Blake was the apostle and martyr of this devotion to the high spiritual mission of Art. He would make no compromise with the world.
In a letter to Mr. Butts dated April 25th, 1803, he writes:
“I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoyed, and that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, see visions, dream dreams, and prophesy and speak parables, unobserved, and at liberty from the doubts of other mortals, perhaps doubts proceeding from kindness, but doubts are always pernicious, especially when we doubt our friends. Christ is very decided on this point: ‘He who is not with me is against me;’ there is no medium or middle state; and if a man is the enemy of my spiritual life, while he pretends to be the friend of my corporeal, he is a real enemy; but the man may be the friend of my spiritual life while he seems the enemy of my corporeal, though not vice versâ.”
This enemy to Blake’s spiritual life is certainly Hayley.
He writes with unmistakable frankness of the Hermit of Eartham in a later letter:
“Mr. H. approves of my designs as little as he does of my poems, and I have been forced to insist on his leaving me, in both, to my own self-will; I am determined to be no longer pestered with his genteel ignorance and polite disapprobation. I know myself both Poet and Painter, and it is not his affected contempt that can move to anything but a more assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness I have brought down his affected loftiness, and he begins to think I have some genius, as if genius and assurance were the same thing! But his imbecile attempts to depress me only deserve laughter.” He goes on to say that he will relinquish all engagements to design for Hayley, “unless altogether left to my own judgement, as you, my dear friend, have always left me; for which I shall never cease to honour and respect you.” And for which, we may add, posterity also has good reason to laud and acclaim Mr. Butts.
Blake was not the man to be the creature of any patron, spending his time and all his magnificent powers as the servant of another man’s brain—especially when that brain was Hayley’s.
If the engravings and designs done for his patron had earned him thousands instead of a mere competence, such work could not have tempted him from his chosen path of spiritual art. Finally, in 1803, he threw off the yoke decisively, turned his back on patronage, and returned with his faithful Kate to the liberty and poverty of rooms in South Molton Street, London, after a three years’ rural seclusion. Just before leaving Felpham Blake became involved in a very disagreeable affair with a drunken soldier named Schofield, which resulted in a trial for sedition. The soldier, who was forcibly removed by Blake from his cottage garden, where he was trespassing, trumped up in revenge a set of ridiculous charges against him, saying he had used seditious language against the king and government. In the practical difficulties that all this gave rise to, Hayley came forward to Blake’s assistance, and putting all the weight of his local position and popularity on the artist’s side, materially helped him before and at the time of the trial. Although he had been thrown from his horse and hurt a few days previously, he insisted on being present to give evidence in his protégé’s favour, who was of course acquitted. Warm-hearted Blake felt a generous inrush of the old affection for his friend, and a deep sense of gratitude helped to re-establish the old cordial relations between the two men. It must not be inferred from this, however, that Blake had altered his opinion that Hayley was his spiritual enemy. That, he held, Hayley had proved himself to be. But he now recognized that it was not malignity, but deficiency of spiritual knowledge and insight that had made him act as he did. It was the law of his being, and Blake, having learned this through experience of his three years’ stay at Felpham, expected no more from him than his capacity warranted, and gave him his dues, dwelling with gratitude on the fact that Hayley was at least a true “corporeal friend.”
The stress and strain connected with the trial had a bad effect on Blake’s highly-sensitive nerves, and is painfully apparent in the writing of the time. The time at Felpham, and the period that succeeded on his return to London, have much light shed on them by the Note-book. The MS. book to which reference has been made was a sort of safety valve, which Blake kept ever at his elbow, and in which he wrote long dissertations on Art and Religion—the “Public Address,” the “Vision of the Last Judgment,” and many of the poems published under the title (which heads the Note-book itself) of “Ideas of Good and Evil.” Along with, and interspersed with these connected and finished utterances, are splenetic epigrams, rude rather than humorous caricature couplets, little scraps of unconsidered verse written to illustrate some incident of the day, and drawings here, there, and everywhere. The MS. Note-book is a very intimate part of Blake. On its first page Messrs. Ellis and Yeats quote the inscription written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who possessed it till his death:
“I purchased this original MS. of Palmer, an attendant at the Antique Gallery of the British Museum, on the 30th April, 1849. Palmer knew Blake personally, and it was from the artist’s wife that he had the present MS., which he sold me for 10s. Among the sketches are one or two profiles of Blake himself.” Unfortunately it has now passed by purchase into the possession of a collector at Boston, U.S.A. I say unfortunately, because our own National Museum should have secured such a treasure, but its present owner courteously lent it for a prolonged period to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, who have embodied the main part of it in their exhaustive and most interesting work. The Note-book was deeply studied by Gilchrist, and was one of Rossetti’s dearest treasures, leaving its impress on his mind and work.