BLAKE AND FLAXMAN
Ten years before Boswell went to live at 56 Great Queen Street, William
Blake was serving an apprenticeship to James Basire, the well-known
engraver, whose house was close by at No. 31 in the same street. Basire's
residence has gone the way of all bricks and mortar; but happily Soho
still preserves the corner house at No. 28 Broad Street, in which Blake
was born. He was born there on the 28th November 1857, over his father's
hosiery shop, and it was there that the first of his strange visions came
to him; for he used to say that when he was only four years old he one day
saw the face of God at the window looking in upon him, and the sight set
him a-screaming. When he was four or five years older, you hear of him
taking long rambles into the country; and it was on Peckham Rye that other
visions came to him. Once he saw a tree there "filled with angels, bright
angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars"; and once, on a summer
morning, he saw "the haymakers at work, and amid them angelic figures
walking." In his matter-of-fact fashion he recounted the first of these
two visions on his return home, and his mother had to intervene to prevent
the honest hosier and conscientious Nonconformist, his father, from
thrashing him for telling a lie.
At the age of ten Blake was journeying to and from the house in Broad
Street to Mr. Paris's academy in the Strand, taking drawing lessons. He
was already writing poetry, too, and before he was fourteen had written
one of the most beautiful and glitteringly imaginative of his lyrics:--
"How sweet I roamed from field to field,
And tasted all the summer's pride,
Till I the Prince of Love beheld
Who in the sunny beams did glide.
He showed me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair
Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet May-dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fired my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty."
In a preface to his first published volume, the _Poetical Sketches_, which
contains this lyric, his Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter verses, "My
Silks and fine Array," and other lovely songs, he says that all the
contents were "commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the
author till his twentieth year." From fourteen till he was twenty-one
Blake was living away from home with his master, Basire, the engraver;
then he went back to his father's, and commenced to study at the recently
formed Royal Academy, and in 1780 exhibited his first picture there, "The
Death of Earl Godwin." Marrying in 1782, he set up housekeeping for
himself at 23 Green Street, Leicester Square, and began to move abroad in
literary society. Flaxman, already his friend, introduced him to Mrs.
Mathew, a lady of blue-stocking tendencies, who held a sort of salon at 27
Rathbone Place; and here, in 1784, "Rainy Day" Smith made his
acquaintance. "At Mrs. Mathew's most agreeable conversaziones," he says,
"I first met the late William Blake, to whom she and Mr. Flaxman had been
truly kind. There I have often heard him read and sing several of his
poems. He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and
allowed by most of his listeners to possess original and extraordinary
merit." He knew nothing of musical technique, but sang some of his verses
to airs that Smith describes as "singularly beautiful." His republican
opinions and general unorthodoxy and daring outspokenness, however, did
not make for social amenity, and it was not long before he dropped out of
these elegant circles, and withdrew to his mystic dreamings and the
production of paintings and poetry that the majority could not understand.
A strangely beautiful and wonderful Bird of Paradise to break from the
nest over that hosier's shop at the corner of Broad Street, Soho!
[Illustration: BLAKE'S HOUSE. SOHO.]
When his father died, in 1784, Blake's brother James took over and
continued the business; and in the same year Blake himself opened the shop
next door (No. 27) as an engraver and printseller, in partnership with
James Parker, who had been one of his fellow-apprentices under Basire.
Here he had his younger brother, Robert, with him as a pupil; and he
used to say that when Robert died, in 1787, he saw his soul ascend through
the ceiling, "clapping its hands for joy." Falling out with Parker, Blake
removed, in this year of his brother's death, to 28 Poland Street, near
by, where he said Robert's spirit remained in communion with him, and
directed him, "in a nocturnal vision, how to proceed in bringing out poems
and designs in conjunction"; and the _Songs of Innocence_, published in
1789, was the result of this inspiration. The method, as Alexander
Gilchrist has it, "consisted in a species of engraving in relief both
words and designs. The verse was written, and the designs and marginal
embellishments outlined on the copper with an impervious liquid. Then all
the white parts, or lights (the remainder of the plate, that is), were
eaten away with aquafortis or other acid, so that the outline of letter
and design was left prominent, as in stereotype. From these plates he
printed off in any tint required to be the prevailing (or ground) colour
in his facsimiles; red he used for the letterpress. The page was then
coloured up by hand in imitation of the original drawing, with more or
less variety of detail in the local hues." A process of mixing his colours
with diluted glue was revealed to him by St. Joseph. Mrs. Blake often
helped him in tinting the designs, and it was her work to bind the books
in boards. In the same year (1789) he put forth the finest of his long
mystical poems, _The Book of Thel_.
