IX

Nothing is known of Blake's life between 1809, the date of his exhibition, and 1818, when he met the chief friend and helper of his later years, John Linnell. Everything leads us to believe that those nine years were years of poverty and neglect. Between 1815 and 1817 we find him doing engraver's task-work for Flaxman's Hesiod, and for articles, probably written by Flaxman, on Armour and Sculpture in Bees's Encyclopoedia. Gilchrist tells a story, on the authority of Tatham, of Blake copying the cast of the Laocoon among the students at the Royal Academy, and of Fuseli, then the keeper, coming up with the just and pleasant remark that it was they who should learn of him, not he of them. The Milton and the Jerusalem, both dated 1804, were printed at some time during this period. Gilchrist suggests that the reason why Blake issued no more engraved books from his press was probably his inability to pay for the copper required in engraving; and his suggestion is confirmed in a letter to Dawson Turner, a Norfolk antiquary, dated June 9, 1818, a few days before the meeting with Linnell. Blake writes: 'I send you a list of the different works you have done me the honor to inquire after. They are unprofitable enough to me, though expensive to the buyer. Those I printed for Mr. Humphry are a selection from the different books of such as could be printed without the writing, though to the loss of some of the best things; for they, when printed perfect, accompany poetical personifications and acts, without which poems they never could have been executed:—

£ s. d.
America, 18 prints folio,5 5 0
Europe, 17 do. do.,5 5 0
Visions, 8 do. do.,3 3 0
Thel, 6 do. quarto,2 2 0
Songs of Innocence, 28 prints octavo,3 3 0
Songs of Experience, 26 do. octavo,3 3 0
Urizen, 28 prints quarto,5 5 0
Milton, 50 do. do.,10 10 0
12 large prints, size of each about 2 ft.
by 1 1/2 ft., historical and poetical,
printed in colours, each5 5 0

The last twelve prints are unaccompanied by any writing. The few I have printed and sold are sufficient to have gained me great reputation as an artist, which was the chief thing intended. But I have never been able to produce a sufficient number for general sale by means of a regular publisher. It is therefore necessary to me that any person wishing to have any or all of them should send me their order to print them on the above terms, and I will take care that they shall be done at least as well as any I have yet produced.'

If we compare this list with the printed list of twenty-five years back (see above "William Blake, chapter III.") we shall see that the prices are now half as many guineas as they were once shillings; in a letter to Cumberland, nine years later, they have gone up by one, two, or three guineas apiece, and Blake tells Cumberland that 'having none remaining of all that I had printed, I cannot print more except at a great loss. For at the time I printed these things I had a little house to range in. Now I am shut up in a corner, therefore I am forced to ask a price for them that I can scarce expect to get from a stranger. I am now printing a set of the Songs of Innocence and Experience for a friend at ten guineas, which I cannot do under six months consistent with my other work, so that I have little hope of doing any more of such things. The last work is a poem entitled Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion, but find that to print it will cost my time to the value of twenty guineas. One I have finished. It contains 100 plates, but it is not likely that I shall get a customer for it.'[6]

Gilchrist tells us, by an error which was pointed out in the life of Palmer by his son, in 1892, that Blake met Linn ell in 1813. It was in 1818, and the first entry relating to Blake in Linnell's journal is dated June 24. In a letter communicated to me by Mr. Sampson, Mr. John Linnell, junior, states that his father took in October or November 1817 the greater part of a house at 38 Rathbone Place, where he lived till the end of 1818; he then took a house at Cirencester Place, Fitzroy Square. Mr. Linnell gives the following extract from his father's autobiographical notes: 'At Rathbone Place, 1818... here I first became acquainted with William Blake, to whom I paid a visit in company with the younger Mr. Cumberland. Blake lived then in South Molton Street, Oxford Street, second floor. We soon became intimate, and I employed him to help me with an engraving of my portrait of Mr. Upton, a Baptist preacher, which he was glad to do, having scarcely enough employment to live by at the prices he could obtain; everything in Art was at a low ebb then.... I soon encountered Blake's peculiarities, and somewhat taken aback by the boldness of some of his assertions, I never saw anything the least like madness, for I never opposed him spitefully, as many did, but being really anxious to fathom, if possible, the amount of truth which might be in his most startling assertions, generally met with a sufficiently rational explanation in the most really friendly and conciliatory tone.'

