Nature soon appeared to him in another shape, and altogether charming. A lively miss to whom he had paid court showed herself cold to his advances; which circumstance he was one evening bemoaning to a dark-eyed, handsome girl,—(a dangerous experiment, by the way,)—who assured him that she pitied him from her heart. "Do you pity me?" he eagerly asked. "Yes, I do, most sincerely." "Then I love you for that," replied the new Othello to his Desdemona; and so well did the wooing go that the dark-eyed Catharine presently became his wife, the Kate of a forty-five years' marriage. Loving, devoted, docile, she learned to be helpmeet and companion. Never, on the one side, murmuring at the narrow fortunes, nor, on the other, losing faith in the greatness to which she had bound herself, she not only ordered well her small household, but drew herself up within the range of her husband's highest sympathy. She learned to read and write, and to work off his engravings. Nay, love became for her creative, endowed her with a new power, the vision and the faculty divine, and she presently learned to design with a spirit and a grace hardly to be distinguished from her husband's. No children came to make or mar their harmony; and from the summer morning in Battersea that placed her hand in his, to the summer evening in London that loosed it from his dying grasp, she was the true angel-vision, Heaven's own messenger to the dreaming poet-painter.
Being the head of a family, Blake now, as was proper, went into "society." And what a society it was to enter! And what a man was Blake to enter it! The society of President Reynolds, and Mr. Mason the poet, and Mr. Sheridan the play-actor, and pompous Dr. Burney, and abstract Dr. Delap,—all honorable men; a society that was dictated to by Dr. Johnson, and delighted by Edmund Burke, and sneered at by Horace Walpole, its untiring devotee: a society presided over by Mrs. Montagu, whom Dr. Johnson dubbed Queen of the Blues; Mrs. Carter, borrowing, by right of years, her matron's plumes; Mrs. Chapone, sensible, ugly, and benevolent; the beautiful Mrs. Sheridan; the lively, absurd, incisive Mrs. Cholmondeley; sprightly, witty Mrs. Thrale; and Hannah More, coiner of guineas, both as saint and sinner: a most piquant, trenchant, and entertaining society it was, and well might be, since the bullion of genius was so largely wrought into the circulating medium of small talk; but a society which, from sheer lack of vision, must have entertained its angels unawares. Such was the current which caught up this simple-hearted painter, this seer of unutterable things, this "eternal child,"—caught him up only to drop him, with no creditable, but with very credible haste. As a lion, he was undoubtedly thrice welcome in Rathbone Place; but when it was found that the lion would not roar there gently, nor be bound by their silken strings, but rather shook his mane somewhat contemptuously at his would-be tamers, and kept, in their grand saloons, his freedom of the wilderness, he was straightway suffered to return to his fitting solitudes. One may imagine the consternation that would be caused by this young fellow turning to Mrs. Carter, whose "talk was all instruction," or to Mrs. Chapone, bent on the "improvement of the mind," or to Miss Streatfield, with her "nose and notions à la Grecque," and abruptly inquiring, "Madam, did you ever see a fairy's funeral?" "Never, Sir!" responds the startled Muse. "I have," pursues Blake, as calmly as if he were proposing to relate a bon mot which he heard at Lady Middleton's rout last night. "I was walking alone in my garden last night: there was great stillness among the branches and flowers, and more than common sweetness in the air. I heard a low and pleasant sound, and knew not whence it came. At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures of the size and color of green and gray grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose-leaf, which they buried with songs, and then disappeared. It was a fairy funeral." Or they are discussing, somewhat pompously, Herschel's late discovery of Uranus, and the immense distances of heavenly bodies, when Blake bursts out uproariously, "'Tis false! I was walking down a lane the other day, and at the end of it I touched the sky with my stick." Truly, for this wild man, who obstinately refuses to let his mind be regulated, but bawls out his mad visions the louder, the more they are combated, there is nothing for it but to go back to his Kitty, and the little tenement in Green Street.
