CHAPTER IV

DECLINING YEARS

Seventeen years of quiet productiveness and unceasing work, marked by the increasing neglect of the world, were passed by Blake at 17, South Molton Street.

When finally abandoned by the public to the deep solitude which he created for himself in the midst of the roar of the city, the years are a record of much peaceful labour, of beautiful and strange work, produced as the result of his spiritual meditations and visions.

"That he should do great things for small wages," writes Mr. Swinburne, "was a condition of his life," and the poverty which had knocked at his door for almost half a century, now raised the latch and came in, to live with the Blakes as accustomed house-mate to the end. Mrs. Blake had often to remind him of the bare larder and purse by setting an empty plate before him, when he turned to his task-work of engraving to earn the needful money whereby they might live.

In the last years of his life Blake said significantly to Crabb Robinson, "I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has, is so much taken from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy." And so indeed he was.

But he wrote in the Note-book these lines also, indicative of the loneliness and misunderstanding of his whole life:

The Angel who presided at my birth, Said, "Little creature formed for joy and mirth, Go, Love, without the help of anything on earth."

The struggle between himself and the world being over, and his intractable genius relegated by the influential and great persons of his age to a limbo of neglect and contempt, then did he reach out his hands as to a friend, and pulled Poverty across the threshold; and stretching his limbs and shaking back his gray old head in relief and content, he settled in to the unhindered and undistracted contemplation of "those things which really are"--the eternal inner world of the imagination.

"They pity me," Blake said of Sir Thomas Lawrence and other popular artists of the day, "but 'tis they are the just objects of pity. I possess my visions and peace. They have bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage."

Gradually the ranks of Blake's old friends were thinned till but two remained, Fuseli and Flaxman, both of whom, however, died before him.

Johnson the bookseller died in 1809, in 1810 Ozias Humphrey; Mr. Butts, always a staunch friend, had no room in his house for more pictures, and fell off as a buyer; Hayley and Blake had long ceased to have a thought in common. Flaxman still continued to find engraving to be done by Blake, being determined that he should at least have money enough to live. Designing, which he would so far rather have done, was out of Flaxman's power to give, for the public had now sedulously turned its back on Blake. Much of this part of his life seems to have been lived in drudgery, but always cheerfully and happily. He was too poor to afford the outlay necessary for printing and producing his books in the old wonderful way, and often made unsuccessful applications to regular publishers. "Well, it is published elsewhere," he would say quietly, "and beautifully bound."

Our artist had never been sympathetic to the decadent age of crumbling institutions and fallow literary and intellectual life that the last part of the eighteenth century presented; and now in the first years of a new century, a generation of new-born song, of enthusiastic lovers of liberty, of strong original and romantic minds, was to supplant the old artificial, social and literary ideals. Blake felt the pristine thrills of the great new birth in the poetry of Wordsworth, introduced to him by Mr. Crabb Robinson, and also in personal acquaintance with Coleridge, a genius somewhat akin to himself.

Mr. George Cumberland introduced Blake in 1818 to John Linnell, afterwards held high in honour and renown as one of England's greatest landscape painters. At that time he painted portraits for a living, and engraved them afterwards. In this work he got Blake to help him, and it was through him that the latter became acquainted with a younger generation of artists, among whom he soon made many congenial friends. Of John Linnell it must be recorded, that from this time forth till Blake's death, he occupied a quite unique relation to him, constituting himself the old man's chief stay and solace, and according him the attentions and the admiring love given by a son to a beloved father.

A new circle of friends and enthusiastic admirers, very young men for the most part, rose up around Blake, whose hearts, expanding in unison with the awakening life of the age, recognized in him a brother, a teacher, and inspired prophet. To them he showed his benign and childlike side, to them he talked, not in the old dogmatic sledge-hammer fashion, but in a spirit of rhapsodic revelation, of peaceful and joyous wisdom.

As the years went by, a new fellowship with mankind, a large toleration and deep tenderness, bore golden fruit in his intercourse with this favoured band of young friends and disciples. As Walter Pater wrote of Michael Angelo, so might it be said of Blake, "This man, because the Gods loved him, lingered on to be of immense patriarchal age, till the sweetness it had taken so long to secrete in him was found at last. Out of the strong came forth sweetness, _ex forti dulcedo_."

