CHAPTER XVIII

HELPING AND BEING HELPED

AT all times, however, the Blakes lived with remarkable frugality.

We eat little, we drink less.

This world makes not our happiness,

might be said of them from first to last, as truly as "by incessant labour we have enough."

After Blake's removal to No. 13 Hercules Buildings he had a period which Mrs. Blake in old age used to look backward to as one of prosperity. She actually kept a

servant.

The house was not unpleasant. There was a garden, and in the garden was a vine-tree which Blake sat under, and would never allow to be trimmed. The grapes became smaller and smaller, and the plant ran all to leaves and long stems and stalks, but at least it was not educated. To this house, Tatham says, came pupils of rank, and Blake would also go to their houses and stay hour after hour delighting them with the sweet dignity of his manner and the poetry of his conversation. Such good interest was made for him in high places that he was even offered the post of drawingmaster to the Royal Family. Had he accepted this he might have become permanently prosperous. But he refused, for he feared that his art would languish in the Court atmosphere, and the offer almost ruined him, for in order not to seem insulting to the Sovereign he gave up all his pupils at once, a very serious sacrifice.

Mrs. Blake's one servant had vanished already, for she was too good a housewife to endure the perfunctory ways of the "general," and she had dismissed her. Blake and his wife were now in the very prime of their health and strength. The long walks in which they used to delight were begun

again, extending sometimes twenty and thirty miles out--it is said even farther. One day when they had left their house empty from morning till night, thieves broke in and stole, says Tatham, sixty pounds' worth of plate. Either this is a mistake for plates, meaning engraved plates for printing that were worth sixty pounds, or the pupils of rank who nearly made Blake a Royal drawing-master must have given him very handsome presents. Blake, who gave forty pounds for his printing press, is not likely to have given sixty for his spoons and forks. He had no dinner-parties.

He had his extravagances, however. He gave away a lump sum of forty pounds with his wife's knowledge, and how much more that she never knew of, and so could not tell Tatham about after his death, we cannot conjecture. This forty pounds was given to an unfortunate young fellow who had written a book containing free-thinking views. It is to be feared that he had ordered it to be printed at his own expense. Tatham does not tell us his name. During Blake's lifetime no one was ever told about the gift. The forty pounds did not all go to the printer. The free-thinking youth had married a pretty little woman, and a considerable part of the sum was spent in a handsome dress for her, in which she then went and called on Mrs. Blake, who was probably found in an apron with her sleeves rolled up. Painters of historic situations please note. What Mrs. Blake said to her visitor is not recorded.

Blake was not cured of open-handedness by this. He noticed a pale-faced young man with a portfolio under his arm, who passed his house every day. This was enough. Blake came out and made his acquaintance. He was a poor art student on his way to death, but struggling to the last. Blake visited him frequently, taught him, nursed him, and evidently to the last fed him, but Mrs. Blake, who probably cooked for him, told Tatham nothing about this. It is a continual and delightful shock to find that Blake, so confident about his visions and rashly boastful in his art criticism, was absolutely silent when he had something to brag about. Had not his wife survived him and in her grief told of his kindnesses to Tatham, and had Tatham not written these things down in his copy of Jerusalem, we should never have known of any such good deeds. Of Mrs. Blake's own wonderful, patient, luminous life we get no glimpses from her. She seems to have been as silent as she was tender and strong.

There is a note belonging to this period in Blake's MS.

book: I say I shan't live five years, and if I live one it will be a wonder. June 1793." There are no initials after it. We can hardly suppose that Blake wrote it of himself between the fifty-mile walks. Perhaps it was a remembrance of some words of the unfortunate youth, jotted down to see if they would come true. If so, they were justified. Yet Blake was subject to very black moments, and he may have been so imaginatively seized with the feeling of life's shortness when this boy was dying that it is possible he said it of himself, and wrote it as a warning to himself against the deceptiveness of the sad mood. It is to this period of Blake's life that is usually attributed the story that he wished to add a concubine to his establishment, after the manner of Scriptural patriarchs, but that his wife wept, and that then he gave up the project. It is of suspicious authenticity, and seems rather to belong to the William Bond time and style, just after the Poetical Sketches were published. The shock to Mrs. Blake there recorded, which may have occurred then, and which would at least account for her subsequent barrenness, was its probable origin. At this moment it seems out of keeping with the thirty- to fifty-mile walks in which she went with him, which in their turn may have continued the childlessness of the couple.

