Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/443

 down everyone who is eccentric as mad. Alas! how many now in Bedlam, are there for disorders of soul (spirit), and not of the body?' A similar suspicion to this Blake himself would sometimes hazard, viz. that 'there are probably men shut up as mad in Bedlam, who are not so: that possibly the madmen outside have shut up the sane people.' Which, by the way, is not the kind of talk a madman, or a man conscious of lying under such a suspicion among his friends, would indulge in. Madmen, and those suspected of madness, do not make common cause with the mad; they rather shun, or take side against them, as animals treat a diseased or wounded comrade. Above all, a madman, with his uneasy sense of his own true condition, has a sensitive horror of so personal a topic and cunningly avoids it.

One ground of the exaggerated misconception of Blake's eccentricities prevalent among those who had heard about Blake rather than sat at his feet,—those strange 'visions' of his, we have accounted for quite consistently with sanity. As we said, he, in conversation with his friends, admitted so much,—viz. the inchoate power of others to see the same things he saw,-— as to eliminate any outrageous extravagance from his pretensions as a soothsayer. Bearing on this point, it is to be remarked that a madman insists on others seeing as he sees. But Blake did not expect his companion of the moment, John Varley, or Mrs. Blake, to behold the visionary spectres summoned from the void before his eyes, of prophet, king, and poet.

One curious but indubitable historical fact is worth remembrance here. It is full of suggestion in connexion with our present subject. For Blake was, in spirit, a denizen of other and earlier ages of the world than the present mechanical one to which chance had rudely transplanted him. It is within the last century or so, that 'the heavens have gone further off,' as Hazlitt put it. The supernatural world has during that period removed itself further from civilised, cultivated humanity than it was ever before—in all time, heathen