Page:William Blake (IA williamblake00ches).pdf/99

 mad if he had said that he saw Hayley's soul in hell, that it had green hair, one eye, and a serpent for a nose. A man may have a wild vision without being insane; a man may have a lying vision without being insane. But I should smell insanity if in turning over Blake's books I found that this one pictorial image obsessed him apart from its spiritual meaning; if I found that the arms of the Black Prince in "King Edward III." were a cyclops vert rampant, nosed serpentine; if I found that Flaxman was praised for his kindness to a one-eyed animal with green bristles and a snaky snout; if Albion or Ezekiel had appeared to Blake and commanded him to write a history of the men in the moon, who are one-eyed, green-haired, with long curling noses; if any flimsy sketch or fine decorative pattern that came from Blake's pencil might reproduce ceaselessly and meaninglessly the writhing proboscis and the cyclopean eye. I should call that morbidity or even madness; for it would be the triumph of the palpable image over its own intellectual meaning. And there is something of that madness in the dark obstinacy or weakness that makes Blake introduce again