Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist

With the Antique, Blake got on well enough, drawing with ‘great care all or certainly nearly all the noble antique figures in various views.’ From the living figure he also drew a good deal; but early conceived a distaste for the study, as pursued in Academies of Art. Already ‘life,’ in so factitious, monotonous an aspect of it as that presented by a Model artificially posed to enact an artificial part – to maintain in painful rigidity some fleeting gesture of spontaneous Nature’s – became, as it continued, ‘hateful,’ looking to him, laden with thick-coming fancies, ‘more like death’ than life; nay (singular to say) ‘smelling of mortality’ – to an imaginative mind! ‘Practice and opportunity,’ he used afterwards to declare, ‘very soon teach the language of art:’ as much, that is, as Blake ever acquired, not a despicable if imperfect quantum. ‘Its spirit and poetry, centred in the imagination alone, never can be taught; and these make the artist:’ a truism, the fervid poet already began to hold too exclusively in view. Even at their best – as the vision-seer and instinctive Platonist tells us in one of the very last years of his life (MS. notes to Wordsworth) – mere ‘Natural Objects always did and do weaken, deaden and obliterate imagination in me!’

The student still continued to throw off drawings and verses for his own delight; out of his numerous store of the former engraving two designs from English history. One of these engravings, King Edward and Queen Eleanor, ‘published’ by him at a later date (from Lambeth), I have seen. It is a meritorious but heavy piece of business, in the old-fashioned plodding style of line-engraving, wherein the hand monotonously hatched line after line, now struck off by machine. The design itself and the other water-colour drawings of this date, all on historical subjects, which now lie scattered among various hands, have little of the quality or of the mannerism we are accustomed to associate with Blake’s name. They remind one rather of Mortimer, the historical painter (now obsolete) of that era, who died, high in reputation with his contemporaries for fancy and correct drawing of the human figure, but neglected by patrons, about this very time, viz. in 1779, at the early age of forty. Of Mortimer, Blake always continued to entertain a very high estimate. The designs of this epoch in his life are correctly drawn, prettily composed, and carefully coloured, in a clear uniform style of equally distributed positive tints. But the costumes are vague and mythical, without being graceful and credible; what mannerism there is is a timid one, such as reappears in Hamilton always, in Stothard often; the general effect is heavy and uninteresting, – and the net result a yawn. One drawing dating from these years (1778-9), The Penance of Jane Shore in St Paul’s Church, thirty years later was included in Blake’s Exhibition of his own Works (1809). In the Descriptive Catalogue he speaks of it with some complacency as ‘proving to the author, and he thinks to any discerning eye, that the productions of our youth and of our maturer age, are equal in all essential points.’ To me, on inspecting the same, it proves nothing of the kind; though it be a very exemplary performance in the manner just indicated. The central figure of Jane Shore has however much grace and sweetness; and the intention of the whole composition is clear and decisive. One extrinsic circumstance materially detracts from the appearance of this and other water-colour drawings from his hand of the period: viz. that, as a substitute for glass, they were all eventually, in prosecution of a hobby of Blake’s, varnished, – of which process, applied to a water-colour drawing, nothing can exceed the disenchanting, not to say destructive effect.

There is a scarce engraving inscribed ‘W. B. inv. 1780’ which, within certain limitations, has much more of the peculiar Blake quality and intensity about it. The subject is evidently a personification of Morning, or Glad Day: a nude male figure, with one foot on earth, just alighted from above; a flood of radiance still encircling his head; his arms outspread, – as exultingly bringing joy and solace to this lower world, – not with classic Apollo-like indifference, but with the divine chastened fervour of an angelic minister. Below crawls a caterpillar, and a hybrid kind of nightmoth takes wing.

