Dialogue with a Flea

"I see everything that I paint in this world," said the English mystic poet and draftsman, William Blake, "but everybody does not see alike." How vividly Blake's vision differed from that of ordinary mortals was illustrated once again last week when an English Blake enthusiast announced that he had unearthed from a castle in Ayrshire a notebook of Blake sketches that had not been seen publicly since 1871.

The book contains 14 drawings of "visionary heads" that Blake drew mainly in 1819 and 1820 for a wealthy young artist named John Linnell and Linnell's teacher, John Varley, who later used them as the basis for illustrations for their published treatise on zodiacal physiognomy. But the notes on the margins indicate that Blake sincerely believed he was drawing the faces of Socrates, Solomon, Richard the Lionhearted, Job, John Milton's first wife and the Saxon King Harold from life or, at any rate, from afterlife.

"Hotspur," reads one note, "said we should have had the battle, but for those cursed stars. Hotspur said he was indignant to be killed by such a person as Prince Henry, who was so much his inferior." Still more cryptic is what Blake called in his sketchbook a "Spiritual Communication." Possibly Blake intended it to be a recording of a conversation he had with the ghost of a flea (he sketched several of these: they look rather like Jiminy Cricket). The "communication" reads: "Can you think I can endure to be considered as a vapour arising from your food? I will leave you if you doubt I am of no greater importance than a butterfly."

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