Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/677

Rh was a hostile one against the very foundation of society as it was around him, and, therefore, his chief merit was an aggravation of his great fault. He had glimpses far down into the abysses where lie the very foundations of our moral nature; and in some of his proverbs and poems he shows a keen worldly wisdom worthy of Solomon or Bacon. Here are some of what he calls "Proverbs of Hell":

But sentences like these are only occasional touches of sanity, brief intervals of bright lucidity, after which his eye rolled, his brain turned, and he vomited forth cloudy words, mere darkness and confusion. His visions and prophecies were illustrated by his own designs; both words and figures being engraved, or rather raised in relief by himself, on copper plate and printed off, and sometimes afterward colored. These he sold at his own lodgings. He was thus poet, painter, engraver, printer and publisher in one. His drawings were well suited to his verses. Both were beautiful in some passages, incomprehensible in most, strongly imagined in all. His style was the large and simple style of the great Italian masters; and this appears even in designs that fill only half the page of a little duodecimo volume. His female figures, drawn only in a heavy outline, have a noble loveliness, and show a full appreciation of, and a strong feeling for the sexual charm in woman's beauty. He was no ascetic; and although he loved his wife tenderly to the close of his life, saying to her just before his death, "Stay, keep as you are! You have ever been an angel to me: I will draw you," he not only admired and desired other women, but was at one time about to marry a second wife after such loose fashion as that in which such a thing might be done in England. The strong objections of the Mrs. Blake already existing diverted him from his purpose; but the code of society in regard to the relations of the sexes was one of the objects of his fierce denunciation throughout his whole life. Yet his manner to women, and his conduct in regard to them, was respectful, tender and winning, and was, like every manifestation on his part, genuine; and to his wife he was through life as a god. She looked to him for the law of her life. He lay on his death-bed singing songs, and passed away so gently that she, sitting by his side, did not know the moment of his departure. The impression that his life and his death made on those who were around him, and particularly upon women, may be gathered from the remark of a humble companion of Mrs. Blake's own sex, who was with her at the close. "I have been," she said, "not at the death of a man, but of a blessed angel."

Of Blake's genius, and even of his wisdom, there can be no doubt whatever; he has left behind him indisputable and enduring witnesses to both. But there can be no more doubt as to his insanity. Mr. Swinburne, laboring to disprove it, as Mr. Gilchrist and Mr. Rosetti labored before him, confesses it over and over again; when he says, for instance, that something of Blake's was wanting "even in decent coherence of verbal dress"—that a "monstrous nomenclature, a jargon of miscreated things in chaos rose as by nature to his lips;" and again, "if any one would realize to himself a material notion of chaos, let him take a blind header into the midst of the whistling foam and rolling weed of this sea of words." Blake mingled Heaven, Earth, and Hell in an indiscriminate jumble; London streets and suburbs make up a part of the mystic, antediluvian or post-millennial world; Fulham, Lambeth and Kentishtown cross the courses and break the metres of the stars; while Washington and Franklin strike hands with seraphim and archangels. The truth is that Blake was neither a madman, nor a maniac, nor a lunatic, nor an idiot. He was deranged: a man of genius, who, born with a predisposition to insanity, soon, because of that disposition and of the circumstances of his life, became a crazed, but harmless creature. The effort to make him an apostle and a prophet (Mr. Swinburne, for instance, referring to him, speaks of "former