Page:The poetical works of William Blake - lyrical and miscellaneous.djvu/102

 xc PREFATORY MEMOIR

to use a plain word--as well as much that was noble and admirable; and this leaves an uneasy sense of insecurity in his reader, and casts a slur ver the whole body of the, author's work. For e must be a "queer fellow ' (to use one of Blake's n phrases) who, being sane, cau write the sort thing which, had it proceeded from a madman, e should recognize as altogether in character. t the present day, the word "enthusiast" bears only a secondary and diffused meaning, and is mostly a term of commendation; but in our older writers it deslgnate(a person of morbid spiritual and religious self-consciousness, a fanatic partly insane. )In both senses the word applies rightly to Blake. In his accustomed moods he is an enthusiast in the modern sense; a glorious enthusiast at whose feet we can sit in veneration, and hear divine strains from his llps, and see his hand prolific in magical creations. But there are moments not unfrequent when he becomes an enthusiast in the older sense, and then we are permitted to close our ears and eyes; under penalty, if we open them, of being forced to pronounce the words thick-coming and contorted jargon, and the pencilled forms an indiscriminate shadow-dance.

The imputation of madness seems to have beset Blake from his earliest years: it is not simply a deduction arrived at by those who have conned his completed work with amazement. "One day," writes Mr. Gilchrist with reference to the artist's childhood, "a traveller was telling bright wonders of some foreign city. ' Do you call that splendid ?' broke in young Blake. ' I should call a city splendid in' which the houses were of gold,