“Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire;
Bring me my spear; O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.”
For War breeds hate and every evil thing. Until we arouse ourselves and fight like warriors the evil that is in ourselves, there can be no glorious liberty, whether for England or any other nation of the world.
The Poetical Sketches were a failure. Mrs Mathew had generously tried to help, but her influence was not wide.
A magnificent opportunity had come to the Blue-stockings, and to Mrs Montagu in particular, who with all her money and wide influence, which she was always ready to use for her needy friends, might have helped quite incalculably when Blake most needed it, and earned our undying gratitude. Yet we must be just and not blame them for their lost opportunity. Their significance lies in the fact that they objected to being perfect dunces like the rest of their English sisters, and so they made a bold dash to understand the things that men understand. They were not the first learned women the world had seen. The ladies of the Italian Renaissance could have given them points all round. Their work was that of restoration and not revolution, and that was more than sufficient to occupy their thoughts and energies without their peering into the new world that was at work in Blake. When whiffs of the new spirit blew on them from Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, and Hume, they were chilled and shocked, and thanked Heaven that in Dr Johnson there was a champion who knew all about the new and stoutly maintained the old. That was sufficient for them. Unfortunately they lived at a time when Society was more than usually artificial and woman suppressed, and the odd contrast between them and their sisters made them appear to men somewhat as monsters, like singing mice or performing pigs. The charge of being a Blue-stocking must always brand with a stigma, but happily now that women are establishing their right to meet men on an equality, the charge need never be made again.
CHAPTER IV
EARLY MARRIED LIFE AND EARLY WORK
We saw that William and Catherine Blake after their marriage settled at 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields. This was in 1782. Here they remained for two years, learning, not without pain, to adjust themselves to each other. Mrs Blake’s love was maternal and whole-hearted. Hers was not a nature to question why love should involve the accepting of immeasurable cares. The cares came one by one and not always singly, and she meekly and bravely accepted them, contented to live her life in her husband’s life, and happy when she perceived that she could smooth his path and shelter him from rough blasts.
Blake at this time was an extraordinarily difficult man to live with. He was by turns vehement, passionate, wildly self-assertive and submissive to others far inferior to himself. His visions were less bright than they had been, and his mind was choked with theories about the elemental things of life that every woman understands by instinct. He was conscious of his own genius and of the shortcomings of his successful contemporaries. His rampant egotism sowed his consciousness with resentments that poisoned his blood and bred bitterness. He made frantic efforts to grasp the liberty he had seen from afar, but he only succeeded in confounding liberty with licence, and peremptorily demanding the latter with his wife in a way that was bound to give her pain. I will not attempt to lift further the veil of their early married life. We have no right to pry. Mr Ellis has constructed this period as far as is possible from the poems of Blake, and to his Real Blake I must refer the curious reader; but for my own part I am content to note the signs of trouble in the various poems and not to probe deeper into the secret things which no right-minded person can ever wish to be proclaimed on the house-top. Suffice it to say that Mrs Blake’s self-forgetful love won the day, and when the early storms had passed, and the adjustments been made, they were united by a bond which, untouched by the fickleness of the flesh, could defy all shocks and changes because it was founded on the enduring reality of the spirit.