Blake was soon made welcome at the Mathews’, and he would enliven their parties, according to Smith, by reading and singing his own verses. Although without training in music, Blake apparently set his songs to airs which he repeated by ear. Smith declares that these airs were sometimes “singularly beautiful,” and that they were even noted down by musical professors, for musicians, too, were invited to the Mathews’ house. None of these notations has survived, but their existence proves Blake to have been a complete artist, since he would sing, set his songs to his own music, and was soon to print, bind, and publish his own books. He was considered at first a great acquisition to the Mathews’ society, but their invitations must have been a doubtful pleasure to Mrs. Blake, whose simplicity could not compete with their sophistication. The poem entitled “Mary” in the Pickering MS, though the date of its composition is conjectural, has been thought to give a picture of her difficulties at this time. She must have been shy, and may have been awkward, and it is only too probable that she was snubbed by some of the company. Blake may not have guessed the extent of her mortification at the time, but when he, too, recoiled from the polite world it probably gave an edge to the spleen that he vented. At first, however, all went well. The verses that he recited attracted attention, and Mrs. Mathew was successful in persuading her husband to join Flaxman in his generous offer to pay half the cost of printing Blake’s poems.
William Blake, Illustration from America, a Prophecy, plate 1, 1793.
Relief etching, with some wash, 23.2 × 16.9 cm.
The British Museum, London.
William Blake, Illustration from America, a Prophecy, plate 2, 1793.
Relief etching, with some wash, 23.2 × 16.6 cm.
The British Museum, London.
William Blake, Illustration from America, a Prophecy, plate 10, 1793.
Relief etching, with some wash. The British Museum, London.
William Blake, Illustration from America, a Prophecy, plate 12, 1793.
Relief etching, with some wash, 23.5 × 17 cm.
The British Museum, London.
In this way the famous Poetical Sketches were presented to Blake in 1783. They were neither bound nor published, and the author was free to dispose of them as he wished. Probably the discussions, criticisms, and the apologetic Advertisement destroyed their flavour for him. Blake never took criticism kindly, and the volume remains a curiosity to which the author showed as much indifference as the world. At all events some of his compositions had gone into print, and the experience probably encouraged him to continue writing, with the resolve to present his work in his own unaided way. Relations may have been strained over the production of the Poetical Sketches, but there was no definite quarrel. A year later, in 1784, after the death of his father, Blake moved to Broad Street once more, where, with the help of Mrs. Mathew, he set up as a print-seller in a house next door to his brother James, who continued to carry on the hosier’s shop. A fellow-apprentice, James Parker, went into partnership with Blake, who was engraving after Stothard at this time. His first plate, Zephyrus and Flora, after Stothard, was issued by the firm of Parker & Blake in 1784. The Blakes were joined in their new home by William’s favourite brother Robert, who became a voluntary apprentice in the house.
A favourite relative or even a friend does not always add to the harmony of a married household, and Mrs. Blake comes before us again in an anecdote touching on this time. One day in the course of an argument with Robert, to which Blake was listening in tense silence, Mrs. Blake used words that seemed to her husband unwarrantable. Bursting into the discussion, Blake exclaimed: “Kneel down and beg Robert’s pardon, or you never see my face again!” Mrs. Blake afterwards declared that she thought it hard to apologise to her brother-in-law when she was not in fault, but fearing her husband’s impetuosity, she knelt and said: “Robert, I beg your pardon. I am in the wrong.” “Young woman, you lie,” Robert retorted; “I am in the wrong.” After this there is no hint that they were not good friends. It is probable, however, that this was not the sole occasion when Mrs. Blake had to bend to a domestic storm. From poems like the one entitled “Broken Love,” Mr. Ellis has inferred that Blake’s passionate nature at first shocked the modesty of his wife, and that the shrinking that he met led him to claim the patriarchal right to add a mistress to his household. Such a poem as “William Bond” must have had some foundation in fact. Mr. Ellis’s interpretation is psychologically probable; Blake’s criticism of priestly views of love and modesty enforce it, but the precise nature of what happened remains as obscure as all similar private histories, which, therefore, leave the world with little remedy for the ills of which everyone is surely but vaguely aware. Mrs. Blake was passing through a troubled time, and it is possible that she had no children because of some such crisis as William Bond records.
William Blake, Illustration from America, a Prophecy, plate 13, 1793.
Relief etching, with some wash, 23.6 × 17.5 cm.
The British Museum, London.
William Blake, Illustration from America, a Prophecy, plate 14, 1793.
Relief etching, with some wash.
The British Museum, London.
In 1785, Blake came before the public again with the exhibition of four watercolour drawings in the Royal Academy, and, perhaps feeling that he was beginning to find his own feet, he stopped visiting the Mathews house, whose society was growing irksome to himself too. His hosts and some of their friends began to complain of his “unbending deportment” or, as his adherents called it, his “manly firmness of opinion.” Hard words have been given, at the safe distance of a century, to all Blake’s patrons; even Butts faltered at last, but Blake was never a man easy to help, and the patron’s task is proverbially exacting. The world does not sympathise with the artist, but not even the artist expects to be patient where his patrons are concerned. Blake’s irritation at the polite world that he had entered is reflected in a scurrilous work called An Island in the Moon. It seems to have been written in 1784, and is the first and longest of his grotesque explosions. Unfinished and unfinishable, it has the inconsequence of Sterne[23] without his humour. Except for its record of Blake’s mental irritation at this time, its only point of interest is that the first draft of several of the Songs of Innocence is contained within its pages. One passage also hints at illuminated printing, a mode of producing books that Blake was meditating upon at this time. He was further driven within himself by the illness of his brother Robert, whom he tended night and day during the last two weeks of an illness of which he died in 1787. As Robert breathed his last, Blake saw his soul rising into heaven and “clapping its hands for joy,” after which, overcome with physical exhaustion, Blake took to his bed and slept continuously for three days and nights. This crisis left its imprint on his mind; relating his experience to the artistic project that he had in view, Blake declared that his brother appeared to him in a vision and directed him on how to accomplish his design.
All