Meanwhile, the Poet and Designer, living under his father the hosier’s roof, 28, Broad Street, had not only to educate himself in high art, but to earn his livelihood by humbler art – engraver’s journey-work. During the years 1779 to 1782 and onwards, one or two booksellers gave him employment in engraving from afterwards better known fellow designers. Harrison of Paternoster Row employed him for his Novelists’ Magazine, or collection of approved novels; for his Ladies’ Magazine, and perhaps other serials; J. Johnson, a constant employer during a long series of years, for various books; and occasionally other booksellers, – Macklin, Buckland, and (later) Dodsley, Stockdale, the Cadells. Among the first in date of such prints, was a well-engraved frontispiece after Stothard, bold and telling in light and shade (The four Quarters of the Globe’), to a System of Geography (1779); and another after Stothard, (‘Clarence’s Dream’), to Enfield’s Speaker, published by Johnson in 1780. Then came with sundry miscellaneous, eight plates after some of Stothard’s earliest and most beautiful designs for the Novelists’ Magazine. The designs brought in young Stothard, hitherto an apprentice to a Pattern-draftsman in Spitalfields, a guinea a piece, – and established his reputation: their intrinsic grace, feeling, and freshness being (for one thing) advantageously set off by very excellent engraving, of an infinitely more robust and honest kind than the smooth style of Heath and his School, which succeeded to it, and eventually brought about the ruin of line-engraving for book illustrations. Of Blake’s eight engravings, all thorough and sterling pieces of workmanship, two were illustrations of Don Quixote, one, of the Sentimental Journey (1782), one, of Miss Fielding’s David Simple, another, of Launcelot Greaves, three, of Grandison (1782-3).

One Trotter, a fellow-engraver who received instructions from Blake, who engraved a print or two after Stothard, and was also draftsman to the calico printers, had introduced Blake to Stothard, the former’s senior by nearly two years, and then lodging in company with Shelly, the miniature painter, in the Strand. Stothard introduced Blake to Flaxman, who after seeing some of the early graceful plates in the Novelists’ Magazine, had of his own accord made their designer’s acquaintance. Flaxman, of the same age and standing as Stothard, was as yet subsisting by his designs for the first Wedgwood, and also living in the Strand, with his father; who there kept a well-known plaster-cast shop when plaster-cast shops were rare. A wistful remembrance of the superiority of ‘old Flaxman’s’ casts still survives among artists. In 1781 the sculptor married, taking house and studio of his own at 27, Wardour Street, and becoming Blake’s near neighbour. He proved – despite some passing clouds which for a time obscured their friendship at a later era – one of the best and firmest friends Blake ever had; as great artists often prove to one another in youth. The imaginative man needed friends; for his gifts were not of the bread-winning sort. He was one of those whose genius is in a far higher ratio than their talents: and it is Talent which commands worldly success. Amidst the miscellaneous journey-work which about this period kept Blake’s graver going, if not his mind, may be mentioned the illustrations to a show-list of Wedgwood’s productions: specimens of his latest novelties in earthenware and porcelain – tea and dinner services, &c. Seldom have such very humble essays in Decorative Art – good enough in form, but not otherwise remarkable – tasked the combined energies of a Flaxman and a Blake! To the list of the engraver’s friends was afterwards added Fuseli, of maturer age and acquirements, man of letters as well as Art; a multifarious and learned author. From intercourse with minds like these, much was learned by Blake, in his art and out of it. In 1780, Fuseli, then thirty-nine, just returned from eight years’ sojourn in Italy, became a neighbour, lodging in Broad Street, where he remained until 1782. In the latter year, his original and characteristic picture of The Nightmare made ‘a sensation’ at the Exhibition: the first of his to do so. The subsequent engraving gave him a European reputation. Artists’ homes as well as studios abounded then in Broad Street and its neighbourhood. Bacon the sculptor lived in Wardour Street, Paul Sandby in Poland Street, the fair R.A., Angelica Kauffman, in Golden Square, Bartolozzi, with his apprentice Sherwin, in Broad Street itself, and at a later date John Varley, ‘father of modern Water Colours,’ in the same street (No. 15). Literary celebrities were not wanting: in Wardour Street, Mrs Chapone; in Poland Street, pushing, pompous Dr Burney, of Musical History notoriety.

