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Blake left the drawing school at the age of fourteen to become formally apprenticed to the engraver James Basire,[11] and to adopt this profession as his own. It was during this apprenticeship that most of the Poetical Sketches must have been written; we have lingered over them already partly because the earliest were written at the drawing school, but mainly to illustrate what Blake’s writings might have become had he followed his talent with poetry and literature. Writing, however, became the private satisfaction of his leisure, and we turn to Frederick Tatham[12] to learn how Blake arrived, and how he spent his apprenticeship, at Basire’s:

His love for art increasing, and the time of life having arrived when it was deemed necessary to place him under some tutor, a painter of eminence was proposed, and necessary applications made; but from the huge premium required, he requested, with his characteristic generosity, that his father would not on any account spend so much money on him, as he thought it would be an injustice to his brothers and sisters. He therefore himself proposed engraving as being less expensive, and sufficiently eligible for his future avocation. Of Basire, therefore, for a premium of fifty guineas, he learnt the art of engraving.

All ideas of the shop had been abandoned and, if we are to believe J. T. Smith, the boy had been “sent away from the counter as a booby [foolish lad].” Nonetheless, Blake’s father seems to have continued to support his son. First of all he took his son to work with Ryland,[13] who introduced the stipple technique to England and was then engraver to the king. Blake must have not liked him, for on leaving Ryland’s studio he remarked: “Father, I do not like the man’s face; it looks as if he will live to be hanged.” Twelve years later, after falling into difficulties, Ryland committed a forgery on the East India Company and was condemned to the gallows. Blake’s father followed the boy’s wishes and took him next to James Basire. This James, the best known of four engravers, kept his shop at 31 Great Queen Street, and was retained professionally by the Society of Antiquaries. He was a man of fifty-one when Blake became his apprentice, and had been warmly esteemed by William Hogarth and many others. Basire had studied in Rome, and was particularly admired for his dry style, which no doubt recommended him to those, like the Society of Antiquaries, who were concerned with ancient monuments.

Indeed, Basire’s chief patrons were antiquaries who had every reason to appreciate the precision of his plates. Basire’s severe style solidified Blake’s insistence on strict form and severe outline in all drawing. Basire was a good teacher and a kind master, and the seven years that Blake spent with him were extremely formative. Blake’s exuberant imagination accepted this controlling influence, without which his execution might never have equalled his creative power of design.

The boy proved an apt and industrious pupil, who soon learned to copy to Basire’s satisfaction whatever work he was set to perform. The shop, too, had its exciting moments, for it was frequented by all sorts of people, including Emanuel Swedenborg, who was then living in London, where he remained until his death in 1772. The sight of the famous novelist is the only external recorded incident of Blake’s first three years at Basire’s, but a casual occurrence of great importance that interrupted his placid course after he had been working in the shop for two years.

There were, we are told, several apprentices beside Blake, and the harmony of the place depended on the ease with which the youngsters worked together. In 1773, two new apprentices arrived who indulged in frequent quarrels with Blake “concerning matters of intellectual argument.” These quarrels created disorderly scenes, and when, according to Malkin,[14] Blake refused to side with his master against his fellow-apprentices, Basire’s kindly comment was: “Blake is too simple and they too cunning.” In order to restore harmony without sacrificing either party, Basire sent Blake, whose industry could be trusted not to abuse the privilege, out of the shop to draw the Gothic monuments in Westminster Abbey and other old churches, monuments which Basire’s patrons, the antiquaries, were always wanting to have engraved. Blake would spend the summer making these drawings, and the winter sometimes in engraving them. Lost in the corners of these old churches, Blake’s romantic imagination was completely Gothicised, and for the future he closed his mind to every other influence or interpreted it by the light of these impressions, for which he had been unconsciously prepared by the religious atmosphere of his home.