Among the new friends were John Varley, the father of English water-colours, as he has been affectionately termed, Richter and Holmes, both leaders of the new school. These men were the forerunners of Turner, Copley-Fielding, De Wint, Cotman, Prout, David Cox and William Hunt, and though in these days they are little remembered, and the glory of them has been eclipsed by their great successors, their somewhat timid and delicate work in South Kensington Museum will repay a visit and establish their pioneer claims to our regard.

It was for John Varley that Blake drew the celebrated visionary heads, the only work of his with which he is associated by many people. Varley was by way of being an astrologer, and took the deepest interest in the occult and the spiritualistic. Blake's talk of visions, of the actual appearances vouchsafed him from the other world, had a significance to Varley's matter-of-fact mind much more vulgar and material than he intended.

Our artist had cultivated imagination till it became vision, and what he thought, that he saw, for, as Mr. Smetham wrote, "thought crystallized itself sharply into vision with him." So that when his friend asked him to draw the portraits of men long dead and gone, such as Edward III, William Wallace, Richard I, Wat Tyler, or unknown personages, such as "the man who built the Pyramids," or "the man who taught Mr. B. painting in his dreams," and (most remarkable of all!) "the Ghost of a Flea," Blake had but to command his visionary faculty and summon before his gaze the desired sitters. The one which has been the most talked about is the Ghost of a Flea, and Varley gives the following description of the manner in which it sat for its portrait: "This spirit visited his (Blake's) imagination in such a figure as he never anticipated in an insect. As I was anxious to make the most correct investigation in my power of the truth of these visions, on hearing of this spiritual apparition of a flea, I asked him if he could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw. He instantly said, 'I see him now before me.' I therefore gave him paper and a pencil with which he drew the portrait.... I felt convinced by his mode of proceeding that he had a real image before him; for he left off and began on another part of the paper to make a separate drawing of the mouth of the flea, which, the spirit having opened, he was prevented from proceeding with the first sketch till he had closed it."

Various explanations of these portraits of "spectres" (as Varley has it) have been put forward. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats write of them, "All are pictorial expressions of personality, pictorial opinions, drawn, as Blake believed, from influences set going by the character of the men, and permanently affecting the atmosphere, finer than air or ether, into which his imagination looked for their lineaments."

A large and curious collection of these heads, executed by Blake at nocturnal sittings at Varley's house, is still in existence, but not in the British Museum, unfortunately. They mostly bear the date, August, 1820.

In 1820 Blake illustrated Thornton's "Virgil's Pastorals." These, along with his other art-work, will be considered in a later portion of this book. They are the only woodcuts Blake ever made, and are unique, strong and suggestive as anything he ever did. In the same year he made a drawing of Laocoon, to illustrate an article in Rees' "Cyclopaedia" (to such hack-work as this he was frequently reduced to replenish the household purse). He went to the Academy Schools, and took his place humbly among the young men to draw from the cast of Laocoon there.

"What! you heer, Meesther Blake," said his old friend Fuseli; "we ought to come and learn of you, not you of us."

In 1821 Blake moved to No. 3, Fountain Court, in the Temple, his last dwelling-place on earth. It was at that time an old-fashioned respectable court, very quiet, though removed but a few paces from the bustling Strand. The two rooms on the first floor which the Blakes inhabited have been more graphically described than any other of Blake's homes. The front room had its walls covered with his pictures and served as a reception room for his friends, while the back room was living room, kitchen, sleeping apartment and studio all in one. One of his friends wrote, "There was a strange expansion and sensation of freedom in those two rooms, _very_ seldom felt elsewhere"; while another, speaking of them to Blake's biographer Gilchrist, exclaimed, "Ah! that divine window!" It was there that Blake's working table was set, with a print of Albrecht Dürer's "Melancholia" beside it; and between a gap in the houses could be seen the river, with its endless suggestions, memories and "spiritual correspondences."

It is to the credit of the Royal Academy that in the year after Blake's last move, 1822, a grant of £25 was given to this least popular but greatest of her children.

Allan Cunningham and the fastidious Crabb Robinson give the impression that Blake lived in squalor at the end, but the insinuation is refuted by all those who knew him well. Says one, "I never look upon him as an unfortunate man of genius. He knew every great man of his day, and had enough"; while one of the most attached of his friends and disciples (a young artist of the band I have mentioned, who attained success as a painter of "poetic landscape," Mr. Samuel Palmer) wrote to Gilchrist, "No, certainly,--whatever was in Blake's house, there was no squalor. Himself, his wife and his rooms, were clean and orderly; everything was in its place. His delightful working corner had its implements ready, tempting to the hand. The millionaire's upholsterer can furnish no enrichments like those of Blake's enchanted rooms."

