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visited Mrs. Mathew's drawing-room. After his worldly failure Blake never tries to mix with the world again, put disgusted with social life, altogether withdraws from society. This voluntary seclusion of a man so highly imaginative as Blake of course had as a result, that he altogether lost contact with the world. He simply writes down his abstract fancies as he sees them before his mental eye, never troubling himself with the thoughts of the impression these fancies would make on the minds of other persons.
Especially the Prophetic Books are full of these wild fancies, and were looked upon by William Rossetti as not free from a tinge of insanity, which opinion seems to have been shared by his brother. Therefore D. G. Rossetti could appreciate the drawings which adorn the works of Blake, the pieces of lyrical song which occasionally relieve the monotony of Blake's rythmical prose, could be impressed by some beautiful descriptive lines as they often occur in Blake, but could not be much influenced by works which he regarded as the aberrations of a sick mind, be it the mind of a genius. I believe Rossetti did not think it worth while to subject Blake's works to a closer investigation for this reason. In his correspondence with Mrs. Gilchrist about the editing of Blake, Rossetti writes: "the truth is that as regards such a poem as "My Spectre"[1] I do not understand it a bit better than anyone else; only I know better than some may know, that it has claims as poetry apart from the question of understanding it and therefore is worth printing".
In the same way Rossetti does not understand Blake when he calls Blake's painting of a tiger in streaks of red and green, "an unaccountable perversity of colour" (Literary Paper on W. Blake). Of course it would have been easy to see for
- ↑ "My Spectre around me night and day
Like a wild beast guards my way;
My Emanation far within
Weeps incessantly for my sin."Lyrical Poems by William Blake. Introduction by Walter Raleigh. Oxford 1905, p. 100.