We have only to imagine Blake transplanted from Westminster Abbey to the ruins of the Parthenon, walking the road to the Piraeus, and apprenticed at the same age to a sculptor occupied in classical studies, to see a different development for him, and to admit that his future was as nearly now a foregone conclusion as that of any boy of genius can be. As it was, Blake never met a man with feelings as ardent as his own, who was not some sort of eccentric, a heretic, a revolutionary, or an astrologer. No humanist ever came his way, and the tameness of the one poet with whom he was to be thrown continuously in contact led him to make an idol of idiosyncrasy.

William Blake, Illustration for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, frontispiece, c. 1790.

Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 2, c. 1790.

Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

Except for his boyish acquaintance with Jacobean poetry, with the antique casts from which he had learned to draw under Mr. Pars, Blake’s youth was inspired solely by romantic or theological influences. Because the romantic was congenial to him, he could well afford to have been crossed with classical and humane traditions. It is interesting to consider what the effect might have been if the example of Michelangelo had been succeeded, not by Gothic, but by the Greek masters by whom Michelangelo himself was largely inspired. In the sunlit spaces between the columns of a Greek temple, in the open-air life that the Greek statues reflect, Blake’s visions would have assumed a very different form from that imposed by the shadowy interior of Gothic churches. The figures that people their gloom are like ghosts in a cavernous Hades, while the gods and heroes of classical sculpture have the happiness of health and the vigour of sunlight as they stand upon their plinths. The designs of Blake wanted the classic foundation, and his writings entirely missed the lucid beauty of classical literature, which he came to identify with the academic art that he despised. There is no classic form in romantic literature, though in romantic art the Gothic severity came near to taking its place. Circumstances led Blake to follow his line of least resistance, and in the Abbey, where, according to Malkin, he became “almost a Gothic monument himself,” he was completely absorbed.

Even in these precincts, however, the interruptions that he had encountered in the shop were not banished. Though Blake was free from the other apprentices, the Westminster schoolboys would intrude. Tatham says that “in the impetuosity of his anger, worn out with interruption, he flung one of the boys from a scaffolding,” and followed this by laying a formal complaint before the Dean. The dreamer proved himself a true mystic by this act, for exceptional insight and decisive action are the combination of qualities by which the great mystic is known. The contradiction is sometimes so startling that the lives of the great mystics puzzle those observers who do not understand them. The wrath of the lamb is the terrible manifestation of righteous anger in a heart of gentleness and peace.

All his life, Blake remained grateful to Basire for the gift of his freedom, not only when at work in the Abbey but on expeditions to the Gothic churches in and around London. He found in their stone monuments not only form and outline for his art, but also a mythic English history, a symbolic language, and the place that colour once had played in architectural sculpture. All these, the colour too, probably suggested the synthetic art that he, too, was later to create in his illuminated manuscripts, wherein poetry and design, handicraft and paint, were to evolve a new form of book by a new type of author: one who was to conceive, combine, and personally carry out every detail of the finished work. No place less splendid or mysterious than the Abbey was to be Blake’s private studio. Shut in there alone, month after month for five years, undisturbed even during the services, Blake’s boyish hand was ever busy, while a throng of thoughts pressed into every unoccupied corner of his mind. His visions returned; the statues and figures seemed to come to life. It was in the Abbey that Christ and the Apostles appeared to him, and the Gothic imagination itself seemed to return to life in the boy. The monuments that he went to sketch suggested to him the visions that had filled the minds of the original builders and sculptors. The figures became less his subjects than his friends; with their shadowy companionship his imagination was peopled. His mind teemed with ideas that took the likeness of the statuesque figures around him, and the men in the world outside to which he returned became the shadows of the sculptures, unreal intruders into the solitude in which he lived.

Blake’s brain and imagination became another Abbey, as remote from those of his neighbours as is the ancient building from the modern life outside its walls. No boy so susceptible had been exposed in his impressionable years to such an influence, and it led Blake to make a religion of Gothic art and to see Christ and his Apostles as artistic rather than religious symbols. In this way he reversed the process by which Christian art had been created, and without any intellectual basis for his reason he sought to interpret the Christian tradition solely by the works of art that it had inspired. A Christian by profession, he never went to church, and at the last conceived a scripture peculiar to himself and composed of fragments that had little bonds but the caprice of his ingenious prejudices. Approaching religion through art, Blake was induced to supply from his own mind the basis that the medieval workmen had inherited. His active mind was besieged in his boyhood by the symbolism of the Abbey, and it is to his lonely hours within its walls that we can trace the origin and leanings of his later mysticism.

