It was this private certainty in regard to truth and all things that Blake shared with the greatest minds of the world, and men doubted him partly because he was content to possess that certainty and had no desire to use it for any practical purpose, least of all to convince others. He asked to be believed when he spoke, told the truth, and was not concerned with argument or experiment, which seemed to him ways of evasion. He said:
'It is easy to acknowledge a man to be great and good, while we
Derogate from him in the trifles and small articles of that goodness,
Those alone are his friends who admire his minutest powers.'
He spoke naturally in terms of wisdom, and made no explanations, bridged none of the gulfs which it seemed to him so easy to fly over. Thus when he said that Ossian and Rowley were authentic, and that what Macpherson and Chatterton said was ancient was so, he did not mean it in a strictly literal sense, but in the sense in which ancient meant authentic: true to ancient truth. Is a thing true as poetry? then it