It would seem that Blake, having won "those just rights as an artist and a man" for which he had striven with Hayley and Cromek in the old days, and having now established his claim to live as he pleased in honourable poverty for the sake of the imaginative life, gained a tardy recognition and respect among the intellectual spirits of the time during his last years. One of the friendly acquaintances of this period was Thomas Griffiths Wainwright, a strange character of great artistic capacity and sensibilities, and yet destined to be a secret poisoner and murderer. I wonder if Blake was thinking of him when he said in one of his conversations with Crabb Robinson, "I have never known a very bad man who had not something very good in him." Palmer Samuel has given a never-to-be-forgotten picture of Blake at the Academy looking at a picture of Wainwright's.

"While so many moments better worthy to remain are fled," wrote Palmer, "the caprice of memory presents me with the image of Blake looking up at Wainwright's picture; Blake in his plain black suit and _rather_ broad-brimmed but not quakerish hat, standing so quietly among all the dressed-up, rustling, swelling people, and myself thinking, 'How little you know _who_ is among you!'" These few graphic and reverential words touch the heart by their simple directness and love, for to Samuel Palmer, Blake was "the Master." The names of Frederick Tatham the elder, and his son the sculptor must be appended to the tale of Blake's friends; Edward Calvert, who used to go long walks with Blake, made memorable by high conversation; F. O. Finch, a member of the old Water Colour Society; and the distinguished painter Richmond, who was a mere boy when he fell under the spell of the inspired old man. Blake showed this group of young men the most fatherly kindness, encouraged them to appeal to him for advice and counsel, and gathered them around him and talked to them simply, directly and earnestly, of his high and spiritual views on life and art. He poured his noble enthusiasm and other-worldliness into receptive hearts, and his words bore fruit in their works in after life. For this group learned from Blake that Art must express the spirit, and must interpret natural phenomena esoterically. Richmond tells the following characteristic story of how once, "finding his invention flag during a whole fortnight, he went to Blake, as was his wont, for some advice and comfort. He found him sitting at tea with his wife. He related his distress: how he felt deserted by the power of invention. To his astonishment, Blake turned to his wife suddenly and said, 'It is just so with us, is it not, for weeks together when the visions forsake us? What do we do then, Kate?' 'We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake.'"

To these earnest young men Blake was as the prophet Ezekiel, and the home in Fountain Court got to be called by them significantly enough, "The House of the Interpreter."

Mr. Frederick Shields (who, like Blake and many other great artists, will doubtless be honoured as he deserves to be when nothing further can touch him, and this world may not lay at his living feet its due meed of recognition and gratitude,) made a sketch of the sombre little living room in Fountain Court. His friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti was so profoundly touched on seeing it that he eased his heart in a sonnet:

This is the place. Even here the dauntless soul, The unflinching hand, wrought on; till in that nook, As on that very bed, his life partook New birth and passed. Yon river's dusky shoal, Whereto the close-built coiling lanes unroll, Faced his work window, whence his eyes would stare, Thought wandering, unto nought that met them there, But to the unfettered irreversible goal.

This cupboard, Holy of Holies, held the cloud Of his soul writ and limned; this other one, His true wife's charge, full oft to their abode Yielded for daily bread, the martyr's stone, Ere yet their food might be that Bread alone, The words now home-speech of the mouth of God.

The house in Fountain Court has been pulled down lately. The footprints of the great and gentle soul in his passage through this world to the "unfettered irreversible goal" have almost all disappeared in the dust and scurry of the last century. We can still think of him, and of those long rapt mornings he spent in our glorious Abbey. Full as it is--pent up and overflowing--with the associations of centuries, it will henceforth hold this one more--Blake worked there, Blake dreamed there, Blake caught inspiration from the enchanted forests of its aisles.

We may think of him, too, as standing in the Diploma Gallery of Burlington House, gazing with all his flaming spirit in his eyes at Marco d'Oggione's beautiful copy of Da Vinci's "Last Supper." Of the apostles he said, "Every one of them save Judas looks as if he had conquered the natural man."