From 1818 Linnell became, in his own independent way, the chief friend and disciple of Blake. Himself a man of narrow but strong individuality, he realized and accepted Blake for what he was, worked with him and for him, introduced him to rich and appreciative buyers like Sir Thomas Lawrence, and gave him, out of his own carefully controlled purse, a steady price for his work, which was at least enough for Blake to live on. There are notes in his journal of visits to picture-galleries together; to the Academy, the British Gallery, the Water-Color Exhibition, the Spring Gardens Exhibition; 'went with Mr. Blake to see Harlow's copy of the Transfiguration' (August 20, 1819), 'went with Mr. Blake to British Museum to see prints' (April 4 and 24, 1823). In 1820 there are notes of two visits to Drury Lane Theatre. It was probably early in 1819 that Linnell introduced Blake to his friend John Varley, the water-color painter and astrologer, for whom Blake did the famous 'visionary heads.' A vivid sketch of the two arguing, drawn by Linnell, is given in Mr. Story's Life of Linnell. Varley, though an astrologer on the mathematical side, was no visionary. He persuaded Blake to do a series of drawings, naming historical or legendary people to him, and carefully writing down name and date of the imaginary portraits which Blake willingly drew, and believing, it has been said, in the reality of Blake's visions more than Blake himself. Cunningham, in his farcical way, tells the story as he may have got it from Varley (see "(VIII.) Life of Blake by Allan Cunningham." below), for he claims in a letter to Linnell to have 'received much valuable information from him.' But the process has been described, more simply, by Varley himself in his Treatise of Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828), where the 'Ghost of a Flea' and the 'Constellation Cancer' are reproduced in engraving. Some of the heads are finely symbolical, and I should have thought the ghost of a flea, in the sketch, an invention more wholly outside nature if I had not seen, in Rome and in London, a man in whom it is impossible not to recognize the type, modified to humanity, but scarcely by a longer distance than the men from the animals in Giovanni della Porta's 'Fisonomia dell' Huomo.'

It was in 1820, the year in which Blake began his vast picture of the 'Last Judgment,' only finished in the year of his death, that he did the seventeen woodcuts to Thornton's Virgil, certainly one of his greatest, his most wholly successful achievements. The book was for boys' schools, and we find Blake returning without an effort to the childlike mood of the Songs of Innocence and Experience. The woodcuts have all the natural joy of those early designs, an equal simplicity, but with what added depth, what richness, what passionate strength! Blake was now engraving on wood for the first time, and he had to invent his own way of working. Just what he did has never been better defined than in an article which appeared in the Athenaeum of January 21, 1843, one of the very few intelligent references to Blake which can be found in print between the time of his death and the date of Gilchrist's Life. 'We hold it impossible,' says the writer, 'to get a genuine work of art, unless it come pure and unadulterated from the mind that conceived it.... Still more strongly is the author's meaning marked in the few wood-engravings which that wonderful man Blake cut himself for an edition of Thornton's Pastorals of Virgil. In token of our faith in the principle here announced, we have obtained the loan of one of Blake's original blocks, from Mr. Linnell, who possesses the whole series, to print, as an illustration of our argument, that, amid all drawbacks, there exists a power in the work of the man of genius, which no one but himself can utter fully. Side by side we have printed a copy of an engraver's improved version of the same subject. When Blake had produced his cuts, which were, however, printed with an apology, a shout of derision was raised by the wood-engravers. "This will never do!" said they; "we will show what it ought to be,"—that is, what the public taste would like—and they produced the above amendment! The engravers were quite right in their estimate of public taste; and we dare say many will agree with them even now: yet, to our minds, Blake's rude work, utterly without pretension, too, as an engraving—the merest attempt of a fresh apprentice—is a work of genius; whilst the latter is but a piece of smooth, tame mechanism.'

Blake lived at South Molton Street for seventeen years. In 1821, 'on his landlord's leaving off business, and retiring to France,' says Linnell, he removed to Fountain Court, in the Strand, where he took the first floor of 'a private house kept by Mr. Banes, whose wife was a sister of Mrs. Blake.' Linnell tells us that he was at this time 'in want of employment,' and, he says, 'before I knew his distress he had sold all his collection of old prints to Messrs. Colnaghi and Co.' Through Linnell's efforts, a donation of £25 was about the same time sent to him from the Royal Academy.

