REMINISCENCES OF BLAKE
(b) 1825-1827
IT was at the latter end of the year 1825 that I put in writing my recollections of this remarkable man. The larger portion are under the date of the 10th of Decr.[1] He died in the year 1827. I have therefore now revised what I wrote on the 10th of Decr. & afterwards, & without any attempt to reduce to order or make consistent the wild & strange, strange rhapsodies uttered by this insane man of genius, thinking it better to put down what I find as it occurs, tho' I am aware of the objection that may justly be made to the recording the ravings of insanity in which it may be said there can be found no principle, as there is no ascertainable law of mental association wh. is obeyed; & from wh. therefore nothing can be learned.
This would be perfectly true of mere madness, but does not apply to that form of insanity or lunacy called Monomania, & may be disregarded in a case like the present in which the subject of the remark was unquestionably what a German wd. call a "Verunglückter Genie" whose theosophic dreams bear a close resemblance to those of Swedenborg; whose genius as an artist was praised by no less men than Flaxman & Fuseli, & whose poems were thought worthy republication by the biographer of Swedenborg, Wilkinson, & of which Wordsworth said, after reading a number. "They were the "Songs of Innocence & Experience," showing the two opposite states of the human soul." There is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron or Walter Scott!—
The German painter Götzenberger, (a man indeed who ought not to be named after the others as an authority for my writing abt Blake) said on his returning to Germany
- ↑ ^ [See ante, pp. 1—7.]
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