William Blake, the Man. Charles Gardner
time. Horace Walpole, driven by curiosity, appeared and disappeared. At Mrs. Ord’s, 35 Queen Anne Street, where Fanny Burney met “everything delectable in the Blue way,” one catches a glimpse of Mr Smelt, Captain Phillips, Dr. Burney, Lord Mulgrave, Sir Lucas Pepys, and the Bishop of London. The kindness and patronage of Lord Bath and Lord Lyttelton could always be relied upon. Yet there was no full and easy interchange of ideas with men. The time had not yet come. In France it had been accomplished by the ladies who were willing to step beyond the bounds of strict propriety, but the pious English Blues were the last to wish to follow the example of their French sisters. And so their best chance of getting a man was to catch one young and struggling whom they might patronize and be kind to.
In this way all the luck fell to Mrs. Mathew, of 27 Rathbone Place. If Mrs. Montagu had the advantage of a rich and indulgent husband, Mrs. Mathew excelled all in the respectability of hers. The Reverend Henry Mathew was incumbent of Percy Chapel, Charlotte Street, and afternoon preacher at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. The latter church alone is sufficient to make a man’s reputation; but Mr. Mathew had already made his both by his piety and his taste.
No one has such opportunities as one of the priesthood for discovering promising young men. Mr. Mathew’s first find was little Flaxman struggling with a Latin book. Learning the nature of the book, he promised him a better and invited him to his house. Mrs. Mathew herself was well read in Latin and Greek, and here was a boy of genius thrown into her very lap. Rising to the great occasion, she taught him, read to him while he sketched, and by her treatment of him alone made more than amends for being a Blue.
When Flaxman was full grown he did all in his power to show his gratitude. Mrs. Mathew was desirous to turn her back parlour into a Gothic chamber. Here was an opportunity. Flaxman modelled little figures of sand and putty and placed them in niches. Another protégé, Oram, son of old Oram and Loutherbourg’s assistant, painted the windows, and between them they made the book-cases, tables, and chairs to match. With such a room, Mrs. Mathew might ask whom she would and not be ashamed. To her tea parties came Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Carter when staying in Clarges Street, Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Brooke, and many others.
Blake and Flaxman first met in 1780 and soon became friends. Flaxman, by native bent and Mrs. Mathew’s teaching, was steeped in Greek. By this time he had shown himself wonderful alike in his designs and sculptures, and already held a high place in what has been called the Second Renaissance.
Blake was a romantic rather than a Greek, but as a later Greek, Goethe, has assured us that there is no antagonism between a true romantic and a true Greek, it is not surprising that the two men found a deep congeniality of spirit. There was an even deeper fellowship, which became explicit later on when both concurred in admiring Swedenborg.
Flaxman, generously anxious that his friend should get on, introduced him, in 1782, to Mr. and Mrs. Mathew, who asked him and Mrs. Blake to their evenings. And so at last we see rebel Blake and his illiterate wife in the midst of a charmed circle of Blues who were mistresses of everything that was learned, cultured, elegant, decorous, and du bon ton.
Our first glimpse of Blake in Society we owe to John Thomas Smith, Keeper of the Prints at the British Museum and frequent visitor at Mrs. Mathew’s. He says in his Book for a Rainy Day: “At Mrs. Mathew’s most agreeable conversaziones I first met the late William Blake, the artist, 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 the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit.”
That is a pleasant picture. Would that we had been there! But as time went on several things became clear to Blake and likewise to the company, only their interpretation of the situation differed. Mrs. Blake proved a touchstone to the other ladies. They of course could see at once that she was not a lady, but that they must be kind to her. She, not having read Mrs. Chapone on the improvement of the mind or practised the elegancies, was quite unable to imitate their manners and catch their tone. She was throughout a simple, direct, noble woman set down in the midst of an artificial society, and she was made to suffer accordingly. These things sank deep into Blake, to reappear again as poems in his Ideas of Good and Evil. Many times he himself felt the same discomfort both at Mrs. Mathew’s and later at Mr. Hayley’s. The words he puts into Mary’s (Catherine’s) lips he speaks in his own person in lines that he afterwards addressed to Flaxman:
“Oh, why was I born with a different face?
Why was I not born like this envious race?
Why did Heaven adorn me with bountiful hand,
And then set me down in an envious land?”
Still Blake was “allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit.” The songs he sang were inspired by his reading of the Elizabethans, whom the Blues could appreciate. The Poetical Sketches came within the purview of professed admirers of Ben Jonson and Spenser; and therefore Mrs. Mathew could genuinely agree with Flaxman that it was worth helping Blake to get them published. The Poetical Sketches were gathered together and printed at the expense of Flaxman and the Mathews, Mr. Mathew himself writing an apologetic Advertisement which would save his skin and lack of discernment if the pieces were unapproved by the great Public. Since it is short, I will quote it entire:
“The following sketches were the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year; since which time, his talents having been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession, he has been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye. Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a poetical originality, which merited some respite from oblivion. These their opinions remain, however, to be now reproved or confirmed by a less partial public.”
It was hardly want of leisure that had prevented Blake from polishing his verses. Mr. Mathew had argued with him on the necessity, and he had proved tiresomely obstinate, and, what is worse, remained of the same opinion eight years afterwards when he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.”
Mr. Mathew was but one of those Bunglers that “can never see perfection, but in the journeyman’s labour.” However, he saved his name for his generation and lost it for posterity.
Blake’s Poetical Sketches were printed but not published. The copies were handed over to him to give or sell, but they brought him neither fame nor money.
It is long since anyone doubted the worth of the Poetical Sketches. The twentieth century wholly endorses the glowing and just criticism that Swinburne wrote fifty years ago. It must have startled the stolid bookish people of the ’sixties to be told that the best of Blake’s Poetical Sketches—To Spring, To Memory, To the Muses, To the Evening Star—were comparable to the world’s best in any age. Swinburne frequently exaggerated in his excitement; but here was no exaggeration, and the poems which were once thought by a partial friend “to merit some respite from oblivion” are now reckoned among the chief pearls of great price in England’s rich treasury of Songs.
There remains little more for the critic to say, but the biographer turns to these Sketches for any intimation of Blake’s spiritual and mental growth.
We must not be misled by the “scent and sound of Elizabethan times” that is upon them. It is of course interesting to the literary mind to discover Ben Jonson in How sweet I roamed, Beaumont and Fletcher in My Silks and fine Array, Webster in the Mad Song, and Shakespeare in King Edward the Third; but these intimations of kinship are only such as are found in original geniuses of the same age. That which gives life and immortality and irresistible sweetness to the songs is Blake’s own child-spirit seeing with wide-eyed simplicity the simple commonplace things of this world that God made, and that are to the pure in heart the immediate revelation of Him. If in fashioning into Song the things that he saw Blake refuses the artifice of