Blake’s wife, daughter of a market-gardener, a woman so uneducated that she had to sign the marriage register with her mark, was not only an excellent housekeeper and domestic drudge, but was in perfect sympathy with him in his work, and had the greatest faith in his visions. Moses, Julius Cæsar, the Builder of the Pyramids, David, Uriah, Bathsheba, Solomon, Mahomet, Joseph, and Mary—these were among Blake’s spiritual visitants at South Moulton Street. They came and sat to him, and he worked at their portraits, “looking up from time to time as though he had a real sitter before him.” Sometimes he would leave off abruptly, and observe in matter-of-fact tones, “I can’t go on. It is gone; I must wait till it returns”; or, “It has moved; the mouth is gone”; or, “He frowns. He is displeased with my portrait of him.” If any one criticised and objected to the likeness he would reply calmly, “It must be right. I saw it so.” In all probability he meant no more than that he conjured up these sitters to his mind’s eye; but his friends took him literally, and he acquiesced in their doing so, and has been dubbed a madman in consequence.
Many times his wife would get up in the nights “when he was under his very fierce inspirations, which were as if they would tear him asunder, while he was yielding himself to the Muse, or whatever else it could be called, sketching and writing. 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.” It is not easy to realise that this burning, fiery spirit did once live in these South Moulton Street rooms, surrounded by his vivid and terrific imaginings, and then could pass out of it and leave it looking so dull and decorous, so ordinary, so entirely commonplace. But here he indubitably lived, so discouraged by neglect and hampered by poverty that he could not afford to issue any more large books like the Jerusalem, and in 1809 made a desperate attempt to appeal to the public by holding an exhibition of his frescoes and drawings on the first floor of his brother’s hosiery shop in Broad Street. Very few visitors attended; but among the few was Lamb’s friend, Crabb Robinson, and when he went he had the room to himself. He paid for admission, recognised that these pictures were the work of no ordinary artist, and bought four of the catalogues, one of which he sent to Lamb; and when, on leaving, he asked the custodian whether he might come again free, James Blake, delighted at having a visitor, and one, moreover, who had bought something, cried, “Oh yes—free as long as you live!” But the exhibition was a failure. The popular painters of Blake’s day were Reynolds, Gainsborough, and men of their schools. Blake was born out of his time, and contemporary society had nothing in common with him—no comprehension of his aim or his outlook—and dismissed him as an astonishing lunatic. When some drawings of his were shown to George III., his Majesty could only gaze at them helplessly and ejaculate a testy “Take them away! take them away!” The noble designs for Blair’s Grave, and the frescoes of The Canterbury Pilgrimage, were among the important works done at South Moulton Street, which Blake quitted in 1821, making his last change of residence to 3 Fountain Court, Strand—a house kept by his brother-in-law, Baines. Here he occupied a room on the first floor for some six years, and when he was nearing his seventieth year, died, after a short illness, on Sunday, the 12th August 1827. He lay dying in his plain back room, serene and cheerful, singing songs to melodies that were the inspiration of the moment; towards evening he fell silent, and passed quietly away, a poor woman, a neighbour who had come in to sit with his wife, saying afterwards, “I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel.”
