Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/337

A STRANGE BOOK 32I " the general and richly deserved limbo of the modem ' spiritualist ' Muse." But while we thus reject with pity or spurn with dis- gust and disdain the mass of the ignorant, the morbid, the deranged, the cunning, the unscrupulous, the dupes and the deceivers who compose the " Devil's Own " of equivocal private secretaries attached to the post- mortem spirits, we must not forget that among them, not of them, are two or three genuine seers — genuine whether their visions be of realities or not ; genuinely inspired, whether their utterances be of truth or error, and whether they attribute their inspiration to its real source or not. We must not confound a Swedenborg with a Home, a Blake with a Slade, a Wilkinson with a " Revd." Mr. Monk. When we have the good for- tune to meet in life, or history, or literature with a great and noble man, let us do our best to study and understand him and his work, however eccentric his life-orbit may be deemed by the world, however startling its aberrations may at first appear to our- selves; nor let us ever fear, rather let us ever be forward to praise, as publicly as we can, all that we find praiseworthy in the man and his work ; though our voice calls forth no responsive echo, but a storm of jeers and howls and curses, because the one half of the world has decreed him guilty as a blasphe- mous infidel, and the other half, more charitable, pronounced him insane. In carefully and respectfully studying these " Impro- visations," I have but adhered to a rule which I stated in some notes on the poems of William Blake (written in 1864, and published at the beginning of 1866, be- fore the appearance of Mr. Swinburne's elaborate and X