WILLIAM BLAKE, [April
198 WILLIAM BLAKE, [April, William Blake. By HUBERT J. NORMAN, M.B., Ch.B., D.P.H.Edin., Assistant Medical Officer,Camberwell House, S.E. I. THE association between the artistic temperament and eccen tricity has frequently been noted, and in the lives of Turner, Vanclyck, Michael Angelo, Benvenuto Cellini, Morland, Romney, Maclise, Landseer, Haydon, Cosway, and many others there is much to support Nisbet's contention that " nerve-disorder is a fundamental element of genius in relation to colour and form." To the list already given, the name of William Blake may fittingly be added, for, just as some of those named at times passed the boundary which separates sanity from insanity, so most certainly did Blake also cross the borderland. It does not, of course, follow that because those attributes which are usually associated with the term genius are so fre quently found in conjunction with unsound mental action that they, therefore, arise from the nerve-disorder ; rather is it that they both proceed from a nervous system in a condition of unstable equilibrium, which may either exhibit complex reactions in the production of some work of high intellectual grade, or tend at other times to display those irregular functionings which are termed eccentric or insane. That conduct'of an eccentric or even of an insane nature has been observed in many artists is undoubted ; indeed, so frequently has such conduct been noted that some writers have inferred that eccentricity is an invariable concomitant of the artistic temperament. The tendency to caricature is, however, very widespread ; that which is a prominent trait in such writers as Dickens, Swift, Cervantes, or Heine, or of such artists as Hogarth, Jan Steen, Cruickshank, or Teniers, is no less notice able a feature of all but a few—avery few—people.
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