In 1782 Blake married for love Catharine Boucher, or Boutcher, of whom Mr. Swinburne has said that she "deserves remembrance as about the most perfect wife on record." She was uneducated, but learned to read and write, and later proved an inestimable helpmate for the struggling and unpractical Blake. She bound his books and coloured some of his illustrations. She bore long poverty uncomplainingly, one is tempted to say with enthusiasm. Once only she faltered. Blake had his own notions about certain Old Testament customs, and he, it is said on the authority of a gossip, had proposed to add another wife to the poor little household. Mrs. Blake wept and the matter was dropped. Other gossip avers that the Adamite in Blake manifested itself in a not infrequent desire to cast aside garments and to sit in paradisiacal innocence. Whether these stories were the invention of malicious associates or were true, one thing is certain: Blake was capable of anything for which he could find a Biblical precedent. In the matter of the unconventional he was the _Urvater_ of English rebels. Shelley, Byron, Swinburne were timid amateurs compared to this man, who with a terrific energy translated his thoughts into art. He was not the idle dreamer of an empty day nor a mooning mystic. His energy was electric. It sounds a clarion note in his verse and prose, it reveals itself in the fiery swirlings of his line, a line swift and personal. He has been named by some one a heretic in the Church of Swedenborg; but like a latter-day rebel--Nietzsche, who renounced Schopenhauer--Blake soon renounced Swedenborg. But Michelangelo remained a deity for him, and in his designs the influence of Angelo is paramount.
Blake might be called an English Primitive. He stems from the Florentines, but _à la gauche_. The bar sinister on his artistic coat of arms is the lack of fundamental training. He had a Gothic imagination, but his dreams lack architectonics. Goethe, too, had dreams, and we are the richer by Faust. And no doubt there are in his works phrases that Nietzsche has seemed to repeat. It is the fashion just now to trace every idea of Nietzsche to some one else. The truth is that the language of rebellion through the ages is the same. The mere gesture of revolt, as typified in the uplifted threatening arm of a Cain, a Prometheus, a Julian the Apostate, is no more conventional than the phraseology of the heretic. How many of them have written "inspired" bibles, from Mahomet to Zarathustra. Blake, his tumultuous imagination afire--remember that the artist doubled the poet in his amazing and versatile soul--poured forth for years his "sacred" books, his prophecies, his denouncements of his fellow-man. It was all sincere righteous indignation; but the method of his speech is obscure; the Mormon books of revelation are miracles of clarity in comparison. Let us leave these singular prophecies of Blake to the mystics. One thing is sure--he has affected many poets and thinkers. There are things in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Shaw might have said had not Blake forestalled him. Such is the cruelty of genius.