When a man is right about visions we call him a telepathist, a prophet, or a magician; when wrong, he passes for a madman. The day will come when we shall be sane enough ourselves to remember that in these difficult subjects he may be wrong without being mad, for he is more likely to be wrong than right, and that in reasoning normally about his abnormal experiences he is practically certain to talk as though he had lost his reason.

Crabb Robinson's notes about Blake's later visions tell us so many interesting things, and with so evident a sincere avoidance of exaggeration, that he must be quoted at some length. There are two forms of his reminiscences, not in the same words. He altered and condensed the second from the first. The presence of some specially significant words in the condensed account, absent from Gilchrist's quotations from the original journals, suggests that these were doctored by the biographer.

In speaking of the 1820 period of visions Gilchrist notes that Varley's "critical friends" discovered traces of his receipt for a face" in them, and hints by this expression that they were all sham and made up to impose on Varley. Crabb Robinson, with similar ignorance of the working of the artistic mind, whether or not it is aided by the visionary mind, thinks he has found an inconsistency in Blake, which he notes. Here is the whole paragraph. It contains more than one obvious error of judgment:

There was nothing wild about his looks. Though very ready to be drawn out to the assertion of his favourite ideas, yet there was no warmth, as though he wanted to make proselytes. (The italics are ours; Crabb Robinson had not peeped into Blake's notebook and read—

He's a blockhead who wants a proof
Of what he can't perceive;
And he's a fool who tries to make
Such a blockhead believe.)

Indeed one of the peculiar features of his scheme, so far as it was consistent, was indifference, and a very extraordinary degree of tolerance and satisfaction with what had taken place-a sort of pious and humble optimism, not the scornful optimism of Candide. He warmly praised some compositions of Mr. Aders; and having brought for Aders an engraving of his Canterbury Pilgrims, he remarked that one of the figures in it resembled a figure in one of the works then in Aders' room, and that he had been accused of having stolen from it. But he added that he had drawn the figure in question twenty years before he had seen the original picture. "However, there is no wonder in the resemblance, as in my youth I was always studying that class of paintings." I have forgotten what the figure was. But his taste was

in close conformity with the old German school. This is somewhat at variance with what he said, both this day and afterwards-implying that he copied his visions.

It is, as we all know now, not at variance at all, only in supplement. His art did not always copy "vision," it often composed" like that of other people, and even when it copied "vision" it often copied visions that were altered or "infected" by other mental activities.

Blake certainly had the Socratic theory about art, that it is a proof when genius cannot analyse it of the existence of the gods. He said, "Art is inspiration. When Michelangelo or Raphael in their day, or Mr. Flaxman does one of his fine things he does them in the spirit." Blake gave Flaxman's name in this connection long after the quarrel with Flaxman about the "Screwmuch" conspiracy, and therefore after Flaxman, who had been accused of joining those who wished to keep down Blake's prices, refused all further intercourse. It is a pure piece of artistic magnanimity on Blake's part. He told Crabb Robinson that he had "seen Shakespeare," who was like his portraits, especially the "old engraving"; that he had seen Milton often, once "as a very old man" with a long flowing beard, and that Milton had asked him to correct in a poem or picture an error of his in Paradise Lost. "But I declined; I said I had my own duties to perform." The error that Milton wished corrected was that sexual intercourse grew out of the Fall-of course a most anti-Blakean view of the Fall, which did not very substantially prove the "devils' account" of it in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a marriage absolutely different from the erroneous reconciliation of contraries which leads to that hateful thing an aggregate, or bloated general form, that was in his mind connected with the evil idea "Morality," Jerusalem, page 91, line 27. Milton did not grow to be a very old man. He only lived sixty-six years on earth, and never wore a beard. We are in a "spiritual" sphere in this conversation. Voltaire came to Blake much and talked what might have been French, Blake said, but was English to his ear. Milton was perhaps a shaven spirit, but appearing to Blake was bearded to his eye. This again shows the impersonal surface, yet personal depth of these visions. Voltaire, in this wordless language, said to Blake, when speaking of his enemies, that they had blasphemed the Holy Ghost in him, which should not be forgiven, though it would be forgiven him that he had blasphemed the Son of Man.

He did not say that this had been forgiven him. Crabb Robinson does not seem to notice that the doctrine of Purgatory is implied here-a doctrine naturally absent from so practical a church as ours, practical in its dealings with a free and married clergy as well as with its laity. Voltaire was, said Blake, commissioned by God to expose the Scriptures when read in their literal sense.

The most important opinion on religion given by Blake, and the one that would have arrayed the narrower clergy against him more than all his belief in the "Saviour" would have attracted them, was that reading the Scriptures in the literal or natural sense takes all sublimity from the Bible." This is his answer to those who consider explaining the Biblical myths to be nothing else than "explaining away."

Crabb Robinson's note on Swedenborg and Dante is:

Incidentally Swedenborg was mentioned. (Blake) declared him to be a Divine teacher; he had done, and would do, much good, yet he did wrong in endeavouring to explain to the reason what it could not comprehend.