Many other guesses are open to the reader, who may perhaps even be inclined to suspect that Blake, who had a continual love of the exaggerated and hyperbolic, which is, of course, a characteristic of all men who are both men of geniality and of genius, suggested, when that one unfortunate servant was dismissed, and Mrs. Blake had found the work irksome to resume along with those interminable walks, that Abraham had known a secret for keeping a household servant and attaching her to the family that might be worth consideration under the circumstances. If this incident arose from such a piece of Irish sly humour, Blake must have been very much shocked when Mrs. Blake replied to his solemn jest with tears.

An engraving of the Accusers of Theft, Adultery, and Murder was done at this time-not a likely subject if Blake, after suffering from theft, had contemplated adultery. It has this line from the Prologue to Edward III, which is among the Poetical Sketches, "When the senses are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness" (Who can stand?), p. 53 (sic). It occurs on p. 56 of the Sketches in Quaritch's facsimile. A drawing also exists with the words, "The Bible of Hell in

Nocturnal Visions collected." Blake does not seem to have engraved this. Perhaps the collection was only projected. Whether or not America and the other " Prophecies" belonged to it we can only conjecture. He also wrote here a Gates of Hell, for Children, probably in short lines like the Gates of Paradise, for Children. He lived in Hercules Buildings till

1800.

Now the century was full. Flaxman, seeing that Blake very much needed a sympathetic patron, and particularly indignant at the small price he received for the plates to Young's Night Thoughts, introduced him in the early part of this year to Hayley. The first mention of Blake's name that is at present known is in a letter from Flaxman to Hayley, which begins:

DEAR AND KIND FRIEND-I have delivered the drawing of Demosthenes to Mr. Blake

This is dated January 29, 1800. The drawing was by Hayley's son, and was to illustrate a book by Hayley on sculpture, in the form of letters to Flaxman, with whom the boy was working as an articled pupil. This year, therefore, begins with the Hayley episode of Blake's life that lasted five years. The head of Demosthenes was to have been engraved for Hayley by Blake on Flaxman's recommendation. On March 26, 1800, he writes:

Perhaps you are not acquainted with Mr. Blake's direction. It is No. 13 Hercules Buildings, near the Asylum, Surrey side of Westminster Bridge.

In this letter, too, Flaxman announces his own appointment as sculptor to the King:

His Majesty has been pleased to appoint me to be his sculptor, but you will understand that this is a mere title.

By the middle of the year it is decided that Blake shall leave London and go to Felpham, where Hayley has a large country house, and is the "great man" of the neighbourhood. Blake must have given notice to his landlord at midsummer. On August 18 Flaxman writes to Hayley:

You may naturally suppose that I am highly pleased at the extension of your usual benevolence in favour of my friend Blake, and as such an occasion offers you will perhaps be more satisfied in having the portraits engraved under your own eye than at a distance. Indeed, I hope that Blake's residence at Felpham will be a mutual comfort to you and him, and I see no reason why he should not make as good a

livelihood there as in London, if he engraves and teaches drawing, by which he may gain considerably, as also by making neat drawings of different kinds; but if he places any dependence on painting large pictures, for which he is not qualified either by habit or study, he will be miserably deceived.

Even at that date it is seen that Flaxman was among those who felt it necessary to keep Blake in his place.

Hayley was an exceedingly fluent, well-meaning, shallow, and sentimental amateur author, whose character, talents, and taste have a faint and anticipating suggestion of Leigh Hunt about them. He was apparently the very man for Blake. He was well off, and positively anxious to patronise somebody. Unfortunately, he lacked one thing, and in lacking it was absolutely unfitted to enter into Blake's mind, as, though he had no tendencies of his own towards art or literature, he seems to have had no knowledge of Swedenborgianism. He showed absolutely none of the sort of comprehension of Blake that any one who knew anything of Swedenborg must almost necessarily have showed. It is therefore almost certain that he knew nothing. He was a typical eighteenth-century man in matters of religion. Though capable of talking sentiment about angels and heaven, he frankly disliked the Bible. Swedenborg must have been simply intolerable to him. Blake's writings soon became equally abhorrent. Blake wrote to Butts after three years' intimate knowledge of Hayley:

Of this work I take care to say little to Mr. H., since he is as much averse to my poetry as he is to a chapter in the Bible.

In all the correspondence about Blake, from the first introduction to the final difference and estrangement, Flaxman's character stands out as that of a kind and indulgent friend, who bore much petulance from Blake and tried to do him much good. But he also shows himself as a cautious and discreet man, who, while exceedingly anxious to be kind, at the same time makes a hobby of being wise. He is ignorant that tepidity is a detestable quality of character. His own character is like that of some cooks who cook potatoes without salt and leave them in their hot water till sodden, ignorant that this is a detestable method of cookery. Flaxman does not seem to have made any attempt to use his position as King's sculptor to catch Hayley's attention for symbolic art. Yet he could have used it for just this purpose had he possessed zeal and tact. His tasteless and sodden