Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/438

 364 outward and visible signs which produced the impression, on many beholders, that reason was unseated.'

According to his own explanation, Blake saw spiritual appearances by the exercise of a special faculty—that of imagination—using the word in the then unusual, but true sense, of a faculty which busies itself with the subtler realities, not with fictions. He, on this ground, objected even to Shakespeare's expression—

He said the things imagination saw were as much realities as were gross and tangible facts. He would tell his artist-friends, 'You have the same faculty as I (the visionary), only you do not trust or cultivate it. You can see what I do, if you choose.' In a similiar spirit was his advice to a young painter: 'You have only to work up imagination to the state of vision, and the thing is done.' After all, he did but use the word vision in precisely the same sense in which Wordsworth uses it to designate the poet's special endowment; as when he speaks of Chaucer as one

The only difference is, that Blake was for applying the word boldly in detail, instead of merely as a general term. And why not? What word could more happily express the truth .'* In short, his belief in what he himself 'saw in vision,' was not as in a material, but a spiritual fact—to his mind a more real kind of fact. The greater importance of the latter was one of his leading canons. He was, moreover, inclined, metaphysically, to be a follower of Bishop Berkeley,—a disbeliever in matter, as I have already said. Extravagant and apocryphal stories have passed current about Blake. One—which I believe Leigh Hunt used to tell — bears internal evidence, to those who understand Blake, of