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.