William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 10, c. 1790.

Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 5, c. 1790.

Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 3, c. 1790.

Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 21, c. 1790.

Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

Blake’s leisure-time was occupied with the continuation of these studies, engraving his drawings of saints and medieval kings. One of these that has survived represents Joseph of Arimathea among the rocks of Albion and is marked with the words: “Engraved by William Blake, 1773, from an old Italian drawing, Michelangelo pinxit.” Already one of Blake’s characteristic comments appears on the plate: “This Joseph is one of the Gothic Artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins, of whom the world was not worthy. Such were the Christians in all ages.” This is an extraordinary revelation of the state of Blake’s mind in his sixteenth or seventeenth year. It was never modified by a sense of proportion later, and when we compare it with his mature utterances we see that his mind remained to the end furnished with the imagery that his occupation of the Abbey in his boyhood had impressed. The Gothic artists were the only historical heroes that Blake’s imagination knew.

In Gough’s[15] Sepulchral Monuments, one of Basire’s commissions, we may trace Blake’s engraving at this time. Gilchrist, following Stothard, confidently attributes to Blake’s hand the Portrait of Queen Philippa from her Monument, though it is, of course, signed by Basire. In his Public Address, to be issued many years later, Blake mentions the rival engravers that he used to meet at this time in Basire’s studio. To the last a believer in his master’s severe method, the seductiveness of the softer school remained abhorrent to him. He insists that “engraving is drawing on copper and nothing else,” and his fierce criticism of Basire’s colleagues may be illustrated by his remark on one:

Woollett[16] I knew very intimately by his intimacy with Basire, and knew him to be one of the most ignorant fellows I ever met… He often proved his ignorance before me at Basire’s by laughing at Basire’s knife tools, and ridiculing the forms of Basire’s other gravers, till Basire was quite dashed and out of conceit with what he himself knew. But his impudence had the contrary effect on me.

Blake was defending what he believed to be the principle of drawing, and we shall observe how the representation of natural effects was to seem to him the death – instead of the discipline – of imagination. Saturated with the conventional sculptures of the Abbey, he desired the transfiguration of natural forms, and sided with art rather than observation. He began to conceive in the Gothic manner, and from this to infer that all intuition came in the shape of Gothic images, which it was the failure of an artist not directly to transcribe. He was like a townsman who had never seen the country except in landscape pictures. The shape in which Blake’s visions came to him was obviously Gothic, but so deep, and therefore so unconscious, was this influence that he believed all visions had come to all men in the same guise, and that Nature herself could be a vision was the gravest of errors. It is true, of course, that to all mystics nature is the myth or reflection of a beauty that does not belong to the visible world, but it is extreme to say, as Blake did, that to represent nature in art is to be busy with the letters at the expense of the imaginative meaning. To assert that conventional foliage is necessarily more beautiful than a living leaf is to uproot art from its foundation, to derive inspiration from previous art or from an individual mind, and when the theory becomes an obsession even formal beauty is imperilled.

William Blake, Illustration from The Book of Daniel: Nebuchadnezzar, 1795-c. 1805.

Colour print finished in ink and watercolour on paper, 54.3 × 72.5 cm.

Tate Gallery, London.

When Blake’s apprenticeship to Basire came to an end in 1778, he went for a time to study in the antique school at the Royal Academy. His teacher there was old Mr. Moser, its first keeper, a chaser medallist and enamel painter, who had been in charge of the parent schools in St. Martin’s Lane. In one of his later annotations to Reynolds’s Discourses, Blake records one of their conversations:

I was once looking over the prints from Raphael and Michelangelo in the Library of the Royal Academy. Moser came to me and said, “You should not study these old, hard, stiff and dry, unfinished works of art. Stay a little and I will show you what you ought to study.” He then went and took down Le Brun and Rubens’ galleries. How did I secretly rage! I also spoke my mind! I said to Moser, “These things that you call finished are not even begun: how then can they be finished? The man who does not know the beginning cannot know the end of art.”