Did Swedenborg do so? Cannot the reason comprehend that a mask is a mask? Of course it, in Blake's use of the word, cannot be said to understand the face that Swedenborg claimed to have found under the Old Testament mask. Swedenborg himself says that we cannot comprehend it till we have "soaked ourselves" for long in our celestial mental faculties, and that it is "irksome" to the everyday parts of our minds the "Natural Man."

He seemed (Crabb Robinson goes on, speaking of Blake) to consider, but that was not clear, the visions of Swedenborg and Dante as the same kind. Dante was the greater poet! (When was Swedenborg anything but the essence of prose ?) Yet this did not appear to affect the estimation of Dante's genius (why should it ?) or his opinion of the truth of Dante's visions. Indeed when he even declared Dante to be an atheist it was accompanied by the highest admiration, "though," said he, "Dante saw devils where I saw none."

Crabb Robinson then puts down in his journal some “insulated remarks" of Blake :

Jacob Boehmen was placed among the divinely inspired men. He praised also the designs to Law's translation of Boehmen: "Michelangelo could not have surpassed them." "Bacon, Locke, and Newton are the three great teachers of Atheism, or Satan's doctrine." "Irving is a highly gifted man; he is a sent man, but they who are sent sometimes go further than they ought." (It will be remembered how Blake in his

notes to Lavater admits his own feeling of temptation to do this in order to produce more effect.) "I saw nothing but good in Calvin's house. In Luther's there were harlots." He declared his opinion that the earth is flat and not round, and just as I had objected the circumnavigation, dinner was announced.

It is a loss that this did not go further. Of course, around the size of the earth is an eternal plane to a spectator walking on it. Blake was speaking purely about its result on the emotions of man through his eye, by means of which we become what we behold," and the vision of the earth in each of us is that of a plain that leaves off at the horizon. It is even a cup, concave like a Mundane Shell."

By way of an example of the difference between the natural and spiritual sun (a very strong point with Swedenborg), Blake says to Crabb Robinson:

You never saw the spiritual sun? I have. I saw him on Primrose Hill. He said: "Do you take me for the Greek Apollo? No. That" (pointing to the sky) "is the Greek Apollo. He is Satan."

Readers of Jerusalem and Milton are grateful to Crabb Robinson for that. Satan: Apollo: Greek materialism, reason nature: death. Blake also said: " I know what is true by internal conviction-a doctrine is stated; my heart tells me it must be true."

Of course we all get our convictions, most of them at second or third stages, from some original conviction, in precisely the same way. Of course, also, Blake had at his hand his Bible, in which he might have read (Jeremiah xvii. 9): "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." He does not seem, however, to have reflected that from this arises the plain duty of every religious man to be a doubter, nor does he reproach his own impatience for constantly rebelling against this hardest of all religious duties.

Crabb Robinson gives a number of further notes about Dante, which form a useful help to understanding the few pencillings by Blake found among the designs to the Divine Comedy made for the Linnell brothers.

Blake declared him (Dante) a mere politician and atheist, busied about this world's affairs, as Milton was, till in his old age he turned back to the God he had abandoned in childhood. I in vain endeavoured to obtain from him a qualification so as not to include him (Dante) in the ordinary reproach. Yet he afterwards spoke of Dante as being then with God.

Blake's designs to Dante are made in thinly-washed water-colours in a large thick sketch-book which was probably bound for the purpose. It is a heavy folio several inches thick. Its pages measure fourteen by eighteen inches, but look more and more gigantic as one turns them over, on account of the largeness of style in the designs and the trance-producing influence that passes from them to the mind of any one who lends himself to their power. Only a few were engraved by Blake. To aid himself in comprehending the scheme of the poem, he sketched a diagram of Dante's circles," No. 1 being at the bottom. They are placed above the other with a note: "This is upside down, but right when viewed from purgatory after they had passed the centre." This recalls the descent of the angels in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell until they get so low that they hold on by the roots of trees and hang over a nether void, and the bending down of Milton into Albion's "bosom of death," until "what was under soon seemed above." " In equivocal worlds," Blake notes to Dante, "all is equivocal." He has also drawn what looks like a target. The bull's-eye is labelled "Purgatory," and the rings have these names:-the innermost ring, "Terrestrial Paradise: it is a limbo"; then "Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Starry Heavens"; and for the exterior ring of all, " Vacuum." He also notes: "It seems as if Dante supposes that God was something superior to the Father of Jesus, or, if he gives rain to the evil and the good, and the sun to the just and the unjust, he can never have builded Dante's Hell, nor the Hell of the Bible, as our parsons explain it. It must have been originally framed by the dark Spirit itself, and so I understand it."

He begins again :

Whatever task is for vengeance for sin, and whatever is against forgiveness of sin, is not of the Father but of Satan, the accuser and father of hells.

He is now speaking of the Father after Jesus has become God. Blake had then ceased to consider the First Person of the Trinity (either as Jehovah or as Elohim) as separate from the Second, though he at one time did so very often, with the result that he has left this note in his MS. book:

Thinking as I do that the Creator of this world is a very cruel being, and being a worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying to the Son, O how unlike the Father! First, God Almighty comes with a