Sane or Mad

When we read Blake, or look at prints of those remarkable watercolours and etchings he made, there is one question that we have sooner or later to ask ourselves – was Blake sane or mad? The visions of a religious schizophrene may be edifying; they may, combined with verbal or manual talent, result in dramatically vivid paintings or poems; but a necessary dimension of art – or, indeed, of any human communication – will be lacking, since the inner labour of adjusting a subjective vision to the humble and meagre detail of external reality will have been side-stepped. The point of Blake’s sanity is of personal interest to me; for I am an alcoholic, and I knew that I never produced a poem worth two cents when I had drink on board – in hangover, certainly, some of my better poems; but never once when drunk. This was because the world of active alcoholism is a private world, like the world of LSD or the world of schizophrenia. It is also of interest because I love Blake’s poems, and in a lesser degree his pictures; and we test most of all the solidity of what we love, so that there may be no illusion in it.

Raymond Lister’s view of Blake is singularly reassuring. It is possible that he overrates the literary value of the Prophetic Books; but he is well qualified to understand Blake’s development as a visual artist, and gives a coherent account of Blake’s financial transactions and relationships with publishers and with other artists. The impression of Blake the man which emerges from these pages is distinctively positive – a humble, generous, curiously matter-of-fact person, whose visions and locutions were never rammed down the page 620 throats of an uninterested audience. His relation with his wife Catherine was particularly tender and harmonious; and this is probably the strongest acid test of any man’s mental stability.

What were the visions then? Raymond Lister gives a hint, though not in so many words, that Blake may have had a special capacity to form eidetic images – images both visual and mental, distinct in every detail, so that Blake had only to transcribe what he saw clearly with the inner eye. The locutions may not have been actual; they may have amounted to no more than the strong sense of ‘being helped’ in his writing by dead friends and heavenly presences; and since Blake was something of a saint, there is no reason for us to doubt his word that this was so.

There is one disadvantage to this book. Its reproductions of Blake’s etchings and watercolours in black-and-white fall so far short of the power of the coloured reproduction of the Simoniac Pope (one of Blake’s illustrations to Dante) which stands both as frontispiece and as the first illustration in the book, that one doubts the value of any Blake reproductions that are not in colour. To remedy this would of course have increased the price of the book astronomically.

1968 (533)