Leaving Poland Street in 1793, Blake moved across London to Lambeth, and
made himself a new home at 13 Hercules Buildings. Gilchrist, one of his
earliest biographers, made a mistake in his identification of this house,
and until a year or two ago it was believed that Blake's residence in that
place had been pulled down. On a recent investigation of the Lambeth
rate-books by the County Council authorities, however, it became clear
that, instead of being on the west side of the street, as Gilchrist
supposed, No. 13 was on the east side, next door but one to Hercules Hall
Yard. Somewhere between 1830 and 1842 the whole road was renumbered, and
Blake's house had become No. 63, and was in 1890 renumbered again, and
became, and is still, No. 23 Hercules Road. Whilst he was living here, Mr.
Thomas Butts, of Fitzroy Square, became his most liberal and most constant
patron; and on calling at Hercules Buildings one day, Mr. Butts says he
found Blake and his wife sitting naked in their summer-house. "Come in!"
Blake greeted him. "It's only Adam and Eve, you know." But Mr. Butts never
took this as evidence of Blake's madness: he and his wife had simply been
reciting passages of _Paradise Lost_ in character.
[Illustration: BLAKE. 23 HERCULES ROAD.]
At Hercules Buildings Blake did a large number of paintings and
engravings, including the 537 coloured drawings for Young's _Night
Thoughts_, and some of the greatest of his designs, such as the "Job" and
"Ezekiel" prints; and here, too, he completed certain of his _Prophetic
Books_, with their incomprehensible imagery and allegory, and what
Swinburne has called their "sunless and sonorous gulfs." From Hercules
Buildings also came "Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the
night," and the rest of the _Songs of Experience_. Then, in 1800, Hayley,
the poet of the dull and unreadable _Triumphs of Temper_, persuaded him
to move into the country and settle down in a cottage at Felpham; from
which, because he said "the visions were angry with me at Felpham," he
returned to London early in 1804, and took lodgings on the first floor of
17 South Moulton Street, Oxford Street.
[Illustration: BLAKE'S HOUSE. SOUTH MOULTON ST.]
Nevertheless, at Felpham he must have been working on his _Jerusalem_,
and on _Milton, A Poem in Two Books_, for these were issued shortly after
his arrival in South Moulton Street. He writes of _Jerusalem_ in one of
his letters: "I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve,
or sometimes twenty or thirty, lines at a time, without premeditation, and
even against my will"; and in a later letter, speaking of it as "the
grandest poem that this world contains," he excuses himself by remarking,
"I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the
secretary--the authors are in eternity." Much of _Jerusalem_ is turgid,
obscure, chaotic, and so impossible to understand that Mr. Chesterton
declares that when Blake said "that its authors were in eternity, one can
only say that nobody is likely to go there to get any more of their work."
But it is in this poem that Blake introduces those verses "To the Jews,"
setting forth that Jerusalem once stood in--
"The fields from Islington to Marybone,
To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood,"
and that then--
"The Divine Vision still was seen,
Still was the human form divine;
Weeping in weak and mortal clay,
O Jesus! still the form was Thine.
And Thine the human face; and Thine
The human hands, and feet, and breath,
Entering through the gates of birth,
And passing through the gates of death";
and in _Jerusalem_ you have his lines "To the Deists," the first version
of his ballad of the Grey Monk, with its great ending:--
"For a tear is an intellectual thing,
And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King,
And the bitter groan of a martyr's woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow."
