LIFE AT FELPHAM
In 1793 Blake removed across the river to Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,
where he lived for seven years of great mental and spiritual vitality,
seeing visions and dreaming dreams and embodying them in beautiful
designs. He was a tireless worker, never resting, and sleeping much less
than other men. These Lambeth days were days of comparative prosperity
with the Blakes, whose wants were so simple and few. The little house in
which they lived possessed rustic charms--a garden with a summer-house,
and a vine climbing over the back of the house, whose leaves made a
pleasant rustling in summer. A view of the river, too, could not have
failed to add a significant charm to the place. On its shining surface
might be descried ships like souls faring to the world's great
market-place, to barter and to receive merchandise; while others, with
white sails set, slipped quietly down the river and out to the wide
mysterious sea. Blake had a few pupils, too, and at this period he made
the acquaintance of Mr. Butts, who was a staunch friend and true
appreciator for thirty years. During all that time he was a constant buyer
of our artist's work, and bought sometimes at the rate of one drawing a
week. In time Mr. Butts' spacious house in Fitzroy Square became a regular
Blake Gallery. The average price he paid was L1 to 30_s._ a design or
picture. To Mr. Butts' great honour be it said that he never assumed the
airs of a patron, never tried to bind or hamper Blake's genius, or to
dictate or direct his choice of subjects or treatment of them. He seems to
have realized that this man was "a prince in Israel," and the lordship of
his ideas not to be questioned, but accepted humbly and with gratitude.
In a future chapter I hope to deal with the Blake drawings and easel
pictures done for Mr. Butts, which were available to the public in the
Exhibition at Messrs. Carfax's Rooms in Ryder Street, held in 1904.
Blake seems to have enjoyed a little wave of recognition at
Lambeth--popularity it can hardly be called--but it was not long-lived. At
one time he was even suggested as drawing-master to the Royal Family, but
declined the position, not from modesty, but from devotion to his true
_metier_--the preservation and expression of spiritual ideas--with which
such a post would probably have interfered.
Two acts of secret and most munificent generosity are recorded by Tatham,
and quoted by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, concerning Blake while at Lambeth.
He gave L40 (he seldom after had half as much money beside him) to a
friend in distress, and his deep sympathetic heart being moved by the
sight of a sick young man, an artist, who daily passed their door, he and
his Kate made the young man's acquaintance, and for the love of Christ and
in memory of brother Robert, finally took him into their house and tended
him till his death some months later.
While at Lambeth he made three large and important
drawings--"Nebuchadnezzar," an enlarged edition of the bearded figure on
hands and knees which occurs in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"; "The
Lazar House" and "The Elohim creating Adam." He also made designs for
Young's "Night Thoughts." There were 537 designs made, and Blake only took
a year to do them. A selected few were engraved. While at Lambeth he
printed also his "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," "America,"
"Europe," "Urizen," "The Gates of Paradise," "The Book of Los," "The Song
of Los," and "Ahania." The list implies steady application, and untiring
intellectual and spiritual energy.
[Illustration: THE LAZAR HOUSE, FROM MILTON
Water-colour, 1795]
The introduction of our painter, in 1800, by his old friend Flaxman, to
Hayley, poetaster and dilettante, marks the beginning of a new epoch in
his life.
Hayley, the friend of Gibbon and, later, of Cowper (whose biography he
wrote), was a characteristic product of the last quarter of the eighteenth
century,--that age of complaisant preoccupation with trifles.
This poetically barren interval before the birth of the wonderful new
school of poetry had, since the best days of Cowper, but one star above
its horizon--or was it a will-o'-the-wisp?--the _soi-disant_ poet Hayley.
Complaisantly he twinkled on his admiring world, and, striking the lyre
with gracious hand, sang with modest satisfaction "The Triumphs of
Temper." This now forgotten work earned him the position of "greatest of
living poets," and he assumed his high seat in the literary world with
bustling alacrity. Above all things he aspired to culture, not at the
expense of a very continuous effort or strain, it is true, but he loved to
collect around him artists and men of letters to whom he could play the
part of a somewhat undersized Lorenzo de' Medici. That they would respond
gracefully, and take their parts becomingly in this garden-comedy, was all
that he required of his court.
