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This wonderful work, engraved for Boydell's Shakspeare Gallery, is esteemed among the best of Fuseli's works. It is, indeed, strangely wild and superhuman if ever a Spirit visited earth, it must have appeared to Fuseli.
Fuseli's method of curing his wife's anger was not less original and characteristic. She was a spirited woman, and one day, when she had wrought herself into a towering passion, her sarcastic husband said, "Sophia, my love, why don't you swear? You don't know how much it would ease your mind." Fuseli was of low stature his frame slim, his forehead high, and his eyes piercing and brilliant.
"No, sir," replied he, "don't come to-morrow, for then you will intrude a second time: tell me your business now!" A man of some station in society, and who considered himself a powerful patron in art, said at a public dinner, where he was charmed with Fuseli's conversation, "If you ever come my way, Fuseli, I shall be happy to see you."
"I thank you, sir," said the cashier, imitating Fuseli's own tone of irony, "we shall be ready for you but as the town is thin and money scarce with us, you will oblige me greatly by giving us a few orders to see your Milton Gallery it will keep cash in our drawers, and hinder your exhibition from being empty."
If Mary was attracted by Fuseli's genius, and this would not have been surprising, and if she went to Paris for change of scene and thought, she certainly only set a sensible example.
His was that true modesty so excellent in ability, and so rare in celebrities petted for a long time in society. His was also that happy alchemy of mind which transmutes disagreeable things into golden and ruby colors like the dawn. His temperament was the exact reverse of Fuseli's, who complained that "nature put him out."
He states as a fact that it was for Fuseli's sake that she changed her mode of life and adopted a new elegance in dress and manners.
'Yes, as long as I believed in Fuseli's "Lectures;" but when I saw at Pompeii the ancient paintings which still remain to us, my faith in their powers received its first shock; and when I re-read in the Lectures of Fuseli and his school all their extravagant praises of the Greek painters, and separated their few facts fairly out from among the floods of rant on which they floated, I came to the conclusion that the ancients knew as little of colour or chiaroscuro as they did of perspective, and as little of spiritual expression as they did of landscape-painting.
My foreign accent provoked him to laughter, and as I stood cursing him in good Shaksperian English, a gentleman kindly directed me to the object of my inquiry." Fuseli's wit, learning, and talents gained him early admission to the company of wealthy and distinguished men.
The Mara was a female demon, who would come at night and torment men or women by crouching on their chests or stomachs and stopping their respiration. The scene is well enough represented in Fuseli's picture, though the frenzied-looking horse which there accompanies the demon has no place in the original superstition. A Netherlandish story illustrates the character of the Mara.
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