In the catalogue of the now fairly established Royal Academy’s Exhibition for 1780, its twelfth, and first at Somerset House – all previous had been held in its ‘Old Room’ (originally built for an auction room), on the south side of Pall Mall East – appears for the first time a work by ‘W. Blake.’ It was an Exhibition of only 489 ‘articles,’ in all, waxwork and ‘designs for a fan’ inclusive among its leading exhibitors, boasting Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mary Moser, R.A., Gainsborough and Angelica Kauffman, R.A., Cosway and Loutherbourg, Paul Sandby and Zoffany, Copley (Lyndhurst’s father), and Fuseli, not yet Associate. Blake’s contribution is the Death of Earl Goodwin, a drawing probably, being exhibited in The Ante-room,’ devoted to flower-pieces, crayons, miniatures, and water-colour landscapes – some by Gainsborough. This first Exhibition in official quarters went off with much eclat, netting double the average amount realized by its predecessors: viz. as much as 3,000/.

In the sultry, early days of June, 1780, the Lord George Gordon No-Popery Riots rolled through Town. Half London was sacked, and its citizens for six days laid under forced contributions, by a mob some forty thousand strong, of boys, pickpockets, and ‘roughs.’ In this outburst of anarchy, Blake long remembered an involuntary participation of his own. On the third day, Tuesday, 6th of June, ‘the Mass-houses’ having already been demolished – one, in Blake’s near neighbourhood, Warwick Street, Golden Square – and various private houses also; the rioters, flushed with gin and victory, were turning their attention to grander schemes of devastation. That evening, the artist happened to be walking in a route chosen by one of the mobs at large, whose course lay from Justice Hyde’s house near Leicester Fields, for the destruction of which less than an hour had sufficed, through Long Acre, past the quiet house of Blake’s old master, engraver Basire, in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and down Holborn, bound for Newgate. Suddenly, he encountered the advancing wave of triumphant Blackguardism, and was forced (for from such a great surging mob there is no disentanglement) to go along in the very front rank, and witness the storm and burning of the fortress-like prison, and release of its three hundred inmates. This was a peculiar experience for a spiritual poet; not without peril, had a drunken soldier chanced to have identified him during the after weeks of indiscriminate vengeance: those black weeks when strings of boys under fourteen were hung up in a row to vindicate the offended majesty of the Law. ‘I never saw boys cry so!’ observed Selwyn, connoisseur in hanging, in his diary.

It was the same Tuesday night, one may add, that among the obnoxious mansions of magistrate and judge gutted of furniture, and consigned to the flames, Lord Mansfield’s in Bloomsbury Square was numbered. That night, too – every householder having previously chalked the talisman, ‘No Popery,’ on his door, (the very Jews inscribing ‘This House True Protestant!’) every house showing blue flag, every wayfarer having donned the blue cockade – that night the Londoners with equal unanimity illuminated their windows. Still wider stupor of fear followed next day: and to it, a still longer sleepless night of prison-burning, drunken infatuation, and onsets from the military, let slip at last from civil leash. Six-and-thirty fires are to be seen simultaneously blazing in one new neighbourhood (Bloomsbury), not far from Blake’s and still nearer to Basire’s; whence are heard the terrible shouts of excited crowds, mingling with the fiercer roar of the flames, and with the reports of scattered musket-shots at distant points from the soldiery. Some inhabitants catch up their household effects and aimlessly run up and down the streets with them; others cheerfully pay their guinea a mile for a vehicle to carry them beyond the tumult. These were not favourable days for designing, or even quiet engraving.

Since his twentieth year, Blake’s energies had been ‘wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession’ as artist: too much so to admit of leisure or perhaps inclination for poetry. Engrossing enough was the indispensable effort to master the difficulties of Design, with pencil or in water-colours. With the still tougher mechanical difficulties of oil-painting he never fairly grappled; but confined himself to water-colours and tempera (on canvas), with in after years a curious modification of the latter – which he daringly christened ‘fresco.’ Original invention now claimed more than all his leisure. His working-hours during the years 1780 to 1782 were occupied by various bookplates for the publications already named. These voluminous, well-illustrated serials are infrequently stumbled on by the Collector at the second-hand booksellers. Very few are to be found in our Museum Library, professedly miscellaneous as that collection is. In the Print Room exists a fine series of engravings after Stothard; which, however, being undated, affords little help to those wishing to learn something about the engravers of them.