Mr. Linnell, always during this period Blake's truest, closest friend, introduced him to a rich and cultivated gentleman, a collector of pictures of the German school, a Mr. Aders, at whose table Blake met Crabb Robinson and Coleridge. Crabb Robinson thus describes our artist's appearance: "He has a most interesting appearance. He is now old--sixty-eight--pale, with a Socratic countenance, and an expression of great sweetness, though with something of languor about it, except when animated, and then he has about him an air of inspiration." Lamb was an habitué at the house also. Gotzenburger, the German painter, met Blake at Mr. Aders, and he declared on his return to Germany that he saw but three men of genius in England--Coleridge, Flaxman and Blake, and the greatest of these was Blake.

Much happy time was spent by the old man among the Linnell family at the painter's house, Collins Farm, at North End, Hampstead. Here he often went of a Saturday, and was always welcomed with keen delight by the children and glad affection by their parents. Mrs. Linnell sang his favourite Scotch songs to him, John Linnell talked to him of art and listened appreciatively to his wild poetic conversation. The latter made happy the last few years of his life by a commission to engrave a set of plates after water-colour drawings, already executed, illustrating the Book of Job.

The congeniality of this task, which was to result in the crowning achievement of his life, fired Blake to put his whole soul into the monumental inventions. Linnell also commissioned him to make a series of drawings from the "Divine Comedy." It is interesting to note that at sixty-seven Blake set to work and learned Italian, in order to read his author in the original. His health had long been failing, and before the drawings were finished Death came to him like a friend who loved him, and took him from this cold and unsympathetic world (where, however, he had been strangely happy) to that other one, with which he had always had so close and mystical a communion. The review of his life, from a worldly point of view, is of one whose means were painfully straitened, whose genius was baffled and powers crippled, by poverty and want of encouragement; to whom the world's acknowledgement was lacking, and the fame of the painter and poet denied.

His own assessment of life, however, was very different. Gilchrist relates that a rich and influential lady (Mrs. Aders?) brought her little golden-haired daughter to see him. When this child was old she recalled the strangeness of the words said to her, a radiant spoilt child of fortune, by the poor shabby old man: "May God make this world as beautiful to you, my child, as it has been to me!" he said, stroking her golden curls.

I cannot forbear to quote from Gilchrist the passage which describes his death.

"The final leave-taking came which he had so often seen in vision; so often and with such child-like simple faith sung and designed. With the same intense high feeling he had depicted the 'Death of the Righteous Man,' he enacted it, serenely, joyously; for life and design and song were with him all pitched in one key, different expressions of one reality. No dissonances there! It happened on a Sunday, the 12th of August, 1827, nearly three months before completion of his seventieth year. On the day of his death ... he composed and uttered songs to his Maker so sweetly to the ear of his Catherine, that, when she stood to hear him, he, looking upon her most affectionately, said, 'My beloved! they are not _mine_! No! they are _not_ mine.'"

The last things Blake did were to execute and colour the design of the "Ancient of Days" from the Europe for the young Mr. Tatham. When that was done, "his glance fell on his loving Kate.... As his eyes rested on the once-graceful form, thought of all she had been to him in these years filled the poet-artist's mind. "Stay," he cried, "keep as you are! _you_ have been ever an angel to me; I will draw you." And he made what Mr. Tatham describes as "a phrenzied sketch of some power, highly interesting, but not like."

In that plain back room where he had worked so contentedly he closed his eyes on this world, about six of a summer evening, to open them on the glorious visions of the next. Those beloved nervous hands which Mrs. Blake said she had never once seen idle, were laid to rest at last in the cold sleep of death.

The year of Blake's death, 1827, was that of Beethoven's. Of both of them it may be said that they were but strangers and sojourners here, and the language they spoke was the language of a far country. Catherine, the devoted wife, only survived her husband four years, during the whole of which time she felt his spiritual presence close to her. Blake, though so poor, left no single debt, and his MSS., pictures, and printed books realized sufficient to keep Mrs. Blake in comfort for those few years. John Linnell and Tatham piously cared for and tended their lost leader's widow. She died as Blake died, joyfully, and her body was laid to rest beside his in Bunhill Fields. There is no sign to-day to show where those graves lie, but it is as well.

"The vegetative earth" has absorbed the two dear bodies that the spirits of William Blake and his wife may shine the clearer; their bright radiance glimmers through the century like a guiding star, to lead men's thoughts out into the endless vistas of the infinite life which transcends our present limited consciousness.