Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/24

xviii ordinary typography. Probably what he meant was that the engraving and printing of lettering and design simultaneously was less expensive than intaglio engraving and letterpress, printed separately by two different processes. The qualification should, of course, be understood, that to produce books in Blake's manner the author must be, as he was, his own artist, engraver, and printer.

Little is known of the life of William Blake, though our ignorance is comfortably veiled from us in several existing biographies. It may be confessed at once that with regard to what Blake called his 'vegetative existence' we are almost wholly in the dark. The slightness of our knowledge of the events of his material career is, however, of little consequence. Blake's real life was a mental and spiritual one. And the only true biography must be that in which his own writings, rather than petty contemporary gossip, are made the foundation of an endeavour to trace this mental and spiritual development. To understand him, some degree of intellectual sympathy with an uncommon mind and temper is desirable, and a larger visionary endowment than that which he esteemed the merely deceptive faculty of 'seeing with, and not through, the eye.' We need too some deeper study than has yet been attempted of the sources from which he received and absorbed his ideas—notably the influence of the Wesleyan revival, his precise debt to Swedenborg, and later, the manner in which the doctrines of the French Revolution affected one who, although the very opposite of reactionary, was antagonistic to the scientific spirit in all its works and ways. Such a task should not be undertaken with slight equipment, or in a spirit of condescension towards 'our good Blake,' the somewhat illiterate, but amiable enthusiast, who, though 'slightly touched,' was capable now and then of happy flights of fancy which are to be sought for as oases in the Sahara of his writings. To some of those who have