Fountain Court (the name is still perpetuated on a metal slab) was called so until 1883, when the name was changed to Southampton Buildings. It has all been pulled down and rebuilt, but I remember it fifteen years ago, when there were lodging-houses in it, by the side of the stage-door of Terry's Theatre. It was a narrow slit between the Strand and the river, and, when I knew it, was dark and comfortless, a blind alley. Gilchrist describes the two rooms on the first floor, front and back, the front room used as a reception-room; a smaller room opened out of it at the back, which was workroom, bedroom, and kitchen in one. The side window looked down through an opening between the houses, showing the river and the hills beyond; and Blake worked at a table facing the window. There seems to be no doubt, from the testimony of many friends, that Crabb Robinson's description, which will be seen below, with fuller detail than has yet been printed, conveys the prejudiced view of a fastidious person, and Palmer, roused by the word 'squalor,' wrote to Gilchrist, asserting 'himself, his wife, and his rooms, were clean and orderly; everything was in its place.' Tatham says that 'he fixed upon these lodgings as being more congenial to his habits, as he was very much accustomed to get out of his bed in the night to write for hours, and return to bed for the rest of the night.' He rarely left the house, except to fetch his pint of porter from the public-house at the corner of the Strand. It was on one of these occasions that he is said to have been cut by a Royal Academician whom he had recently met in society. Had not the Royal Academy been founded (J. T. Smith tells us in his Book for a Rainy Day, under date 1768) by 'members who had agreed to withdraw themselves from various clubs, not only in order to be more select as to talent, but perfectly correct as to gentlemanly conduct'?

It was about this time that Blake was discovered, admired, and helped by one who has been described as 'not merely a poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.' This was Lamb's 'kind, lighthearted Wainewright,' who in the intervals of his strange crimes found time to buy a fine copy of the Songs of Innocence and to give a jaunty word of encouragement or advertisement to Jerusalem. Palmer remembers Blake stopping before one of Wainewright's pictures in the Academy and saying, 'Very fine.'

In 1820 Blake had carried out his last commission from Butts in a series of twenty-one drawings in illustration of the Book of Job. In the following year Linnell commissioned from him a duplicate set, and in September 1821 traced them himself from Butts's copies; they were finished, and in parts altered, by Blake. By an agreement dated March 25, 1823, Blake undertook to engrave the designs, which were to be published by Linnell, who gave £100 for the designs and copyright, with the promise of another £100 out of the profits on the sale. There were no profits, but Linnell gave another £50, paying the whole sum of £150 in weekly sums of £2 or £3. The plates are dated March 8, 1825, but they were not published until the date given on the cover, March 1826. Gilchrist intimates that 'much must be lost by the way' in the engraving of the water-color drawings; but Mr. Russell, a better authority, says that 'marvelous as the original water-color drawings unquestionably were, they are in every case inferior to the final version in the engraving.' It is on these engravings that the fame of Blake as an artist rests most solidly; invention and execution are here, as he declared that they must always be in great art, equal; imagination at its highest here finds adequate expression, without even the lovely strangeness of a defect. They have been finally praised and defined by Rossetti, in the pages contributed to Gilchrist's life (i. 330-335), of which Mr. Swinburne has said, with little exaggeration, that 'Blake himself, had he undertaken to write notes on his designs, must have done them less justice than this.'

Before Blake had finished engraving the designs to 'Job' he had already begun a new series of illustrations to Dante, also a commission from Linnell; and, with that passionate conscientiousness which was part of the foundation of his genius, he set to work to learn enough Italian to be able to follow the original with the help of Cary's translation. Linnell not only let Blake do the work he wanted to do, paying him for it as he did it, but he took him to see people whom it might be useful for him to know, such as the Aders, who had a house full of books and pictures, and who entertained artists and men of letters. Mrs. Aders had a small amateur talent of her own for painting, and from a letter of Carlyle's, which is preserved among the Crabb Robinson papers, seems to have had literary knowledge as well. 'Has not Mrs. Aders (the lady who lent me Wilhelm Meister) great skill in, such things?' he asks in a letter full of minute inquiries into German novels. Lamb and Coleridge went to the house, and it was there that Crabb Robinson met Blake in December 1825. Mr. Story, in his Life of Linnell, tells us that one of Linnell's 'most vivid recollections of those days was of hearing Crabb Robinson recite Blake's poem, "The Tiger," before a distinguished company gathered at Mrs. Aders's table. It was a most impressive performance.' We find Blake afterwards at a supper-party at Crabb Robinson's, with Linnell, who notes in his journal going with Blake to Lady Ford's, to see her pictures; in 1820 we find him at Lady Caroline Lamb's.

