forcene!’ Diderot exclaims.  ’Je tache en vain de faire de la poesie, mais cet homme me revient tout a travers mon travail; il me trouble, et je suis comme si j’avais a cote de moi un damne:  il est damne, cela est sur. ...  J’avoue que je n’ai jamais eprouve un trouble d’ame si terrible que celui que j’ai ...  Que je ne revoie plus cet homme-la, il me ferait croire au diable et a l’enfer.  Si je suis jamais force de retourner chez lui, je suis sur que je fremirai tout le long du chemin:  j’avais la fievre en revenant ...  On entendait ses cris jusqu’au bout du jardin; et je le voyais!...  Les poetes ont bien fait de mettre un intervalle immense entre le ciel et les enfers.  En verite, la main me tremble.’  Every word of that is stamped with sincerity; Diderot was writing from his heart.  But he was wrong; the ‘intervalle immense,’ across which, so strangely and so horribly, he had caught glimpses of what he had never seen before, was not the abyss between heaven and hell, but between the old world and the new.

1907.

NOTES: 

[Footnote 7:  Jean Jacques Rousseau:  a New Criticism, by Frederika Macdonald.  In two volumes.  Chapman and Hall. 1906.]

THE POETRY OF BLAKE[8]

The new edition of Blake’s poetical works, published by the Clarendon Press, will be welcomed by every lover of English poetry.  The volume is worthy of the great university under whose auspices it has been produced, and of the great artist whose words it will help to perpetuate.  Blake has been, hitherto, singularly unfortunate in his editors.  With a single exception, every edition of his poems up to the present time has contained a multitude of textual errors which, in the case of any other writer of equal eminence, would have been well-nigh inconceivable.  The great majority of these errors were not the result of accident:  they were the result of deliberate falsification.  Blake’s text has been emended and corrected and ‘improved,’ so largely and so habitually, that there was a very real danger of its becoming permanently corrupted; and this danger was all the more serious, since the work of mutilation was carried on to an accompaniment of fervent admiration of the poet.  ‘It is not a little bewildering,’ says Mr. Sampson, the present editor, ’to find one great poet and critic extolling Blake for the “glory of metre” and “the sonorous beauty of lyrical work” in the two opening lyrics of the Songs of Experience, while he introduces into the five short stanzas quoted no less than seven emendations of his own, involving additions of syllables and important changes of meaning.’  This is Procrustes admiring the exquisite proportions of his victim.  As one observes the countless instances accumulated in Mr. Sampson’s notes, of the clippings and filings to which the free and spontaneous expression of Blake’s genius has been subjected, one is reminded of a verse in one of his own lyrics, where he speaks of the beautiful garden in which—­