Page:William Blake (Chesterton).djvu/89

 WILLIAM BLAKE called indecency appeared in his pictures, his opinions, and to some extent in his conduct. But it was an idealistic indecency. Blake's mistake was not so much that he aimed at sin as that he aimed at an impossible and inhuman sinlessness. It is said that he proposed to his wife that they should live naked in their back garden like Adam and Eve. If the husband ever really proposed this, the wife succeeded in averting it. But in his verse and prose, particularly in some of the Prophetic Books, he began to talk very wildly. However far he really meant to go against common morality, he certainly meant (like Walt Whitman) to go the whole way against common decency. He professed to regard the veiling of the most central of human relations as the unnatural cloaking of a natural work. He was never at a loss for an effective phrase; and in one of his poems on this topic he says finely if fallaciously—

But his speculations went past decorum and at least touched the idea of primary law. In 77