G. K. Chesterton

“ The most important conception can be found in one sentence which he let fall as if by accident, "Nature has no outline, but imagination has." If a clear black line when looked at through a microscope was seen to be a ragged and confused edge like a mop or a doormat, then Blake would say, "So much the worse for the microscope." If pure lines existed only on the human mind, then Blake would say, "So much the better for the human mind." If the real earth grew damp and dubious when it met and mixed itself with the sea, so much the worse for the real earth. ”

“ One may be fantastic by merely leaving something out. One might call it a fantasy if the official portrait of Wellington represented him without a nose. But one could hardly call it an exaggeration.
There is an everlasting battle in which Blake is on the side of the angels, and what is much more difficult and dangerous, on the side of all the sensible men. The question is so enormous and so important, that it is difficult to state even by reason of its reality. For in this world of ours we do not so much go on and discover small things; rather we go on and discover big things. ”

“ Whatever was the man who built the pyramids, one feels that he must (to put it mildly) have been a clever man. We look at Blake's picture of the man, and with a start behold the face of an idiot. Nay, we behold even the face of an evil idiot, a leering, half-witted face with no chin and the protuberant nose of a pig. Blake declared that he drew this face from a real spirit, and I see no reason to doubt that he did. But if he did, it was not really the man who built the pyramids; it was not any spirit with whom a gentleman ought to wish to be on intimate terms. ”

“ It is the quarrel between the artist who is a poet and the artist who is only a painter. In many of his merely technical designs Blake was a better and bolder artist than Stothard; still, I should admit, and most people who saw the two pictures would be ready to admit, that Stothard's Canterbury Pilgrims as a mere piece of drawing and painting is better than Blake's. But this if anything only makes the whole argument more certain. It is the duel between the artist who wishes only to be an artist and the artist who has the higher and harder ambition to be a man—that is, an archangel. ”

“ Now it is in this sense that we may truly say that Blake (upon one side of his mind) was something worse than a maniac—he was a faddist. He did permit aspirations or prejudices which are accidental or one-sided to capture and control him at the expense of things really more human and enduring: things which he shared with all the children of men. I do not allude to his supernaturalism; for on that he is in no sense alone, nor even specially eccentric. I do not refer to his love of the gorgeous, the terrible or even the secretive of temples, initiations, and hieroglyphic religion. ”

“ But it is a fad, an ugly and unlawful fad, to starve human beings because you will not let them eat oysters. It is a beautiful mood to feel impelled to assassinate Mr Carnegie; but it is a fad to maintain seriously that any private person has a right to do it. We all have emotional moments in which we should like to be indecent in a drawing-room; but it is faddist to turn all drawing-rooms into places in which one is indecent. We all have at times an almost holy temptation suddenly to scream out very loud ”

“ He truly seemed to wait for the opening of the door of death as a child waits for the opening of the cupboard on his birthday. He genuinely and solemnly seemed to hear the hoofs of the horses of death as a baby hears on Christmas eve the rheindeer-hooves of Santa Claus. He was in his last moments in that wonderful world of whiteness in which white is still a colour. He would have clapped his hands at a white snowflake and sung as at the white wings of an angel at the moment when he himself turned suddenly white with death. ”

“ Some people will be quite satisfied with saying that the mere solemn attestation of such miracles marks a man as a madman or a liar. But that is a short cut of sceptical dogmatism which is not far removed from impudence. Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the mad-house on all the mystics of history. To call a man mad because he has seen ghosts is in a literal sense religious persecution. It is denying him his full dignity as a citizen because he cannot be fitted into your theory of the cosmos. ”

“ If there is an immortal lamb, a being whose simplicity and freshness are for ever renewed, then it is truly and really a more creepy idea to horrify that being into hostility than to defy the flaming dragon or challenge darkness or the sea. No old wolf or world-worn lion is so awful as a creature that is always young—a creature that is always newly born. ”

“ Blake's women are too womanish, his young men are too athletic, his old men are too preposterously old. But Aubrey Beardsley does not really exaggerate; he understates. His young men have less than the energy of youth. His women fascinate by the weakness of sex rather than by its strength. In short, if one is really to exaggerate the truth, one must have some truth to exaggerate. The decadent mystic produces an effect not by exaggerating but by distorting. True exaggeration is a thing both subtle and austere. ”

“ Like every true artist, he detested india-rubber. Take, for the sake of example, all the designs to the Book of Job. When he gets the thing right he gets it suddenly and perfectly right, as in the picture of all the sons of God shouting for joy. We feel that the sons of God might really shout for joy at the excellence of their own portrait. When he gets it wrong he gets it completely and incurably wrong, as in the preposterous picture of Satan dancing among paving-stones. But both are equally final and fixed. If one picture is incurably bad, the other picture is incurably good. ”

“ You might shoot all the lions on the earth; but you could not destroy the Lion of Judah, the Lion of the Imagination. You might kill all the lambs of the world and eat them; but you could not kill the Lamb of the Imagination, which was the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. Blake’s philosophy, in brief, was primarily the assertion that the ideal is more actual than the real: just as in Euclid the good triangle in the mind is a more actual (and more practical) than the bad triangle on the blackboard. ”

“ There was nothing defective about Blake; he was in contact with all the songs and smells of the universe, and he was entirely guiltless of that one evil element which is almost universal in the character of the morbidly insane—I mean secrecy. Yet again, if we mean by madness anything inconsistent or unreasonable, then Blake was not mad. Blake was one of the most consistent men that ever lived, both in theory and practice. Blake may have been quite wrong, but he was not in the least unreasonable. ”

“ It is usual to hear a man say that he likes common sense and does not like the mummeries and flummeries of church ritual. But common sense is in favour of mummery and ritualism, the common sense of mankind. The man who attempts to do without symbols is a prophet so austere and isolated as to be dangerously near to a madman. The man who does not believe in ghosts is a solitary fanatic and lonely dreamer among the sons of men. Therefore I do not in any sense count even his craziest visions or wildest symbols among the real fads or eccentricities of Blake. ”

“ One may say, to keep up the metaphor, that many a man has joined the French army from love of the Horse Guards Blue; many an old-fashioned eighteenth century sailor has gone over to the Chinese merely because they wore pigtails. It is so easy to turn against what is really yourself for the sake of some accidental resemblance to yourself. You may envy the curled hair of Hercules; but do not envy curly hair until you wish that you were a nigger. You may regret that you have a short nose; but do not dream of its growing longer and longer till it is like the trunk of an elephant. ”

“ The real difficulty about the specialist or expert is much more singular and fascinating. The trouble with the expert is never that he is not a man; it is always that wherever he is not an expert he is too much of an ordinary man. Wherever he is not exceptionally learned he is quite casually ignorant. This is the great fallacy in the case of what is called the impartiality of men of science. If scientific men had no idea beyond their scientific work it might be all very well—that is to say, all very well for everybody except them. ”

“ I should not in the least degree think that Blake was 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. ”