William Blake, the Man. Charles Gardner
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.
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.
CHAPTER III
THE BLUE-STOCKINGS
Posterity is spiteful towards those who do not make good their claim to immortality; and for a long time the Blue-stockings have been the butt of the superior modern. Yet they were remarkable women, and by their dash to capture for themselves some of the treasures of man’s learning they helped to open up a new way for the modern woman.
We can dispense no doubt with Mrs. Montagu’s Essay, in which she defends Shakespeare against the rash onslaught of Voltaire. We may even forget her three Dialogues of the Dead, although Mrs. Modish speaks with the genuine accent of the polite world: “Indeed, Mr. Mercury, I cannot have the pleasure of waiting upon you now, I am engaged, absolutely engaged.” (There was a fourth Dialogue returned to her by Lord Lyttelton in which Cleopatra tells Berenice only what every woman knows.) But we cannot forgo without loss to ourselves her letters to the Duchess of Portland and many other friends, which are lively, witty, and entertaining, and second in her time only to those of that prince of letter-writers, Horace Walpole.
Mrs. Montagu’s friends did their best to turn her head. Mrs. Carter writes to her of “the elegant brilliancy of my dearest Mrs. Montagu,” and not content with prose as a medium of praise, sends her an ode which leads up by a strong crescendo to these two verses:
“O blest with ev’ry talent, ev’ry Grace
Which native Fire, or happy Art supplies,
How short a Period, how confined a Space,
Must bound thy shining Course below the Skies!
For wider Glories, for immortal Fame,
Were all those talents, all those Graces given:
And may thy life pursue that noblest aim,
The final plaudit of approving Heav’n.”
Mrs. Carter thought that Dr. Johnson’s preface to Shakespeare was “very defective,” and she adds to Mrs. Montagu, certain that her Latin will be understood without the aid of a dictionary: “Res integra tibi reservatur.” Elsewhere she writes: “you, who have proved yourself the most accurate and judicious of all his commentators.” This opinion was shared by the entire circle of Blue-stockings, and even outside that charmed circle the Reverend Montagu Pennington, nephew of Mrs. Carter and godson of Mrs. Montagu, felt that she was guilty of something like mortal sin in omitting to defend the British Public against the pernicious influence of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son.
Mrs. Carter, loaded with languages, and much addicted to snuff and green tea, was scarcely inferior to Mrs. Montagu. She was modest and almost apologetic for her much learning. She and the rest of the heady sisterhood were not without misgivings that in pursuing man’s studies they might become manly, and therefore they never ceased to express in season and out of season pious female sentiments. Indeed, Mrs. Carter protested against being thought of as a walking tripod, and was what used to be called “a sweet woman.” Thus she writes of “the infernal composition of deadly weeds made up by Voltaire.” Candide was “so horrid in all respects.” Werther she detested. She is relieved to hear that Pascal is “very respectable,” for she considered him “a dangerous author to all kinds of readers.” Rousseau “quite sunk her spirits.” Of course her spirits were liable to the same shock during her extensive readings among the ancients, and, indeed, she said that Quintilian’s impiety was “quite shocking”; but very justly she considered that they were to be excused because they had not the light of revelation, while Voltaire and Rousseau were sinning against that light.
Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Montagu fully agreed in their admiration for Mrs. Vesey, whom they familiarly called “our Sylph.” Hannah More in her Bas Bleu seems to reckon her the first of the Blues, and specially commends her for the skill she displayed in breaking the formidable circle that Mrs. Montagu’s guests were forced to make. Her lively Irish nature was refreshing to Mrs. Carter, her head full and aching after a strenuous tussle with Aristotle’s Ethics. She wrote to Mrs. Montagu: “As little of the turbulent as there is in her (our Sylph’s) composition, the uproar of a mighty sea is as much adapted to the sublime of her imagination, as the soft murmurs of a gliding stream to the gentleness of her temper.”
The conversaziones of the Blue-stockings were as successful as might be. There