These were days of Courtship, too. And the course of Blake’s love did not open smoothly. ‘A lively little girl’ in his own, or perhaps a humbler station, the object of his first sighs readily allowed him, as girls in a humble class will, meaning neither marriage nor harm, to ‘keep company’ with her, to pay his court, take mutual walks, and be as lovesick as he chose; but nowise encouraged the idea of a wedding. In addition to the pangs of fruidess love, attacks of jealousy had stoically to be borne. When he complained that the favour of her company in a stroll had been extended to another admirer, ‘Are you a fool?’ was the brusque reply – with a scornful glance. That cured me of jealousy,’ Blake used naïvely to relate. One evening at a friend’s house he was bemoaning in a corner his love-crosses. His listener, a dark-eyed, generous-hearted girl, frankly declared ‘She pitied him from her heart.’ ‘Do you pity me?’ ‘Yes! I do, most sincerely.’ Then I love you for that!’ he replied, with enthusiasm: – such soothing pity is irresistible. And a second more prosperous courtship began. At this, or perhaps a later meeting, followed the confession, I dare say in lower tones, ‘Well! and I love you!’ – always, doubtless, a pretty one to hear.

The unsophisticated maiden was named Catherine Sophia Boucher – plebeian corruption, probably, of the grand historic name, Bourchier; – daughter of William and Mary Boucher of Battersea. So at least the Register gives the name: where, within less than ten years, no fewer than seven births to the same parents, including two sets of twins in succession, immediately precede hers. Her position and connexions in life were humble, humbler than Blake’s own; her education – as to book-lore – neglected, not to say omitted. For even the (at first) paltry makeshift of National Schools had not yet been invented; and Sunday Schools were first set going a little after this very time, namely, in 1784. When, by-and-by, Catherine’s turn came, as bride, to sign the Parish Register, she, as the same yet mutely testifies, could do no more than most young ladies of her class then, or than the Bourchiers, Stanleys, and magnates of the land four centuries before could do – viz. make a X as ‘her mark:’ her surname on the same occasion being mis-spelt for her and vulgarized into Butcher, and her second baptismal name omitted. A bright-eyed, dark-haired brunette, with expressive features and a slim graceful form, can make a young artist and poet overlook such trifles as defective scholarship. Nor were a fair outside and a frank accessible heart deceptive lures in this instance. Catherine – Christian namesake, by the way, of Blake’s mother – was endowed with a loving loyal nature, an adaptive open mind, capable of profiting by good teaching, and of enabling her, under constant high influence, to become a meet companion to her imaginative husband in his solitary and wayward course. Uncomplainingly and helpfully, she shared the low and rugged fortunes which over-originality insured as his unvarying lot in life. She had mind and the ambition which follows. Not only did she prove a good housewife on straitened means, but in after-years, under his tuition and hourly companionship, she acquired besides the useful arts of reading and writing, that which very few uneducated women with the honestest effort ever succeed in attaining: some footing of equality with her husband. She, in time, came to work off his engravings, as though she had been bred to the trade; nay, imbibed enough of his very spirit to reflect it in Design which might almost have been his own.

Allan Cunningham says she was a neighbour. But the marriage took place at Battersea, where I trace relatives of Blake’s father to have been then living. During the course of the courtship many a happy Surrey ramble must have been taken towards and around the pleasant village of the St Johns. The old familyseat, spacious and venerable, still stood, in which Lord Bolingbroke had been born and died, which Pope had often visited. The village was ‘four miles from London’ then, and had just begun to shake hands with Chelsea, by a timber bridge over the Thames; the river bright and clear there at low tide as at Richmond now, with many a placid angler dotting its new bridge. Green meadow and bright cornfield lay between the old-fashioned winding High Street and the purple heights of Wimbledon and Richmond. In the volume of 1783, among the poems which have least freshness of feeling, being a little alloyed by false notes as of the poetic Mocking Bird, are one or two love-poems anticipating emotions as yet unfelt. And love, it is said, must be felt ere it can be persuasively sung. One or two stanzas, if we did not know they had been written long before, might well have been allusive to the ‘black-eyed maid’ of present choice, and the ‘sweet village’ where he wooed her.