Along with this general society Blake now gathered about him a certain number of friends and disciples, Linnell being the steadiest friend, and Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert, and George Richmond the chief disciples. To these must be added, in 1826, Frederick Tatham, a young sculptor, who was to be the betrayer among the disciples. They called Blake's house 'the House of the Interpreter,' and in speaking of it afterwards speak of it always as of holy ground. Thus we hear of Richmond, finding his invention flag, going to seek counsel, and how Blake, who was sitting at tea with his wife, turned to her and said: 'What do we do, Kate, when the visions forsake us?' 'We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake.' It is Richmond who records a profoundly significant saying of Blake: 'I can look at a knot in a piece of wood till I am frightened at it.' Palmer tells us that Blake and his wife would look into the fire together and draw the figures they saw there, hers quite unlike his, his often terrible. On Palmer's first meeting that Blake, on October 9, 1824, he tells us how Blake fixed his eyes upon him and said: 'Do you work with fear and trembling?' 'Yes, indeed,' was the reply. 'Then,' said Blake, 'you'll do.'

The friends often met at Hampstead, where Linnell had, in 1824, taken Collins's Farm, at North End, now again known by its old name of 'Wyldes.' Blake disliked the air of Hampstead, which he said always made him ill; but he often went there to see Linnell, and loved the aspect from his cottage, and to sit and hear Mrs. Linnell sing Scotch songs, and would sometimes himself sing his own songs to tunes of his own making. The children loved him, and would watch for him as he came, generally on foot, and one of them says that she remembers 'the cold winter nights when Blake was wrapped up in an old shawl by Mrs. Linnell, and sent on his homeward way, with the servant, lantern in hand, lighting him across the heath to the main road.' It is Palmers son who reports it, and he adds: 'It is a matter of regret that the record of these meetings and walks and conversations is so imperfect, for in the words of one of Blake's disciples, to walk with him was like "walking with the Prophet Isaiah."' Once when the Palmers were staying at Shoreham, the whole party went down into the country in a carrier's van drawn by eight horses: Calvert tells the story, with picturesque details of Blake's second-sight, and of the hunt with lanterns in Shoreham Castle after a ghost, who turned out to be a snail tapping on the broken glass of the window.

From the end of 1825 Blake's health began to fail, and most of his letters to Linnell contain apologies for not coming to Hampstead, as he is in bed, or is suffering from a cold in the stomach. It was the beginning of that sickness which killed him, described as the mixing of the gall with the blood. He worked persistently, whether he was well or ill, at the Dante drawings, which he made in a folio book given him by Linnell. There were a hundred pages in the book, and he did a drawing on every page, some completely finished, some a mere outline; of these he had only engraved seven at the time of his death. He sat propped up in bed, at work on his drawings, saying, 'Dante goes on the better, which is all I care about.' In a letter to George Cumberland, on April 12, 1827, he writes: 'I have been very near the gates of death, and have returned very weak and an old man, feeble and tottering, but not in the spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination, which liveth for ever.' And indeed there is no sign of age or weakness in these last great inventions of a dying man. 'Flaxman is gone,' he adds, 'and we must soon follow, every one to his own eternal house, leaving the delusive Goddess Nature to her laws, to get into freedom from all law of the numbers, into the mind, in which every one is king and priest in his own house. God send it so on earth, as it is in heaven.'

Blake died on August 12, 1827, and the ecstasy of his death has been recorded by many witnesses. Tatham tells us how, as he put the finishing touches to a design of 'The Ancient of Days' which he had been coloring for him, he 'threw it down suddenly and said: "Kate, you have been a good wife; I will draw your portrait." She sat near his bed, and he made a drawing which, though not a likeness, is finely touched and expressed. He then threw that down, after having drawn for an hour, and began to sing Hallelujahs and songs of joy and triumph which Mrs. Blake described as being truly sublime in music and in verse.' Smith tells us that he said to his wife, as she stood to hear him, 'My beloved, they are not mine, no, they are not mine.' And a friend quoted by Gilchrist says: 'He died on Sunday night, at six o'clock, in a most glorious manner. He said he was going to that country he had all his life wished to see, and expressed himself happy, hoping for salvation through Jesus Christ. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened, and he burst out into singing of the things he saw in heaven.' 'Perhaps,' he had written not long before, 'and I verily believe it, every death is an improvement of the state of the departed.'

