Page:William Blake, painter and poet.djvu/91

Rh Prince Polignac brought the monarchy of the Restoration to ruin in deference to imaginary revelations from the Virgin Mary, yet no court of law would ever have placed him under restraint. With Blake not the faintest suggestion of such a thing is possible. Except for one or two incidents, related upon doubtful authority, he appears throughout his life in the light of an exemplary citizen, and in his unselfishness and unworldliness contrasts with his Sadducasan neighbours in a way that forbids us to call him mentally diseased, though he may have been mentally warped. The value of his mystical utterances is quite another question. The occasional splendour of the poetry in which they are couched will not be disputed, any more than their general confusion and obscurity. Commentators have striven hard to elicit the sunbeam from the cucumber; we pass no judgment on their efforts, further than may seem to be implied in the observation that in our opinion the chief mission of Blake's mystical poetry was to be the vehicle of his finest and most characteristic art. His ideas, many profound and worthy of close attention, may, we think, be more advantageously collected from his prose aphorisms and the fragments of his conversation; and in this respect he is by no means singular. The one great achievement which unquestionably entitles him to the distinction of an inspired man, is to have produced in boyhood, without set purpose or any clear consciousness of what he was doing, lyrics recalling the golden prime of English poetry, and instinct with a music to which, since Chatterton was no more, no contemporary save Burns was capable of making the slightest approach. It is true that reaction against artifice and conventionality was in the air of the time, and was already announced by evident symptoms. To compare, however, the highly creditable efforts in this direction of even such poets as Cowper and Mickle with the achievements of this stripling is to become sensible at once of the difference between talent and inspiration.

Blake's gifts and shortcomings as an artist are sufficiently revealed by the examples of his work which accompany this essay. It need merely be remarked here that, apart from the great army of artists of genius who move on recognised lines, transmitting the succession from the age of Zeuxis and Phidias to our own, there is, as it were, a parallel column skirting it on the by-roads of art; and that at certain periods of Art's history the genius which has forsaken the more conspicuous of her