is not true; but it is not only true but psychologically explicable that small “geniuses” often are so. most children are geniuses before the dawn of moral and intellectual responsibilities; and there are some who remain, not children, but moral and intellectual manikins, all their lives. it must be confessed that conscience makes, not only cowards, but more or less dullards, of us all. the child, that
mighty prophet, seer blest,
on whom those truths do rest
which we are toiling all our lives to find,
owes his power of vision to his not being able to see the flaming sword of conscience which turns every way, and hinders all men but a very few from getting a glimpse through the closed gates of paradise. yet it is better to be a purblind man with a conscience than a seeing manikin with none. it is better still, and best of all, when the man of developed intellect and fully accepted responsibilities retains a cherished memory of and an innocent sympathy with the knowledge that came{101} to him in childhood and early youth, and uses his trained powers of expression in order to make the world partakers of those thoughts and feelings which had no tongue when they first arose in him, and leave no memory in the mass of men until the man of true and sane genius touches chords of recollection that would otherwise have slept in them for ever. one of the few really good things ever said by hazlitt is that “men of genius spend their lives in teaching the world what they themselves learned before they were twenty.”
for the time, however, the manikin type of genius is all the fashion, especially with a class of critics who have it in their power to give notoriety, if they cannot give fame. craziness alone passes at present for a strong presumption of genius, and where genius is really found in company therewith it is at once pronounced “supreme.” this is partly because most people can see that craziness has something abnormal about it, and are ready, therefore, to identify it with genius, of which most persons only know that it also is “abnormal”; and partly because the manikin mind is always red republican, and ardent in its hatred of kings, priests, “conventions,” the “monopoly” of property and of women, and all other hindrances put in the way of virtue, liberty, and happiness by the wicked “civilizee.{102}”
blake, as an artist, is a more important figure than blake the poet; and naturally so, for the smallest good poem involves a consecutiveness and complexity of thought which are only required in paintings of a character which blake rarely attempted. yet, even as a painter his reputation has until lately been much exaggerated. the recent exhibition of his collected drawings and paintings was a great blow to the fame which had grown up from a haphazard acquaintance by his admirers with a few sketches or an illustrated poem. here and there there was a gleam of such pure and simple genius as is often revealed in the speech of a finely natured child amid its ordinary chatter; here and there the expression of a tender or distempered dream, which was not like anything else in the spectator’s experience; now and then an outline that had a look of michael angelo, with sometimes hints which might have formed the themes of great works, and which justified the saying of fuseli that “blake is damned good to steal from”; but the effect of the whole collection was dejecting and unimpressive, and did little towards confirming its creator’s opinion that titian, reynolds, and gainsborough were bad artists, and blake, barry, and fuseli good ones.
