Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/183

 Rh call "humility." Such a man need not have died; "Caiaphas would forgive" if one "died with Christian ease asking pardon" after your "humble" fashion:—

and such an one might have become a very Cæsar's minion, or Caesar himself. Though of course mainly made up of violent quibbling and perversities of passionate humour, which falls to work in this vehement way upon words as some personal relief (a relief easily conceivable in Blake's case by any student of his life), all this has also its value in helping us to measure according to what light we may have in us the stronger and weaker, the worse and better, the graver and lighter sides of the man. It belongs evidently to the period when he painted portraits of the dead and transcribed Jerusalem from spiritual dictation. "This," he lets us know by way of prelude or opening note, "is what Joseph of Arimathæa said to my Fairy," or natural spiritual part by which he conversed with spirits. Next in his defiant doggrel he calls on "Pliny and Trajan"—heathen learning and heathen power or goodness—to "come before Joseph of Arimathæa" and "listen patient." "What, are you here?" he asks as if in the direct surprise of vision. (I will not give these roughest notes in the perfection of their pure doggrel. As verse, serious or humorous, they are irreclaimable and intolerable; what empirical value they may have must be wrung out of them with all haste.)