Blake was content to draw from the antique; very characteristically, he found the living figure too natural. The Abbey became to him that which the palaestra had been to the Greek sculptors. Already his imagination could feel free only when it was working removed from reality. Thus when Malkin tells us that Blake “professed drawing from life always to have been hateful to him,” and spoke of it “as looking more like death or smelling of mortality,” we can understand how this fatal prejudice had lodged itself in his mind. He seems more reasonable when he says: “Practice and opportunity very soon teach the language of art. Its spirit and poetry, centred in the imagination alone, never can be taught; and these make the artist.” True enough, yet one of the most valuable opportunities that the imagination can have is the study of the natural form that Blake so despised. He carried his recoil so far as to confess that “natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me.” Haunted by the forms of the Gothic sculptors, and identifying these with the religious ideas that had given them birth, Blake resented living realities as intruders, and refused to admit the criticism that they offered of the images that exclusively occupied his mind. A watercolour drawing made at this time, The Penance of Jane Shore, was included by Blake in the exhibition of his works held in 1809. A note in the descriptive catalogue says of it: “This drawing was done above thirty years ago, and proves to the author, and he thinks will prove to any discerning eye, that the productions of our youth and of our maturer age are equal in all essential respects.”

William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 24, c. 1790.

Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

William Blake, Illustration from The Daughters of Albion, plate 1, 1793.

Relief etching, watercoloured by hand.

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts).

William Blake, Illustration from The Daughters of Albion, plate 3, 1793.

Relief etching, watercoloured by hand.

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts).

William Blake, Illustration from The Daughters of Albion, plate 2, 1793.

Relief etching, watercoloured by hand.

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts).

Meanwhile, Blake was beginning to earn his living by making engravings for Harrison, Johnson, and other booksellers. He engraved designs for their books and magazines. The most important were eight plates after Stothard for the Novelist. Blake became acquainted with Stothard in 1780, and by him was introduced to Flaxman. It was with Flaxman that Blake went yachting and sketching on the Medway, as far as Upmore Castle, some time between 1780 and 1782. Mrs. Bray, in her Life of Stothard, tells how the members of the party were mistaken for French spies, supposed to be map-making, and were then arrested by soldiers and only released when the Royal Academy identified them. A third friend made in this year was Henry Fuseli, an idealistic painter who had been Lavater’s[17] schoolfellow, and declared that nature “put him out;” when he shortly settled in Broad Street, and Flaxman moved to 27 Wardour Street, the three became neighbours. Gilchrist says that Blake needed such friends because “he was one of those whose genius is in a far higher ratio than their talents, and it is talent which commands worldly success.” The inference is not so prosaic as it sounds. We have Mr. George Moore’s[18] authority for saying that “genius without talent can only totter a little way.” Blake “loved laughing,” but he had little sense of humour, and virtually no critical intelligence. His hand was much better cultivated than his head, and in but few of his writings is there a line of mental laughter, usually the flower of observation delighting in the criticism that nature and behaviour passes upon our ideas. In this same year, 1780, Blake first exhibited at the Royal Academy. His picture was a watercolour of the Death of Earl Godwin. It was the year of the Gordon Riots, and one day walking in the streets Blake was swept along by the mob and witnessed the burning of Newgate, but though he occasionally said severe things about the Latin Church, he did not identify himself with the No-Popery cry of the London agitators. He was beginning to be busy with the painting of watercolours, and with tempera on canvas, a modification of which he came to christen fresco.

