COMING OF AGE AND MARRIAGE
The Royal Academy is a British Institution which we all patronize once a
year, and then abuse that we may keep our self-respect. We go, impelled by
a sense of high duty; but we presently relax and take our pleasure in Bond
Street. In 1778 Bond Street did not lay itself out to encourage
revolutionary artists, and Burlington House was not yet finished. The
Royal Academy was turned out of Somerset Palace and was still waiting to
turn into its new quarters.
Blake, on leaving Basire, immediately joined the Academy and studied in
the Antique School under Mr Moser. This was not an auspicious beginning.
Moser had scant respect for Michael Angelo and Raphael, while he extolled
to the skies the more fleshly works of Le Brun and Rubens. Some of us may
wish that Moser had taught Blake to admire Rubens. But an angel from
Heaven could not have done that. Clear outline was a necessity to keep him
sane; blurred outline always gave him nightmare. Only the mystic who loves
the flesh can rejoice in the roly-poly curves and tints of Rubens' fat
Venuses. Moser did his best, and being an old man of seventy-three, felt
he might advise a young man in his art studies. But Blake had now known
for some years what he really liked, and his impetuosity led him to speak
to Moser as if their positions were reversed.
Blake drew at the Academy not only from the antique but from living
models. This was distasteful to him, because it was never his aim to
reproduce exact portraits of outward things. Always his imagination must
pierce through and illumine the object before him, and he found the posed
model baffled him in this attempt, and made him scent death rather than
life.
These were crowded days for Blake. He could not continue to live under his
father's roof in Broad Street without contributing towards the household
expenses, and therefore he must do work of marketable value. To this end
he received orders for engraving from Johnson and other booksellers. It
was drudging work, and Blake was not without his full share of drudgery.
To engrave after Stothard was to set a lion to speak in a monstrous little
voice. But Stothard had his uses for Blake. Through a fellow-engraver
Blake was introduced to Stothard, who, still young, was making a guinea a
piece for his contributions to the _Novelist's Magazine_. Broad Street was
in the thick of the Artists and Royal Academicians. Once Blake had pierced
the magic circle and could meet them on equal terms, instead of merely
watching their exits and their entrances through the doors of Broad
Street, Poland Street, and Golden Square, they might prove of value to
him, not by teaching him to paint as they painted, but by helping him to
get customers for his own productions. Stothard had lately made the
acquaintance of Flaxman, who had sought him out, and he introduced Blake
to Flaxman, who in 1781 took a house at 27 Wardour Street and became
Blake's close friend and neighbour.
At this time, in 1780, Blake threw off one of his very own magnificent
designs known as _Morning, or Glad Day_. It is the real Blake with only
one foot on earth, his head in a flood of light, and the symbols of his
grub state--caterpillar and moth--at his feet. The rays of the light are
darting north and south and east and west. Blake had weary years before
him to work out his salvation to Glad Day. This design makes it certain
that he already had had his glimpse of the end, and we shall find that he
was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.
London was not without its excitements. Lord George Gordon headed the
No-Popery Riots in 1780, and through the unruly violence of the mob,
London was in a panic for a week. Lord George was arrested and imprisoned
in the Tower, where he was visited by the ubiquitous John Wesley, who
found him well instructed in the Bible and not disposed to complain.
It is impossible to trace accurately what books Blake read at this time.
It is evident that he observed Wesley and Whitefield and admired much that
he saw in them. But his own religious genius was far removed from theirs,
and sought nourishment elsewhere. It is probable that he read Boehme,
Paracelsus, Fludd, Madame Guyon, and St Theresa in his spare hours.
But there were other imperious needs surging up in him. The creative
passion of love was driving him hither and thither. With his tendency to
view all things in the light of eternity, he was passionately in love with
the eternal feminine, into which any pair of bright eyes would serve as
windows. The particular pair of eyes that captivated him belonged to "a
lively little girl" called Polly Wood, with whom he kept company for a
while. Polly's conversation was probably no more suitable as a permanent
entertainment to Blake than that of a modern flapper. Fortunately, she
understood little affairs of the heart much better than he did, not taking
them more seriously than they deserved; and when she saw symptoms of
tremendously earnest love-making threatening to engulf her, she quickly
shook him off with a sharp stroke, "Are you a fool?" and left him feeling
very lacerated and sorry for himself.
Blake had not long to wait for another manifestation of the eternal
feminine. Recovering from an illness at Kew, where he was staying at the
house of a market-gardener named Boucher, he told his grief to the
gardener's daughter Catherine, who declared that she pitied him from the
heart. There was the authentic voice of the eternal feminine. "Do you pity
me?" he gasped. "Yes! I do most sincerely" the voice continued. "Then I
love you!" and his fate was sealed. William Blake and Catherine Boucher
were married quietly at St Mary's Church, Battersea, on August 18th, 1782,
and the happy pair, leaving their parental nests, made their first little
home together in lodgings at 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields.
Blake's worldly goods with all of which he endowed his bride were not
plentiful. A portfolio of prints which had been growing in bulk during
fifteen years was his darling treasure. Money he had none. But he had
immense capacity for sustained application and work. His engravings made
small but sure returns, and for the last four years he had turned his
attention to water-colour, and in 1780 had even exhibited in the Royal
Academy. And he was making friends. Friend Flaxman lived near in Wardour
Street, friend Fuseli in Broad Street. Stothard was kind. A young man with
sanguine temperament like Blake might expect anything to turn up.
His wife brought no gold with her; but she brought a faithful maternal
heart, unlimited faith in her husband, a teachable spirit, and a
willingness to turn her hand to all that was necessary to make and keep a
little home for the man-child of her heart. She had made her mark in
the marriage register of St Mary's Church. A woman with such endowments,
unspoilt by education, was virgin soil that would yield whatever her
husband willed. It was no long time before she learnt of him to write,
draw, and engrave, all of which acquirements she placed in perfect loyalty
at his disposal.
[Illustration: GLAD DAY.]
We have seen that Blake's circle of acquaintances widened much from the
day he became a student at the Royal Academy. But artists are not
necessarily in Society, and if one can believe what everyone says they are
apt to be bohemian. Now that Blake was a married man, he could not be
indifferent to the grades of the social ladder; and when Flaxman
introduced him to the elegant and cultured Mrs Mathew at 27 Rathbone
Place, he not only had hopes of a useful patron for himself, but also that
the accomplished lady might be a kind friend to his wife. She had been
truly kind to Flaxman for many years, and it is reasonable to suppose that
while benefiting him she had herself benefited by his pure classicism and
romanticism combined. Thus equipped, she needed only to extend her
sympathies towards mysticism, and then she might include even Blake
himself among her good works. But she and her sister Blue-stockings
deserve a chapter to themselves.