It will be remembered that Romney was one of his artist friends, and that
the connection proved in a way economically disastrous to the painter, for
Hayley was an extravagant man, though he professed simple tastes, and
encouraged poor Romney in his mania for building and other lavish
expenditure.
His influence, such as it was, was stimulating to none of his friends,
though he meant well and kindly enough. He affected the part of the
country gentleman, as well as that of the high priest of culture, and
delighted in patronage.
Soon after his acquaintance with Blake began, his old friend Cowper died
under tragic conditions, and a week later Hayley's only child (an
illegitimate son) died also. The boy was a youth of promise, and had been
a pupil of Flaxman. So he had gratified as well as filled the poor
father's heart. Hayley's trouble called forth a letter from Blake, which I
quoted when writing on the death of Robert, and it seems to have touched,
perhaps comforted, Hayley, who even in his deep affliction assumed a pose
not natural or spontaneous.
Blake was recommended by Flaxman as an engraver and designer (if the
latter should be required), and Hayley proposed that the Blakes should
come and live at Felpham, near his own place of Eartham in Sussex, in
order that his new _protege_ might engrave the illustrations to the life
of Cowper which he was now about to write, under Hayley's own eye.
The idea pleased Blake, while Mrs. Blake, he wrote, "is like a flame of
many colours of precious jewels, whenever she hears it named." As a matter
of fact, Hayley did not live at Eartham now, as the place was an expensive
one to keep up, but had built himself a wonderful turretted marine
"cottage," with a library and covered court for equestrian exercise at
Felpham.
[Illustration: PLATE FROM "EUROPE," PRINTED 1794
Coloured by hand]
In the September of 1800, Blake being then forty-three years old, the
husband and wife took up their abode in a pretty little cottage by the sea
at Felpham, and began a new manner of life. If Hercules Buildings,
Lambeth, had afforded Blake hints and types of spiritual life and
light, how much larger a vista must have opened to him at Felpham. He used
to wander musing along the seashore, and more than once saw the yellow
sands peopled by a host of souls long since departed from this
earth--Moses and the Prophets, Homer, Dante, Milton: "all," Blake said,
"majestic shadows, gray but luminous, and superior to the common height of
men." Many visions came to him at first. It is not wonderful that this
should have been so, for there was nothing that did not teem with
suggestions to his subjective mind, and when he received a new influx of
spiritual light, as he seemed to have had at Felpham, then, indeed, were
blossoms, stars and stones, nay, the very air he breathed, alive with a
strange, sentient, crowding population, to whose spiritual utterances he
listened, whose forms he strained his mental sight to realize.
In a letter to Flaxman, beginning, "Dear Sculptor of Eternity," Blake
writes in the first effervescence of delight: "Felpham is a sweet place
for study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on
all sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours;
voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms
more distinctly seen."
For a while all went very well indeed, and the first part of his sojourn
at Felpham was a sort of charmed circle in his life. "Mr. Hayley acts like
a prince," "Felpham is the sweetest spot on earth," "work will go on here
with God-speed," "Find that I can work with greater pleasure than ever,"
are phrases which occur in the enthusiastic letters of the period. But
gradually Hayley's constant companionship, his amiable but fatuous and
gushing friendship, acted like the hated chain of slavery on Blake's
electric and expansive temperament. Hayley's mind was set on little
things, trivial business and futile undertakings, and his vanity and
self-satisfaction about all his doings came at last to be exasperating to
Blake. In spite of his generosity, his lavish but undiscerning praise, and
the commissions for engraving and designs with which he supplied our
artist, Blake little by little found himself goaded to madness by the
ever-flowing stream of Hayley's conventionality and watery enthusiasms.