For my part, I wish it were possible for some of our living poets to go
again to those authors in eternity and get some more of such stuff as
this, even if we had to have it embedded in drearier lumps of nonsense
than you find in _Jerusalem_.
Blake's wife, daughter of a market-gardener, a woman so uneducated that
she had to sign the marriage register with her mark, was not only an
excellent housekeeper and domestic drudge, but was in perfect sympathy
with him in his work, and had the greatest faith in his visions. Moses,
Julius Cæsar, the Builder of the Pyramids, David, Uriah, Bathsheba,
Solomon, Mahomet, Joseph, and Mary--these were among Blake's spiritual
visitants at South Moulton Street. They came and sat to him, and he worked
at their portraits, "looking up from time to time as though he had a real
sitter before him." Sometimes he would leave off abruptly, and observe in
matter-of-fact tones, "I can't go on. It is gone; I must wait till it
returns"; or, "It has moved; the mouth is gone"; or, "He frowns. He is
displeased with my portrait of him." If any one criticised and objected to
the likeness he would reply calmly, "It _must_ be right. I saw it so." In
all probability he meant no more than that he conjured up these sitters to
his mind's eye; but his friends took him literally, and he acquiesced in
their doing so, and has been dubbed a madman in consequence.
Many times his wife would get up in the nights "when he was under his
very fierce inspirations, which were as if they would tear him asunder,
while he was yielding himself to the Muse, or whatever else it could be
called, sketching and writing. And so terrible a task did this seem to be
that she had to sit motionless and silent, only to stay him mentally,
without moving hand or foot; this for hours, and night after night." It is
not easy to realise that this burning, fiery spirit did once live in these
South Moulton Street rooms, surrounded by his vivid and terrific
imaginings, and then could pass out of it and leave it looking so dull and
decorous, so ordinary, so entirely commonplace. But here he indubitably
lived, so discouraged by neglect and hampered by poverty that he could not
afford to issue any more large books like the _Jerusalem_, and in 1809
made a desperate attempt to appeal to the public by holding an exhibition
of his frescoes and drawings on the first floor of his brother's hosiery
shop in Broad Street. Very few visitors attended; but among the few was
Lamb's friend, Crabb Robinson, and when he went he had the room to
himself. He paid for admission, recognised that these pictures were the
work of no ordinary artist, and bought four of the catalogues, one of
which he sent to Lamb; and when, on leaving, he asked the custodian
whether he might come again free, James Blake, delighted at having a
visitor, and one, moreover, who had bought something, cried, "Oh yes--free
as long as you live!" But the exhibition was a failure. The popular
painters of Blake's day were Reynolds, Gainsborough, and men of their
schools. Blake was born out of his time, and contemporary society had
nothing in common with him--no comprehension of his aim or his
outlook--and dismissed him as an astonishing lunatic. When some drawings
of his were shown to George III., his Majesty could only gaze at them
helplessly and ejaculate a testy "Take them away! take them away!" The
noble designs for Blair's _Grave_, and the frescoes of _The Canterbury
Pilgrimage_, were among the important works done at South Moulton Street,
which Blake quitted in 1821, making his last change of residence to 3
Fountain Court, Strand--a house kept by his brother-in-law, Baines. Here
he occupied a room on the first floor for some six years, and when he was
nearing his seventieth year, died, after a short illness, on Sunday, the
12th August 1827. He lay dying in his plain back room, serene and
cheerful, singing songs to melodies that were the inspiration of the
moment; towards evening he fell silent, and passed quietly away, a poor
woman, a neighbour who had come in to sit with his wife, saying
afterwards, "I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed
angel."