But real friends Blake found, who, if they could not quite understand him, could love and honor and assist. Flaxman, the "Sculptor for Eternity," and Fuseli, the fiery-hearted Swiss painter, stood up for him manfully. His own younger brother, Robert, shared his talents, and became for a time a loved and honored member of his family,—too much honored, if we may credit an anecdote in which the brother appears to much better advantage than the husband. A dispute having one day arisen between Robert and Mrs. Blake, Mr. Blake, after a while, deemed her to have gone too far, and bade her kneel down and beg Robert's pardon, or never see her husband's face again. Nowise convinced, she nevertheless obeyed the stern command, and acknowledged herself in the wrong. "Young woman, you lie!" retorted Robert "I am in the wrong!" This beloved brother died at the age of twenty-five. During his last illness, Blake attended him with the most affectionate devotion, nor ever left the bedside till he beheld the disembodied spirit leave the frail clay and soar heavenward, clapping its hands for joy!
His brother gone, though not so far away that he did not often revisit the old home,—friendly Flaxman in Italy, but more inaccessible there than Robert in the heaven which lay above this man in his perpetual infancy,—the bas-bleus reinclosed in the charmed circle in which Blake had so riotously disported himself, a small attempt at partnership, shop-keeping, and money-making, wellnigh "dead before it was born,"—the poet began to think of publishing. The verses of which we have spoken had been seen but by few people, and the store was constantly increasing. Influence with the publishers, and money to defray expenses, were alike wanting. A copy of Lavater's "Aphorisms," translated by his fellow-countryman, Fuseli, had received upon its margins various annotations which reveal the man in his moods. "The great art to love your enemy consists in never losing sight of man in him," says Lavater. "None can see the man in the enemy," pencils Blake. "If he is ignorantly so, he is not truly an enemy; if maliciously so, not a man. I cannot love my enemy; for my enemy is not a man, but a beast. And if I have any, I can love him as a beast, and wish to beat him." No equivocation here, surely. On superstition he comments,—"It has been long a bugbear, by reason of its having been united with hypocrisy. But let them be fairly separated, and then superstition will be honest feeling, and God, who loves all honest men, will lead the poor enthusiast in the path of holiness." Herein lies the germ of a truth. Again, Lavater says,—"A great woman not imperious, a fair woman not vain, a woman of common talents not jealous, an accomplished woman who scorns to shine, are four wonders just great enough to be divided among the four corners of the globe." Whereupon Blake adds,—"Let the men do their duty, and the women will be such wonders; the female life lives from the life of the male. See a great many female dependents, and you know the man." If this be madness, would that the madman might have bitten all mankind before he died! To the advice, "Take here the grand secret, if not of pleasing all, yet of displeasing none: court mediocrity, avoid originality, and sacrifice to fashion," he appends, with an evident reminiscence of Rathbone Place, "And go to hell."
But this private effervescence was not enough; and long thinking anxiously as to ways and means, suddenly, in the night, Robert stood before him, and revealed to him a secret by which a facsimile of poetry and design could be produced. On rising in the morning, Mrs. Blake was sent out with a half-crown to buy the necessary materials, and with that he began an experiment which resulted in furnishing his principal means of support through life. It consisted in a species of engraving in relief both of the words and the designs of his poems, by a process peculiar and original. From his plates he printed off in any tint he chose, afterwards coloring up his designs by hand. Joseph, the sacred carpenter, had appeared in a vision, and revealed to him certain secrets of coloring. Mrs. Blake delighted to assist him in taking impressions, which she did with great skill, in tinting the designs, and in doing up the pages in boards; so that everything, except manufacturing the paper, was done by the poet and his wife. Never before, as his biographer justly remarks, was a man so literally the author of his own book. If we may credit the testimony that is given, or even judge from such proofs as Mr. Gilchrist's book can furnish, these works of his hands were exquisitely beautiful. The effect of the poems imbedded in their designs is, we are told, quite different from their effect set naked upon a blank page. It was as if he had transferred scenery and characters from that spirit-realm where his own mind wandered at will; and from wondrous lips wondrous words came fitly, and with surpassing power. Confirmation of this we find in the few plates of "Songs of Innocence" which have been recovered. Shorn of the radiant rainbow hues, the golden sheen, with which the artist, angel-taught, glorified his pictures, they still body for us the beauty of his "Happy Valley." Children revel there in unchecked play. Springing vines, in wild exuberance of life, twine around the verse, thrusting their slender coils in among the lines. Weeping willows dip their branches into translucent pools. Heavy-laden trees droop their ripe, rich clusters overhead. Under the shade of broad-spreading oaks little children climb on the tiger's yielding back and stroke the lion's tawny mane in a true Millennium.