Hayley attempted to enlarge Blake's education by reading to him Klopstock
and translating as he went along--a proceeding that must have bored our
fiery genius to tears. He also, with the kindest intentions in the world,
obtained commissions for Blake to paint miniatures--hardly, one would
think, a congenial form of art to him, but one which at the beginning
appears to have interested him nevertheless.
A couplet he wrote in the Note-book at the time evidences the irritated
nerves that Hayley's unspiritual contact set on edge:
Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache.
Do be my enemy for friendship's sake.
The letters, too, to Mr. Butts give direct insight into his state of mind,
and the points of sharp disagreement and intellectual misunderstanding
between the two men are easily traced.
It appears that "Hayley was as much averse to a page of Blake's poetry as
to a chapter in the Bible."
Blake the creator and artist was unintelligible and foreign to Hayley,
who, always satisfied with his own judgement, sought to turn Blake from
designing and to chain him to the hack work of engraving.
[Illustration: LOS, ENITHARMON AND ORC
Colour-print from "Urizen," 1794]
By degrees the visions that had so often and radiantly appeared to Blake
on his first coming to Felpham seemed to forsake him. As he became
involved in Hayley's pursuits, and sought to work out Hayley's plans for
him, the visions even appeared to be angry with him. Then, indeed, it
seemed that he was in danger of "bartering his birthright for a mess of
pottage." He writes to Mr. Butts:
"My unhappiness has arisen from a source which, if explored too narrowly,
might hurt my pecuniary circumstances, as my dependence is on engraving at
present, and particularly the engravings I have in hand for Mr. H., and I
find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere
drudgery of business, and intimations that if I do not confine myself to
this, I shall not live. This has always pursued me.... This from Johnson
and Fuseli brought me down here, and this from Mr. H. will bring me back
again. For that I cannot live without doing my duty to lay up treasures in
heaven, is certain and determined, and to this I have long made up my
mind.... But," he goes on to say, "if we fear to do the dictates of our
angels, and tremble at the tasks set before us; if we refuse to do
spiritual acts because of natural fears and natural desires, who can
describe the dismal torments of such a state? I too well remember the
threats I heard" (_i.e._, in vision). "If you, who are organized by Divine
Providence for spiritual commission, refuse and bury your talents in the
earth, even though you should want natural bread--sorrow and desperation
pursue you through life, and after death shame and confusion of face to
eternity. Everyone in eternity will leave you, aghast at the man who was
crowned with glory and honour by his brethren and betrayed their cause to
their enemies. You will be called the base Judas who betrayed his friend."
Blake was the apostle and martyr of this devotion to the high spiritual
mission of Art. He would make no compromise with the world.
In a letter to Mr. Butts dated April 25th, 1803, he writes:
"I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoyed, and that I
may converse with my friends in Eternity, see visions, dream dreams, and
prophesy and speak parables, unobserved, and at liberty from the doubts
of other mortals, perhaps doubts proceeding from kindness, but doubts are
always pernicious, especially when we doubt our friends. Christ is very
decided on this point: 'He who is not with me is against me;' there is no
medium or middle state; and if a man is the enemy of my spiritual life,
while he pretends to be the friend of my corporeal, he is a real enemy;
but the man may be the friend of my spiritual life while he seems the
enemy of my corporeal, though not _vice versa_."
This enemy to Blake's spiritual life is certainly Hayley.
He writes with unmistakable frankness of the Hermit of Eartham in a later
letter:
"Mr. H. approves of my designs as little as he does of my poems, and I
have been forced to insist on his leaving me, in both, to my own
self-will; I am determined to be no longer pestered with his genteel
ignorance and polite disapprobation. I know myself both Poet and Painter,
and it is not his affected contempt that can move to anything but a more
assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness I have brought
down his affected loftiness, and he begins to think I have some genius, as
if genius and assurance were the same thing! But his imbecile attempts to
depress me only deserve laughter." He goes on to say that he will
relinquish all engagements to design for Hayley, "unless altogether left
to my own judgement, as you, my dear friend, have always left me; for
which I shall never cease to honour and respect you." And for which, we
may add, posterity also has good reason to laud and acclaim Mr. Butts.