You have only to look at the portraits of Blake, at the broad forehead—the forehead of a revolutionary, as he himself said—the sensitive mouth, the large, intent, vision-haunted eyes, to know that his outward appearance fairly adequately revealed the manner of man that he really was. He was under five feet six in height and thick-set, but so well proportioned that he did not strike people as short. “He had an upright carriage,” says Gilchrist, “and a good presence; he bore himself with dignity, as not unconscious of his natural claims. The head and face were strongly stamped with the power and character of the man. There was a great volume of brain in that square, massive head, that piled-up brow, very full and rounded at the temples, where, according to phrenologists, ideality or imagination resides. His eyes were fine (‘wonderful eyes,’ some one calls them), prominently set, but bright, spiritual, visionary—not restless or wild, but with a look of clear, heavenly exaltation. The eyes of some of the old men in his Job recall his own to surviving friends. His nose was insignificant as to size, but had that peculiarity which gives to a face an expression of fiery energy, as of a high-mettled steed—a little clenched nostril, a nostril that opened as far as it could, but was tied down at one end. His mouth was wide, the lips not full, but tremulous, and expressive of the great sensibility which characterised him. He was short-sighted, as the prominence of his eyes indicated—a prominence in keeping with the faculty for languages, according to phrenologists again. He wore glasses only occasionally.” His poverty forced him to study economy in the matter of dress. Indoors he was not slovenly, but generally wore a threadbare old suit, the grey trousers of which had been rubbed black and shiny in front like a mechanic’s. When he walked abroad he was more careful, and dressed plainly but well, something in the style of an old-fashioned tradesman, in black knee-breeches and buckles, black worsted stockings, shoes that tied, and a broad-brimmed hat.
But for a memorable description of Blake in his habit as he lived, you must read this letter that was written to Gilchrist by Samuel Palmer, who knew him intimately in his latter years:—
“Blake, once known, could never be forgotten.... In him you saw at once the maker, the inventor; one of the few in any age; a fitting companion for Dante. He was a man ‘without a mask’; his aim single, his path straightforwards, and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy. His voice and manner were quiet, yet all awake with intellect. Above the tricks of littleness, or the least taint of affectation, with a natural dignity which few would have dared to affront, he was gentle and affectionate, loving to be with little children and talk about them. ‘That is heaven,’ he said to a friend, leading him to a window and pointing to a group of them at play.
“Declining, like Socrates, whom in many respects he resembled, the common objects of ambition, and pitying the scuffle to obtain them, he thought no one could be truly great who had not humbled himself ‘even as a little child.’ This was a subject he loved to dwell upon and to illustrate. His eye was the finest I ever saw; brilliant, but not roving, clear and intent, yet susceptible; it flashed with genius, or melted in tenderness. It could also be terrible.... Nor was the mouth less expressive, the lips flexible and quivering with feeling. I can yet recall it when, on one occasion, dwelling upon the exquisite beauty of the parable of the Prodigal, he began to repeat a part of it; but at the words, ‘When he was yet a great way off his father saw him,’ he could go no further; his voice faltered, and he was in tears.
“He was one of the few to be met with in our passage through life who are not in some way or other double-minded and inconsistent with themselves; one of the very few who cannot be depressed by neglect, and to whose name rank and station could add no lustre. Moving apart, in a sphere above the attraction of worldly honours, he did not accept greatness, but conferred it. He ennobled poverty, and, by his conversation and the influence of his genius, made two small rooms in Fountain Court more attractive than the threshold of princes.”
One of Blake’s warmest friends for many years was the great sculptor, John Flaxman. With none of Blake’s lawless, glowing imagination, Flaxman’s drawings in his illustrations to Homer, and his designs on some of the Wedgwood pottery, have a classical correctness—a cold, exquisite beauty of outline—that are more suggestive of the chisel than of the pencil or the brush; and it is in the splendid sculptures with which he has beautified Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s, and many other of our cathedrals and churches that his genius found its highest expression. In his work as an artist Blake was largely influenced by Flaxman. They and Stothard used to meet at Mrs. Mathew’s; but there came a day when the friendship between these three was broken. Blake thought Flaxman had appropriated one of his designs, and there seems no doubt that Stothard did so, on the prompting of an unscrupulous picture-dealer; and you have Blake lampooning them both, as well as Hayley, with whom he had also fallen out, in epigrams that were not always just, and probably represented nothing worse than a passing mood, as thus:—
“My title as a genius thus is proved:
Not praised by Hayley, nor by Flaxman loved.”
“I found them blind, I taught them how to see,
And now they know neither themselves nor me.”