No words could do full justice to the beautiful life of Catherine Blake. It is true that no ordinary man could have drawn such harmony from the vivacious, impulsive, passionate nature of the girl. All the generous love that her nature possessed she lavished on Blake, and her complete absorption in him seems to have satisfied the maternal cravings which were to have no other satisfaction, for William and Catherine had no children. The work of caring for the few rooms which were all that Blake’s means allowed, and his ambition desired, for the housing of their bodies, this Catherine did with the thoroughness of the true aesthete. She cooked, sewed, swept, dusted, and washed, and yet found time to learn from her husband how to read and write, the use of the graver, and even to colour with neat and precise hand some of the prints he made. Added to this she was soon able to read with intelligence the books he praised, and listened wondering to the songs he made, finding them of a heavenly significance and beauty; and when his tense nerves and superabundant physical energy drove Blake forth to stretch his limbs and cool his brain in long country walks of thirty, and occasionally forty miles at a stretch, Catherine went with him, and cheerfully tramped along beside him, silent or responsive as he set the mood.
Again, when in the night time visions appeared to his teeming ever-inventive brain, and he must needs get up and write or draw while the divine “mania” was upon him, then Catherine arose softly and sat beside that wondrous husband in her white nightgown, her whole consciousness hanging upon his least movement or utterance, and her whole being thrilling sympathetically to those invisible presences which moved his spirit. Like Mary, “she kept all these things in her heart and pondered them.”
Speaking of his wife, one cannot but recall that in Blake’s mysterious and unorthodox creed the doctrine of free love was a very favourite one, on which in his poetry he was never tired of insisting. Yet he seems to have desired freedom, only, as Mr. Swinburne finely shows, “for the soul’s sake.” If love is bound, he argued, what merit is there in faithfulness? Love, to be what love in perfect development should be,—to be what Love in its very essence predicates,—must be free. Such a creed, proclaimed by the lips of the most austere of men in matters sensual, seems to shadow forth one dimly apprehended aspect of a truth, which may be realized perhaps, in a future and more perfect state of society.
“In a myrtle shade,” and “William Bond,” are two among the poems in Blake’s MS. book, which have their origin in thoughts about free love.
The year after his marriage, 1782-83, Blake had to turn to engraving in real earnest to pay for the necessities of the modest ménage in Green Street. We find him engaged mainly in engraving plates after Stothard’s refined and graceful designs. In after years, when he was estranged from Stothard, Blake used to say that many of these same designs contained ideas stolen from himself. There can be small doubt that Stothard did owe something to Blake’s influence. Fuseli frankly declared that “Blake is damned good to steal from,” and accordingly adopted his ideas, and in one instance, at least, a complete design.
A kind and appreciative couple, the Rev. Henry and Mrs. Mathew, received Blake in their drawing-room about this time, and gave him an honoured place among their guests. It was they who paid in part for the production of his “Poetical Sketches,” and Flaxman, who had always a strong admiration of Blake’s poetical genius, helped,—an act of beautiful generosity in a young artist with his own way to make.
The “Poetical Sketches” are among the tenderest lyric notes uttered by Blake, and their bird-like spontaneity and lilt recall, says Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “the best period of English song-writing, whose rarest treasures lie scattered among the plays of our Elizabethan dramatists.” These wild wood-notes gushing unselfconscious from a heart glad with youth and fair visions are in strange contrast to the artificial, trifling, and unsatisfying poetry of the age. Blake himself writes in the “Poem to the Muses”:
How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoy’d in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few.
What can be said of that perfect lyric, written when Blake was but fourteen, “My silks and fine array,” and that other which I shall surely be forgiven for quoting as it stands:
How sweet I roamed from field to field
And tasted all the summer’s pride,
Till I the Prince of Love beheld
Who in the sunny beams did glide.
He show’d me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair
Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet Maydews my wings are wet,
And Phoebus fired my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.