Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/439

 Rh having been a fabrication. Once, it is said, the visionaryman was walking down Cheapside with a friend. Suddenly he took off his hat and bowed low, 'What did you do that for?' 'Oh! that was the Apostle Paul.' A story quite out of keeping with the artist's ordinary demeanour towards his spiritual visitants, though quite in unison with the accepted notions as to ghosts and other apparitions with whom the ghost-seer is traditionally supposed to have tangible personal relations. Blake's was not that kind of vision. The spirits which appeared to him did not reveal themselves in palpable, hand-shaking guise, nor were they mistaken by him for bodily facts. He did not claim for them an external, or (in German slang) an objective existence.

In Blake, imagination was by nature so strong, by himself had been so much fostered and, amid the solitude in which he lived, had been so little interfered with by the ideas of others, that it had grown to a disproportionate height so as to overshadow every other faculty. He relied on it as on a revelation of the Invisible. The appearances thus summoned before his mental eye were implicitly trusted in, not dismissed as idle phantoms as an ordinary—even an imaginative—man dismisses them. Hence his bonâ fide 'portraits' of visionary characters, such as those drawn for John Varley. And to this genuine faith is due the singular difference in kind between his imaginative work and that of nearly every other painter who has left a record of himself Such is the explanation which all who knew the man personally give of what seemed mere madness to the world.

And here let us finally dispose of this vexed question of Blake's 'madness;' the stigma which, in its haste to arrive at some decision on an unusual phenomenon, the world has fastened on him, as on many other notable men before. Was he a 'glorious madman,' according to the assumption of those who knew nothing of him personally, little of his works, nothing of the genesis of them—of the deep though wayward spiritual currents of which they were the unvarying exponent?