Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/440

 To Blake's surviving friends—all who knew more of his character than a few casual interviews could supply—the proposition is (I find) simply unintelligible; thinking of him, as they do, under the strong influence of happy, fruitful, personal intercourse remembered in the past; swayed by the general tenor of his life, rather than by isolated extravagances of speech, or wild passages in his writings. All are unanimous on the point. And I have taken the opinions of many independent witnesses. 'I saw nothing but sanity,' declares one (Mr. Calvert); 'saw nothing mad in his conduct, actions, or character.' Mr. Linnell and Mr Palmer express themselves in the same sense, and almost in the same words. Another very unbiassed and intelligent acquaintance—Mr. Finch—summed up his recollections thus:—'He was not mad, but perverse and wilful; he reasoned correctly from arbitrary, and often false premises.' This, however, is what madmen have been sometimes defined to do; grant them their premises, and their conclusions are right. Nor can I quite concur in it as characteristic of Blake, who was no reasoner, but preeminently a man of intuitions; and therefore more often right as to his premises than his deductions. But, at all events, a madman's actions are not consonant with sound premises: Blake's always were. He could throw aside his visionary mood and his paradoxes when he liked. Mad people try to conceal their crazes, and in the long run cannot succeed.

'There was nothing mad about him,' emphatically exclaimed to me Mr. Cornelius Varley; 'people set down for mad anything different from themselves.' That vigorous veteran, the late James Ward, who had often met Blake in society and talked with him, would never hear him called mad. If mad he were, it was a madness which infected everybody who came near him; the wife who all but worshipped him, for one—whose sanity I never heard doubted; sensible, practical Mr. Butts, his almost life-long friend and patron, for another—who, I have reason to know, reckoned him eccentric, but nothing worse. The high respect which Flaxman and Fuseli