The Portable William Blake (17 page)

When a Man has Married a Wife, he finds out whether
Her knees & elbows are only glewed together.

Whate‘er is done to her she cannot know,
And if you’ll ask her she will swear it so.
Whether ’tis good or evil none’s to blame:
No one can take the pride, no one the shame.

Grown old in Love from Seven till Seven times Seven,

I oft have wish’d for Hell for Ease from Heaven.

Since all the Riches of this World
May be gifts from the Devil & Earthly Kings,
I should suspect that I worship’d the Devil
If I thank’d my God for Worldly things.

Nail his neck to the Cross: nail it with a nail.
Nail his neck to the Cross: ye all have power over his tail.

SELECTIONS FROM THE LETTERS

LETTERS

Blake’s letters are no more personal than his other writing; he threw the full power of his personality, and its unwaking dream, into everything he did. But unlike so much of his other work, the letters show his encounter with the world. Here he is in the society he usually defied; it is one of the few glimpses we have of him in relation to others. Here Blake is not the lord of his own creations, a man always ready to console himself for the uniqueness of his thoughts by his own pleasure in them. He is a man talking to other men—reporting on the progress of work in hand, giving technical advice to interested craftsmen, inquiring after the health of a patron, hinting at the possibility of a sale. On occasion he is even ready to have a mutual conversation about his work, as from one man of good sense to another. He never adjusts his views to the correspondent’s measure, but with the stiff and old-fashioned courtesy of his class, and out of his abundant good nature, shows himself a man ready for friendship.

Yet Blake had almost no friends; he had only admirers and enemies, patrons and colleagues. At the end, thanks to his young admirer John Linnell, there were even disciples. Friendship to him meant tolerance and encouragement of his work. The friends of his visions were his friends, and he was always ready to believe in another’s friendship where the usual skepticism or indifference was missing. He was touchingly grateful to anyone who took him seriously. “As to Myself, about whom you are so kindly interested, I live by miracle.” When he is happy at a favor, he puts a poem into a letter. “Happiness stretch’d forth across the hills.” It is not hard to believe that his happiness often did, when he felt the world would receive him. Yet these are primarily business letters. Blake was a man who never stopped thinking and working. A letter to him was the sixth finger of the hand which gave his message to the world.

Most of the letters are either to artists who befriended him—George Cumberland, John Flaxman the sculptor, Ozias Humphry, John Linnell; or to patrons like William Hayley and Thomas Butts. What is perhaps the greatest single letter, Blake’s defense and exposition of his imagination to the Reverend John Trusler, beginning “I really am sorry that you are fallen out with the spiritual world,” was written after the Reverend had expressed dissatisfaction with illustrations he had commissioned Blake to do for him. The nature of the Reverend Trusler’s work may be guessed from the titles of two of his books—
Hogarth Moralized
and The Way To Be Rich and Respectable. When he received the letter he added,
Blake, dim’d with superstition.

Thomas Butts (1759-1846), the great patron of Blake’s middle period, was a wealthy and genial official who filled his house in Fitzroy Square with Blake’s pictures. For many years he bought Blake’s work regularly, sometimes taking a drawing a week, until he did not have room on his walls for more. Butts, though he was sometimes made uneasy by Blake’s radicalism, thought well of him and tried in many ways to help him. At one period he engaged Blake to teach drawing to his son, Thomas, Junior. The Butts and Blake families got on amiably, and Butts became one of the great supports of the artist’s life. The son, however, thought so little of Blake’s work that he sold the original “inventions” to
The Book of Job,
as well as many other pictures.

William Hayley (1745-1820), who seems in the end to have exasperated Blake more than anyone he ever knew, was a sentimental and interminable versifier, author of the popular
The Triumphs of Temper,
lives of Cowper and Romney, and endless memorials to himself and his illegitimate son, Thomas Alphonso. Hayley, from all reports, seems to have been one of the most notorious bores of the age: a sententious squire who delivered himself of poetic epistles on all subjects. Byron said that his work was “for ever feeble and for ever tame”; Blake’s account of their relations portrays a sentimental and stubborn mediocrity who employed him for a variety of jobs but seems never to have understood the talent he exploited. It was Hayley who made possible Blake’s three-year stay at the Felpham cottage, in Sussex. There Blake worked, with pathetic gratitude for a chance to live in the country, at illustrations to Hayley’s life of Cowper and Hayley’s
Ballads
(“Founded on Anecdotes Relating to Animals”), as well as many other tasks which he could finally no longer endure. One of his first commissions for Hayley was to decorate the library of the “Bard” with eighteen heads, nearly of life size, of the great poets—among them the bewept image of the son, Thomas Alphonso, encircled by doves. In the end Hayley’s complacency and interference got so on Blake’s nerves that he thought it better to return to London.

John Flaxman (1755-1826), one of the earliest and most important of Blake’s artist friends, was one of the most important of eighteenth-century sculptors and designers, and as important to the art of his day as Blake was generally ignored by it. His delicate and “classical” illustrations to Homer are probably his best work, but the churches of England are full of his memorials and monuments.

George Cumberland (the elder), was the author of
Thoughts on Outline,
which Blake helped to illustrate and one of the first proponents of the National Gallery. He was a devoted friend to Blake, and may have suggested the engraving technique that Blake developed into his unique method of “illuminated printing.” The last engraving Blake ever did was a message card, or bookplate, for Cumberland.