Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/446

 372 it out,' &c. He believed them only in a non-natural sense. If it gave him pleasure to think of the welkin, as the old Hebrews did, as a smooth surface which he might feel with his hand, he would believe it as well as he could; contending (among friends) that the idea had a spiritual reality. For, to recur to the explanation of his character I lately quoted, he was 'not mad, but perverse and wilful;' believing a thing because he chose to do so. His reasoning powers were far inferior, as are, more or less, those of all artists, to his perceptive, above all to his perceptions of beauty. He elected his opinions because they seemed beautiful to him, and fulfilled 'the desires of his mind.' Then he would find reasons for them. Thus, Christianity was beautiful to him, and was accepted even more because it satisfied his love of spiritual beauty, than because it satisfied his religious and moral sense. Again, the notion was attractive and beautiful to him that 'Christianity is Art,' and conversely, that 'Art is Christianity:' therefore he believed it. And it became one of his standing theological canons, which, in his sibylline writings, he is for ever reiterating.

Both in his books and in conversation, Blake was a vehement assertor; (try decisive and very obstinate in his opinions, when he had at once taken them up. And he was impatient of control, or of a law in anything,—in his Art, in his opinions on morals, religion, or what not. If artists be divided into the disciplined and undisciplined, he must fall under the latter category. To this, as well as to entire want of discipline in the literary art, was due much of the incoherence in his books and design; incoherence and wildness, which is another source of the general inference embodied by Wordsworth and Southey, who knew him only in his poems, when they described him as a man 'of great, but undoubtedly insane genius.' If for insane we read undisciplined, or ill-balanced, I think we shall hit the truth.

I have spoken of Blake's daring heterodoxy on religious topics. He not only believed in a pre-existent state, but