He was now a young man in his early twenties, and his first youthful love affair seems to have been with “a lively little girl” called Polly Wood. She was ready to go for walks with him, but when he mentioned marriage she refused. Blake was not the only feather in her cap; she liked young men’s society, but was by no means sure that the time had come to commit herself definitely to any of these admirers. When Blake was simple-minded enough to complain that she also kept company with others, she was astonished at his seriousness, and asked him if he was a fool. He used to say, in his bold manner, that this question cured him of jealousy forever, but at the time he was greatly upset and felt so ill that he went, according to Tatham, for a change of air to Kew. In fact, he went to Battersea, where he stayed with a market-gardener, Mr. William Boucher. Blake, who was badly in need of sympathy, was ready to confide in the first compassionate ear, and he found in the market-gardener’s daughter a willing listener. He told Catherine why he had come to Battersea, and she heard his story with such affectionate interest that he was completely won. Tatham, who tells the anecdote, was very close to the Blakes in later life, and there is no reason to doubt his statement that the two young people made a great impression upon each other. Catherine Boucher had a different temperament from lively Polly Wood. She was a demure young woman who did not run after men, and when her mother would ask her which of her acquaintances she would fancy for a husband, Catherine would reply that she had not yet seen the man. This was her state of mind when Blake suddenly appeared at Battersea, but she afterward related that when she first came upon Blake sitting in her house, she instantly recognised her future husband, and so nearly fainted that she left the room until she had composed herself. In this condition his story made a profound impression. When Blake saw how affected she was, he asked in his impulsive way: “Do you pity me?” “Indeed, I do,” she answered. “Then I love you,” he said, and so it was settled between them.

William Blake, Illustration from The Daughters of Albion, plate 7, 1793.

Relief etching, watercoloured by hand.

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts).

William Blake, Illustration from The Daughters of Albion, plate 11, 1793.

Relief etching, watercoloured by hand.

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts).

They were married on August 18, 1782, in St. Mary’s Church at Battersea, after Blake had returned to London to work until he had enough money to provide his wife with a home. The suggestion of Tatham that Blake had resolved not to see her until this was accomplished explains the year that elapsed between his visit to Battersea and his marriage.

Catherine Boucher, like many brides of her day, signed her name on the register with a mark. There were no national schools at this time, and even regular Sunday schools had not been invented. She had nothing to unlearn when she came to her husband, unless it were some puritan prejudices. He taught her all she ever knew, but she brought to him a slim figure, dark rich eyes, a warm heart, and a loyal affection. Mr. Symons thinks that she was the model for her husband’s “invariable type of woman, tall, slender, and with unusually long legs,” a sufficiently fascinating description. Crabb Robinson, who met her two years before Blake’s death, also spoke of her “dark eyes,” “good expression,” and the remains of youthful beauty. The verses in the Poetical Sketches about the dark-eyed maid were written five years before Blake met Catherine Boucher, but they occur often enough to suggest a preference that was to remain with him. There is no question of the happiness of his marriage, or of the singular devotion of his wife. He taught her to read and write, to draw, to help him to print, and even to colour his engravings. Like that of many wives, her handwriting resembled her husband’s. She was his complement in every way, and as obedient as he was imperious. “It is quite certain,” Crabb Robinson says, “that she believed in all his visions.” He filled her horizon, and she saw the world through his eyes. According to Gilchrist,

She would get up in the night when he was under his very fierce inspirations, which were as if they would tear him asunder… 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.

Tatham is the source of this description:

While she looked on him as he worked, her sitting quite still by his side doing nothing soothed his impetuous mind; he has many a time, when a strong desire presented itself to overcome any difficulty in his plates or drawings, in the middle of the night, risen and requested her to get up with him, and sit by his side, in which she has cheerfully acquiesced.