The first series, "Songs of Innocence," was succeeded by "Songs of Experience," subsequently bound in one volume. Then came the book of "Thel," an allegory, wherein Thel, beautiful daughter of the Seraphim, laments the shortness of her life down by the River of Adona, and is answered by the Lily of the Valley, the Little Cloud, the Lowly Worm, and the Clod of Clay; the burden of whose song is—
"But how this is, sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know,
I ponder, and I cannot ponder: yet I live and love!"
The designs give the beautiful daughter listening to the Lily and the Cloud. The Clod is an infant wrapped in a lily-leaf. The effect of the whole poem and design together is as of an "angel's reverie."
The "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" is considered one of the most curious and original of his works. After an opening "Argument" comes a series of "Proverbs of Hell," which, however, answer very well for earth: as, "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees"; "He whose face gives no light shall never become a star"; "The apple-tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion the horse how he shall take his prey." The remainder of the book consists of "Memorable Fancies," half dream, half allegory, sublime and grotesque inextricably commingling, but all ornamented with designs most daring and imaginative in conception, and steeped in the richest color. We subjoin a description of one or two, as a curiosity. "A strip of azure sky surmounts, and of land divides, the words of the title-page, leaving on each side scant and baleful trees, little else than stem and spray. Drawn on a tiny scale lies a corpse, and one bends over it. Flames burst forth below and slant upward across the page, gorgeous with every hue. In their very core, two spirits rush together and embrace." In the seventh design is "a little island of the sea, where an infant springs to its mother's bosom. From the birth-cleft ground a spirit has half emerged. Below, with outstretched arms and hoary beard, an awful, ancient man rushes at you, as it were, out of the page." The eleventh is "a surging of mingled fire, water, and blood, wherein roll the volumes of a huge, double-fanged serpent, his crest erect, his jaws wide open." "The ever-fluctuating color, the spectral pigmies rolling, flying, leaping among the letters, the ripe bloom of quiet corners, the living light and bursts of flame, the spires and tongues of fire vibrating with the full prism, make the page seem to move and quiver within its boundaries, and you lay the book down tenderly, as if you had been handling something sentient."
We have not space to give a description, scarcely even a catalogue, of Blake's numerous works. Wild, fragmentary, gorgeous dreams they are, tangled in with strange allegoric words and designs, that throb with their prisoned vitality. The energy, the might, the intensity of his lines and figures it is impossible for words to convey. It is power in the fiercest, most eager action,—fire and passion, the madness and the stupor of despair, the frenzy of desire, the lurid depths of woe, that thrill and rivet you even in the comparatively lifeless rendering of this book. The mere titles of the poems give but a slight clue to their character. Ideas are upheaved in a tossing surge of words. It is a mystic, but lovely Utopia, into which "The Gates of Paradise" open. The practical name of "America" very faintly foreshadows the Ossianic Titans that glide across its pages, or the tricksy phantoms, the headlong spectres, the tongues of flame, the folds and fangs of symbolic serpents, that writhe and leap and dart and riot there. With a poem named "Europe," we should scarcely expect for a frontispiece the Ancient of Days, in unapproached grandeur, setting his "compass upon the face of the Earth,"—a vision revealed to the designer at the top of his own staircase.