You have only to look at the portraits of Blake, at the broad
forehead--the forehead of a revolutionary, as he himself said--the
sensitive mouth, the large, intent, vision-haunted eyes, to know that his
outward appearance fairly adequately revealed the manner of man that he
really was. He was under five feet six in height and thick-set, but so
well proportioned that he did not strike people as short. "He had an
upright carriage," says Gilchrist, "and a good presence; he bore himself
with dignity, as not unconscious of his natural claims. The head and face
were strongly stamped with the power and character of the man. There was
a great volume of brain in that square, massive head, that piled-up brow,
very full and rounded at the temples, where, according to phrenologists,
ideality or imagination resides. His eyes were fine ('wonderful eyes,'
some one calls them), prominently set, but bright, spiritual,
visionary--not restless or wild, but with a look of clear, heavenly
exaltation. The eyes of some of the old men in his _Job_ recall his own to
surviving friends. His nose was insignificant as to size, but had that
peculiarity which gives to a face an expression of fiery energy, as of a
high-mettled steed--a little _clenched_ nostril, a nostril that opened as
far as it could, but was tied down at one end. His mouth was wide, the
lips not full, but tremulous, and expressive of the great sensibility
which characterised him. He was short-sighted, as the prominence of his
eyes indicated--a prominence in keeping with the faculty for languages,
according to phrenologists again. He wore glasses only occasionally." His
poverty forced him to study economy in the matter of dress. Indoors he was
not slovenly, but generally wore a threadbare old suit, the grey trousers
of which had been rubbed black and shiny in front like a mechanic's. When
he walked abroad he was more careful, and dressed plainly but well,
something in the style of an old-fashioned tradesman, in black
knee-breeches and buckles, black worsted stockings, shoes that tied, and a
broad-brimmed hat.
But for a memorable description of Blake in his habit as he lived, you
must read this letter that was written to Gilchrist by Samuel Palmer, who
knew him intimately in his latter years:--
"Blake, once known, could never be forgotten.... In him you saw at once
the maker, the inventor; one of the few in any age; a fitting companion
for Dante. He was a man 'without a mask'; his aim single, his path
straightforwards, and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy. His
voice and manner were quiet, yet all awake with intellect. Above the
tricks of littleness, or the least taint of affectation, with a natural
dignity which few would have dared to affront, he was gentle and
affectionate, loving to be with little children and talk about them. 'That
is heaven,' he said to a friend, leading him to a window and pointing to a
group of them at play.
"Declining, like Socrates, whom in many respects he resembled, the common
objects of ambition, and pitying the scuffle to obtain them, he thought no
one could be truly great who had not humbled himself 'even as a little
child.' This was a subject he loved to dwell upon and to illustrate. His
eye was the finest I ever saw; brilliant, but not roving, clear and
intent, yet susceptible; it flashed with genius, or melted in tenderness.
It could also be terrible.... Nor was the mouth less expressive, the lips
flexible and quivering with feeling. I can yet recall it when, on one
occasion, dwelling upon the exquisite beauty of the parable of the
Prodigal, he began to repeat a part of it; but at the words, 'When he was
yet a great way off his father saw him,' he could go no further; his voice
faltered, and he was in tears.
"He was one of the few to be met with in our passage through life who are
not in some way or other double-minded and inconsistent with themselves;
one of the very few who cannot be depressed by neglect, and to whose name
rank and station could add no lustre. Moving apart, in a sphere above the
attraction of worldly honours, he did not accept greatness, but conferred
it. He ennobled poverty, and, by his conversation and the influence of his
genius, made two small rooms in Fountain Court more attractive than the
threshold of princes."
One of Blake's warmest friends for many years was the great sculptor, John
Flaxman. With none of Blake's lawless, glowing imagination, Flaxman's
drawings in his illustrations to Homer, and his designs on some of the
Wedgwood pottery, have a classical correctness--a cold, exquisite beauty
of outline--that are more suggestive of the chisel than of the pencil or
the brush; and it is in the splendid sculptures with which he has
beautified Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, and many other of our cathedrals
and churches that his genius found its highest expression. In his work as
an artist Blake was largely influenced by Flaxman. They and Stothard used
to meet at Mrs. Mathew's; but there came a day when the friendship between
these three was broken. Blake thought Flaxman had appropriated one of his
designs, and there seems no doubt that Stothard did so, on the prompting
of an unscrupulous picture-dealer; and you have Blake lampooning them
both, as well as Hayley, with whom he had also fallen out, in epigrams
that were not always just, and probably represented nothing worse than a
passing mood, as thus:--
"My title as a genius thus is proved:
Not praised by Hayley, nor by Flaxman loved."
