Page:William Blake (Chesterton).djvu/96

 WILLIAM BLAKE studied the stars like Newton. But something, when all is said and done, had eaten away whole parts of that powerful brain, leaving parts of it standing like great Greek pillars in a desert. What was this thing?

is not an anarchy. Madness is a bondage; a contraction. I will not call Blake mad because of anything he would say. But I will call him mad in so far as there was anything he must say. Now, there are notes of this tyranny in Blake. It was not like the actual disease of the mind that makes a man believe he is a cat or a dog; it was more like the disease of the nerves, which makes a man say "dog" when he means "cat." One mental jump or jerk of this nature may be especially remarked in Blake. He had in his poetry one very peculiar habit, a habit which cannot be considered quite sane. It was the habit of being haunted, one may say hag-ridden by a fixed phrase, which gets itself written in ten separate poems on quite different subjects, when it had no apparent connection with any of them. The amusing 84