Blake was buried in Bunhill Fields, where all his family had been buried before him, but with the rites of the Church of England, and on August 17 his body was followed to the grave by Calvert, Richmond, Tatham, and Tatham's brother, a clergyman. The burial register reads: 'Aug. 17, 1827. William Blake. Age, 69 years. Brought from Fountain Court, Strand. Grave, 9 feet; E.&W. 77: N.&S. 32. 19/' The grave, being a 'common grave,' was used again, and the bones scattered; and this was the world's last indignity against William Blake.

Tatham tells us that, during a marriage of forty-five years, Mrs. Blake had never been separated from her husband 'save for a period that would make altogether about five weeks.' He does not remind us, as Mr. Swinburne, on the authority of Seymour Kirkup, reminds us, of Mrs. Blake's one complaint, that her husband was incessantly away 'in Paradise.' Tatham adds: 'After the death of her husband she resided for some time with the author of this, whose domestic arrangements were entirely undertaken by her, until such changes took place that rendered it impossible for her strength to continue in this voluntary office of sincere affection and regard.' Before going to Tatham's she had spent nine months at Linnell's house in Cirencester Place, only leaving it in the summer of 1828, when Linnell let the house. After leaving Tatham she took lodgings in 17 Upper Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, where she died at half-past seven on the morning of October 18, 1831, four years after the death of her husband, and within three months of his age. Tatham says: 'Her death not being known but by calculation, sixty-five years were placed upon her coffin,' and in the burial register at Bunhill Fields we read: 'Oct. 23, 1831. Catherine Sophia Blake. Age, 65 yrs. Brought from Upper Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. Grave, 12 feet; E.&W. 7: N.&S. 31, 32. £1, 5s.' She was born April 24, 1762, and was thus aged sixty-nine years and six months.

Mr. Swinburne tells us, on the authority of Seymour Kirkup, that, after Blake's death, a gift of £100 was sent to his widow by the Princess Sophia, which she gratefully returned, as not being in actual need of it. Many friends bought copies of Blake's engraved books, some of which Mrs. Blake colored, with the help of Tatham. After her death all the plates and manuscripts passed into Tatham's hands. In his memoir Tatham says that Blake on his death-bed 'spoke of the writer of this as a likely person to become the manager' of Mrs. Blake's affairs, and he says that Mrs. Blake bequeathed to him 'all of his works that remained unsold at his death, being writings, paintings, and a very great number of copperplates, of whom impressions may be obtained.' Linnell says that Tatham never showed anything in proof of his assertion that they had been left to him. Tatham had passed through various religious phases, and from being a Baptist, had become an 'angel' of the Irvingite Church. He is supposed to have destroyed the whole of the manuscripts and drawings in his possession on account of religious scruples; and in the life of Calvert by his son we read: 'Edward Calvert, fearing some fatal dénouement, went to Tatham and implored him to reconsider the matter and spare the good man's precious work; notwithstanding which, blocks, plates, drawings, and MSS., I understand, were destroyed.'

Such is the received story, but is it strictly true? Did Tatham really destroy these manuscripts for religious reasons, or did he keep them and surreptitiously sell them for reasons of quite another kind? In the Rossetti Papers there is a letter from Tatham to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, dated Nov. 6, 1862, in which he says: 'I have sold Mr. Blake's works for thirty years'; and a footnote to Dr. Garnett's monograph on Blake in the The Portfolio of 1895 relates a visit from Tatham which took place about 1860. Dr. Garnett told me that Tatham had said, without giving any explanation, that he had destroyed some of Blake's manuscripts and kept others by him, which he had sold from time to time. Is there not therefore a possibility that some of these lost manuscripts may still exist? whether or not they may turn out to be, as Crabb Robinson tells us that Blake told him, 'six or seven epic poems as long as Homer, and twenty tragedies as long as Macbeth.'