Blake was twenty-four and Catherine twenty at the time of their marriage, and, possibly because it was not welcomed by his father, their first home was not with the hosier but at 23 Green Street in Leicester Fields. Hogarth had lived in Leicester Fields, which was an artists’ quarter, for the Blakes had a neighbour in Sir Joshua Reynolds. The young couple had a much rougher path to tread, but luckily for both of them Mrs. Blake was one of those reliable, sympathetic, and adaptable women who will second their husbands at whatever work they may set their hearts upon. Tatham tells us that she was a good cook and a careful housewife who “did all the work herself, kept the house clean and tidy, besides printing all Blake’s numerous engravings, which was a task sufficient for any industrious woman.” In addition to all this, Mrs. Blake had to adapt her ideas and behaviour to those of a man, an extraordinary thing to do in any age and wholly new to her own experience. We can well believe, without the hints to be found in the poetry that Blake composed in the early years of his marriage, that this was not the least exacting call upon her character. It was, no doubt, also the one of which Blake was at first the least conscious himself. The contrast between the two is apparent in their countenances and physique: she slim, dark-eyed, maternal; he, in Swinburne’s[19] summary of several contemporary descriptions, with “the infinite impatience of a great preacher or apostle,” showing “intense, tremulous vitality, as of a great orator, with the look of one who can do all things but hesitate.” How was a woman of Catherine’s placid nature to become, as she did, a responsive companion to such a man?

William Blake, Illustration from The Daughters of Albion, plate 10, 1793.

Relief etching, watercoloured by hand.

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts).

William Blake, Illustration from The Daughters of Albion, plate 9, 1793.

Relief etching, watercoloured by hand.

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts).

William Blake, Illustration from The Daughters of Albion, plate 4, 1793.

Relief etching, watercoloured by hand.

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts).

They were not left entirely to themselves, for Flaxman, the sculptor, was not only nearby in Wardour Street, but he had many friends of his own and was eager to introduce Blake into this more fashionable circle. It was he who took the Blakes to the drawing-room of the accomplished blue-stocking, Mrs. Mathew, the wife of the Rev. Henry Mathew, then living in Rathbone Place, where their house was much frequented by literary and artistic figures. The Mathews were a cultivated, genial pair, the smiling centre of a little select world, and ready to be kind to all who seemed worthy of admission. Like most of their type, they confused benevolence with insight and were far more strict than they supposed in their liberal ideas. The helping hand that they were ready to extend did not really encourage independence, and suitors for their favour had to conform to the real, if scarcely visible, yoke of their polite patronage. They must have been very proud and pleased when they reflected on the accomplishments of each other. Mr. Mathew was said to have “read the church service more beautifully than any other clergyman in London.” He had also discovered Flaxman as a little boy learning Latin behind his father’s counter, and had held out a helping hand to him. Mrs. Mathew in turn became the sculptor’s friend, and would read Homer to him while he made designs on the table at her side during these voluntary lessons. She was well versed in Greek and Latin, and fully able to hold her own with such learned ladies as Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu[20] and Mrs. Carter.[21] These hostesses held conversations at their houses, and were anxious to show that scholarship could be pursued without impiety. They were the first to desire equal education for their sex, and from their discreet beginnings the independent modern woman has grown. The foibles of these ladies are more famous than their enterprise, but there are worse ambitions than the desire to be a wife fit for men like Horace Walpole.[22] Mrs. Mathew looked to Flaxman to help her to realise her taste in decoration, and the result of their joint endeavours was the conversion of one of her rooms into a Gothic chamber. The feeling for Gothic was in the air, and Mrs. Mathew must have seemed to Flaxman the one person likely to advance and appreciate his friend. A lively picture of these blue-stockings is given by Mr. Charles Gardner in his volume William Blake: the Man.

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 ideas that came to Blake’s mind were converted into images, every event was changed into a drama, and as we listen to his words or meditate upon the anecdotes of which he was the hero, we seem to be studying the working of the human imagination itself. It is this that makes critical commentary seem irrelevant, for vividness of impression is the quality for which he was unique. To measure his experiences by the force with which they were conveyed is to mistake the quality of his genius.

William Blake, Illustration from America, a Prophecy, plate 3, 1793.

Relief etching, with some wash, 25.2 × 16.5 cm.

The British Museum, London.