Blake was not the man to be the creature of any patron, spending his time
and all his magnificent powers as the servant of another man's
brain--especially when that brain was Hayley's.
If the engravings and designs done for his patron had earned him
thousands instead of a mere competence, such work could not have tempted
him from his chosen path of spiritual art. Finally, in 1803, he threw off
the yoke decisively, turned his back on patronage, and returned with his
faithful Kate to the liberty and poverty of rooms in South Molton Street,
London, after a three years' rural seclusion. Just before leaving Felpham
Blake became involved in a very disagreeable affair with a drunken soldier
named Schofield, which resulted in a trial for sedition. The soldier, who
was forcibly removed by Blake from his cottage garden, where he was
trespassing, trumped up in revenge a set of ridiculous charges against
him, saying he had used seditious language against the king and
government. In the practical difficulties that all this gave rise to,
Hayley came forward to Blake's assistance, and putting all the weight of
his local position and popularity on the artist's side, materially helped
him before and at the time of the trial. Although he had been thrown from
his horse and hurt a few days previously, he insisted on being present to
give evidence in his _protege's_ favour, who was of course acquitted.
Warm-hearted Blake felt a generous inrush of the old affection for his
friend, and a deep sense of gratitude helped to re-establish the old
cordial relations between the two men. It must not be inferred from this,
however, that Blake had altered his opinion that Hayley was his spiritual
enemy. That, he held, Hayley had proved himself to be. But he now
recognized that it was not malignity, but deficiency of spiritual
knowledge and insight that had made him act as he did. It was the law of
his being, and Blake, having learned this through experience of his three
years' stay at Felpham, expected no more from him than his capacity
warranted, and gave him his dues, dwelling with gratitude on the fact that
Hayley was at least a true "corporeal friend."
The stress and strain connected with the trial had a bad effect on Blake's
highly-sensitive nerves, and is painfully apparent in the writing of the
time. The time at Felpham, and the period that succeeded on his return to
London, have much light shed on them by the Note-book. The MS. book to
which reference has been made was a sort of safety valve, which Blake kept
ever at his elbow, and in which he wrote long dissertations on Art and
Religion--the "Public Address," the "Vision of the Last Judgment," and
many of the poems published under the title (which heads the Note-book
itself) of "Ideas of Good and Evil." Along with, and interspersed with
these connected and finished utterances, are splenetic epigrams, rude
rather than humorous caricature couplets, little scraps of unconsidered
verse written to illustrate some incident of the day, and drawings here,
there, and everywhere. The MS. Note-book is a very intimate part of Blake.
On its first page Messrs. Ellis and Yeats quote the inscription written by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who possessed it till his death:
"I purchased this original MS. of Palmer, an attendant at the Antique
Gallery of the British Museum, on the 30th April, 1849. Palmer knew Blake
personally, and it was from the artist's wife that he had the present MS.,
which he sold me for 10_s._ Among the sketches are one or two profiles of
Blake himself." Unfortunately it has now passed by purchase into the
possession of a collector at Boston, U.S.A. I say unfortunately, because
our own National Museum should have secured such a treasure, but its
present owner courteously lent it for a prolonged period to Messrs. Ellis
and Yeats, who have embodied the main part of it in their exhaustive and
most interesting work. The Note-book was deeply studied by Gilchrist, and
was one of Rossetti's dearest treasures, leaving its impress on his mind
and work.
The work Blake did during the Felpham period included the designs and
engraving of animals to Hayley's "Ballads," some of the engravings for
"The Life of Cowper," and, above all, the writing of two long prophetic
books, the "Milton" and the "Jerusalem," which, however, he did not finish
till he had returned to London.