Page:The sanity of William Blake.djvu/25

 Rh man will at last find sympathy and true understanding.

But to grasp the true worth of Blake's message, we must enquire still further into the sanity of the multitude. And to this end it will prove convenient to subdivide the sane class into three, though they over-lap and intermingle.

(i.) The sanity of the first is measured by their limitations in seeing. We appoint perhaps as their vestal virgin a certain servant-girl of Samuel Palmer, that brilliant painter-etcher and most devoted disciple of Blake. She had declared in the kitchen, and solely on the strength of her own keen-eyed perspicacity, that her master must be mad, because he would recite poetry to himself and had hung on the drawing-room walls, she declared, two framefuls of tailor's patterns. The accusations looked grave indeed. And we quite justify the maid's election to the sacred vestal-virginship, when we learn that these tailors' patterns were some of William Blake's masterpieces, to wit, his only attempts at wood-engraving, the celebrated Pastorals! This first subdivision of the class of Facts holds as its maxim that if things look more like what