This notion also overawes the general public so that they
value what looks to them difficult; but in art that which seems
difficult to us fails with us, we are aware of the difficulty, not of
the art. The greater the work of art the easier it seems to us. We feel
that we could have done it ourselves if only we had had the luck to hit
upon that way of doing it; indeed, where our aesthetic experience of it
is complete, we feel as if we were doing it ourselves; our minds jump
with the artist's mind; we are for the moment the artist himself in his
very act of creation. But we are always apt to undervalue this true and
complete aesthetic experience, because it seems so easy and simple, and
we mistake for it a painful sense of the artist's skill, of his
professional accomplishment. So we demand of artists, that they shall
impress us with their accomplishment; we have not had our money's worth
unless we feel that we could not possibly do ourselves what they have
done. No doubt, when the _Songs of Innocence_ were first published,
anyone who did happen to read them thought them doggerel. Blake in a
moment had freed himself from all the professionalism of the followers
of Pope, and even now they make poetry seem an easy art to us, until we
try to write songs of innocence ourselves:--
When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.
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