When early morn walks forth in sober grey,

Then to my black-ey’d maid I haste away,

When evening sits beneath her dusky bow’r

And gently sighs away the silent hour,

The village-bell alarms, away I go,

And the vale darkens at my pensive woe.

To that sweet village, where my black-ey’d maid

Doth drop a tear beneath the silent shade,

I turn my eyes; and pensive as I go,

Curse my black stars, and bless my pleasing woe.

Oft when the summer sleeps among the trees,

Whisp’ring faint murmurs to the scanty breeze,

I walk the village round; if at her side

A youth doth walk in stolen joy and pride,

I curse my stars in bitter grief and woe,

That made my love so high and me so low.

The last is an inapplicable line to the present case, – decidedly unprophetic. In a better, more Blake-like manner is the other poem, apposite to how many thousand lovers, in how many climes, since man first came into the planet.

My feet are wing’d while o’er the dewy lawn

I meet my maiden risen with the morn:

Oh, bless those holy feet, like angel’s feet!

Oh, bless those limbs beaming with heavenly light!

As when an angel glitt’ring in the sky

In times of innocence and holy joy,

The joyful shepherd stops his grateful song

To hear the music of that angel’s tongue:

So when she speaks, the voice of Heav’n I hear,

So when we walk, nothing impure comes near,

Each field seems Eden and each calm retreat;

Each village seems the haunt of holy feet.

But that sweet village where my black-ey’d maid

Closes her eyes in sleep beneath Night’s shade,

Whene’er I enter, more than mortal fire

Burns in my soul, and does my song inspire.

The occasional hackneyed rhyme, awkward construction, and verbal repetition, entailed by the requirements of very inartificial verse, are technical blemishes any poetical reader may by ten minutes’ manipulation mend, but such as clung to Blake’s verse in later and maturer years.

The lovers were married, Blake being in his twenty-fifth year, his bride in her twenty-first, on a Sunday in August (the 18th), 1782, in the then newly rebuilt church of Battersea: a ‘handsome edifice,’ say contemporary topographers. Which, in the present case, means a whitey-brown brick building in the church-warden style, relying for architectural effect, externally, on a nondescript steeple, a low slate roof, double rows of circular-headed windows, and an elevated western portico in a strikingly picturesque and unique position: almost upon the river as it were, which here takes a sudden bend to the south-west, the body of the church stretching alongside it. The interior, with its galleries (in which are interesting seventeenth and eighteenth century mural tablets from the old church, one by Roubiliac), and elaborately decorated apsidal dwarf-chancel, has an imposing effect and a strongly marked characteristic accent (of its Day), already historical and interesting. There, standing above the vault wherein lies the coronetted coffin of Pope’s Bolingbroke, the two plighted troth. The vicar who joined their hands, Joseph Gardnor, was himself an amateur artist of note in his day, copious ‘honorary contributor’ (not above customers) to the Exhibitions; sending ‘Views from the Lakes,’ from Wales, and other much-libelled Home Beauties, and even Landscape Compositions ‘in the style of the Lakes,’ whatever that may mean. Specimens of this master – pasteboard-like model of misty mountain, old manorial houses as of cards, perspectiveless diagram of lovely vale – may be inspected in Williams’ plodding History of Monmouthshire, and in other books of topography. Engravers had actually to copy and laboriously bite in these young-lady-like Indian ink drawings. Conspicuous mementoes of the vicar’s Taste and munificence still survive, parochially, in the ‘handsome crimson curtains’ trimmed with amber, and held up by gold cord with heavy gold tassels, festooned about the painted eastern window of the church: or rather in deceptively perfect imitations of such upholstery, painted (‘tis said) by the clergyman’s own skilled hand on the light-grained wall of the circular chancel. The window is an eighteenth century remnant piously preserved from the old church: a window literally painted not stained – the colours not burnt in, that is; so that a deluded cleaner on one occasion rubbed out a portion. The subjects are armorial bearings of the St Johns, and (at bottom) portraits of three august collateral connexions of the Family: Margaret Beauchamp, Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth. The general effect is good in colour, not without a tinge of ancient harmony, yellow being the predominating hue. From the vicar’s hand, again, are the two small ‘paintings on glass,’ – The Lamb bearing the sacred monogram, and The Dove (descending), – which fill the two circular sidewindows, of an eminently domestic type, in the curvilinear chancel-wall: paintings so ‘natural’ and familiarly ‘like,’ an innocent spectator forgets perhaps their sacred symbolism – as possibly did the artist too! Did the future designer of The Gates of Paradise, the Jerusalem, and the Job, kneel beneath these trophies of religious art?