"I found them blind, I taught them how to see,
And now they know neither themselves nor me."
_To Flaxman._
"You call me mad; 'tis folly to do so,--
To seek to turn a madman to a foe.
If you think as you speak, you are an ass;
If you do not, you are but what you was."
_To the same._
"I mock thee not, though I by thee am mocked;
Thou call'st me madman, but I call thee blockhead."
Flaxman was not, like Blake, a born Londoner, but his family came from
York, and settled down in London when he was six months old. His father
had a shop in New Street, Covent Garden, where he made and sold plaster
casts. Flaxman emerged from a sickly childhood, and developed into a
sufficiently wiry and energetic man, though he remained feeble in
appearance, so high-shouldered as to seem almost deformed, with a head too
large for his body, and a queer sidelong gait in walking. He married in
1782, and, after living for five years in a very small house at 27 Wardour
Street, Soho--where he was elected collector of the watch-rate for the
parish--he and his wife went to Italy, and spent seven years in Rome.
Whilst he was there he fulfilled a commission for Romney, and collected
and sent over to England a selection of casts from the antique, that
Romney required for the use of students in his Hampstead painting-room.
Returning from Italy in 1794, Flaxman took up residence at 17 Buckingham
Street, Euston Road, and lived here through all his most famous years,
till he died in 1826. Blake visited him here, and Haydon, and other of his
artistic circle; for though he went little into society, he was
unpretentiously hospitable, fond of entertaining his chosen friends,
greatly esteemed and beloved by his pupils, models, and servants, and the
poor of the neighbourhood, especially the children. He went about among
the latter habitually, filling his sketch-book with drawings of them, and
invariably carrying a pocketful of coppers to drop into the small grubby
hands that were ready to receive them.
[Illustration: FLAXMAN'S HOUSE. BUCKINGHAM STREET. EUSTON ROAD.]
The district hereabouts has degenerated since Flaxman's day. His house was
dull, insignificant, rather mean-looking, and now it looks more so than
ever, amid its grimy surroundings--a pinched, old, dreary little house,
that is yet transfigured when you remember the glorious visitors who have
crossed its threshold, and that it was at this same dead door the postman
knocked one day near the end of September 1800 and delivered this letter
from Blake, who was then newly gone out of London and had not had time to
begin to grow tired of his cottage at Felpham:--
"DEAR SCULPTOR OF ETERNITY,--We are safe arrived at our cottage, which
is more beautiful than I thought it, and more convenient.... Mr.
Hayley received us with his usual brotherly affection. I have begun to
work. 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; and
my cottage is also a shadow of their houses. My wife and sister are
both well, courting Neptune for an embrace....
"And now begins a new life, because another covering of earth is
shaken off. I am more famed in heaven for my works than I could well
conceive. In my brain are studies and chambers filled with books and
pictures of old, which I wrote and painted in ages of eternity before
my mortal life; and these works are the delight and study of
archangels. Why then should I be anxious about the riches and fame of
mortality? The Lord our Father will do for us and with us according to
His divine will, for our good.
"You, O dear Flaxman, are a sublime archangel--my friend and companion
from eternity. In the divine bosom is our dwelling-place. I look back
into the regions of reminiscence, and behold our ancient days, before
this earth appeared in its vegetable mortality to my mortal vegetated
eyes. I see our houses of eternity, which can never be separated,
though our mortal vehicles should stand at the remotest corners of
heaven from each other.
"Farewell, my best friend. Remember me and my wife in love and
friendship to our dear Mrs. Flaxman, whom we ardently desire to
entertain beneath our thatched roof of rusted gold."
Later, when they quarrelled, Flaxman was not an archangel, but a blockhead
and an ass; but that quarrel is not to be taken too seriously. Their
houses of eternity were not separated, though their mortal vehicles were
estranged; and it was on hearing Flaxman was dead that Blake said finely,
"I can never think of death but as a going out of one room into another."