ABSTRACT
The real trouble about Blake is his vocabulary. If a man in his first conversation with you were to say, for example: “There is nothing like death. Death is the best thing that can happen in life; but most people die so late and take such an unmerciful time in dying, God knows, their neighbours never see them rise from the dead”—well, you might reasonably think that he had strained common sense for the sake of paradox. But Blake made many such remarks to Crabbe Robinson in all seriousness, and would by them have conveyed profound truths, only Mr. Robinson was incapable of appreciating what his peculiar friend meant by “death”, or many of the other words Blake used with uncommon meanings. When he spoke of Sight, Imagination, Nature, Reason, Genius, and even Love, Heaven or Hell, to men like Flaxman, Hayley or the Reverend Doctor Trusler, he intended to signify things which were, unfortunately, beyond their comprehension. That was partly because they were merely unimaginative; but it was also because Blake gave to such words peculiar and enlarged meaning. When he writes, “Where any view of money exists, art cannot be carried on, but war only, by pretences to the two impossibilities, Chastity and Abstinence, gods of the heathen,” one is justified in believing that nothing but a liberal education in Blakean 37terminology can give to these words their author’s meaning.