SIX Introduction to the Polite World 1782-84 [ÆT. 24-27] (#ulink_a7fd94a9-c400-5049-aced-c97bf10168ab)

To his father, Blake’s early and humble marriage is said to have been unacceptable; and the young couple did not return to the hosier’s roof. They commenced housekeeping on their own account in lodgings, at 23, Green Street, Leicester Fields: in which Fields or Square, on the north side, the junior branches of Royalty had lately abode, on the east (near Green Street) great Hogarth. On the west side of it Sir Joshua in these very years had his handsome house and noble gallery. Green Street, then the abode of quiet private citizens, is now a nondescript street, given up to curiosity shops, shabby lodging-houses, and busy feet hastening to and from the Strand. No. 23, on the right-hand side going citywards, next to the house at the corner of the Square, is one – from the turn the narrow Street here takes – at right angles with and looking down the rest of it. At present, part tenanted by a shoemaker, the house is in an abject plight of stucco, dirt, and dingy desolation. In the previous year, as we have seen, friendly Flaxman had married and taken a house.

About this time, or a little earlier, Blake was introduced by the admiring sympathetic sculptor to the accomplished Mrs Mathew, his own warm friend. The ‘celebrated Mrs Mathew?’ Alas! for tenure of mortal Fame! This lady ranked among the distinguished blue-stockings of her day, was once known to half the Town, the polite and lettered part thereof, as the agreeable, fascinating, spirituelle Mrs Mathew, as, in brief, one of the most ‘gifted and elegant’ of women. As she does not, like her fair comrades, still flutter about the bookstalls among the half-remembered all-unread, and as no lettered contemporary has handed down her portrait, she has disappeared from us. Yet the lady, with her husband, the Rev. Henry Mathew, merit remembrance from the lovers of Art, as the first discoverers and fosterers of the genius of Flaxman, when a boy not yet in teens, and his introducer to more opulent patrons. Their son, afterwards Dr Mathew, was John Hunter’s favourite pupil. Learned as well as elegant, she would read Homer in Greek to the future sculptor, interpreting as she went, while the child sat by her side sketching a passage here and there; and thus she stimulated him to acquire hereafter some knowledge of the language for himself. She was an encourager of musicians, a kind friend to young artists. To all of promising genius the doors of her house, 27, Rathbone Place, were open. Rathbone Place, not then made over to papier-mache, Artist’s colours, toy-shops, and fancytrades, was a street of private houses, stiffly genteel and highly respectable, nay, in a sedate way, quasi fashionable; the Westbourne Street of that day, when the adjacent district of Bloomsbury with its Square, in which (on the countryward side) was the Duke of Bedford’s grand House, was absolutely fashionable and comparatively new, lying on the northern skirts of London; when Great Ormond Street, Queen’s Square, Southampton Row, were accounted ‘places of pleasure,’ being ‘in one of the most charming situations about town,’ next the open fields, and commanding a ‘beautiful landscape formed by the hills of Highgate and Hampstead and adjacent country.’ Among the residents of Rathbone Place, the rebel Lords Lovat, Kilmarnock, Balmarino had at one time numbered. Of the Mathews’ house, by the way, now divided into two, both of them shops, the library or back parlour, garrulous Smith (Nollekens’s biographer) in his Book for a Rainy Day tells us, was decorated by grateful Flaxman ‘with models in putty and sand, of figures in niches in the Gothic manner:’ quaere if still extant? The window was painted ‘in imitation of stained glass’ – just as that in Battersea church, those at Strawberry Hill, and elsewhere were, the practice being one of the valued arts or artifices of the day – by Loutherbourg’s assistant, young Oram, another protégé. The furniture, again, ‘bookcases, tables, and chairs, were also ornamented to accord with the appearance of those of antiquity.’