Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist. Richard Holmes
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very few uneducated women with the honestest effort ever succeed in attaining: some footing of equality with her husband. She, in time, came to work off his engravings, as though she had been bred to the trade; nay, imbibed enough of his very spirit to reflect it in Design which might almost have been his own.
Allan Cunningham says she was a neighbour. But the marriage took place at Battersea, where I trace relatives of Blake’s father to have been then living. During the course of the courtship many a happy Surrey ramble must have been taken towards and around the pleasant village of the St Johns. The old familyseat, spacious and venerable, still stood, in which Lord Bolingbroke had been born and died, which Pope had often visited. The village was ‘four miles from London’ then, and had just begun to shake hands with Chelsea, by a timber bridge over the Thames; the river bright and clear there at low tide as at Richmond now, with many a placid angler dotting its new bridge. Green meadow and bright cornfield lay between the old-fashioned winding High Street and the purple heights of Wimbledon and Richmond. In the volume of 1783, among the poems which have least freshness of feeling, being a little alloyed by false notes as of the poetic Mocking Bird, are one or two love-poems anticipating emotions as yet unfelt. And love, it is said, must be felt ere it can be persuasively sung. One or two stanzas, if we did not know they had been written long before, might well have been allusive to the ‘black-eyed maid’ of present choice, and the ‘sweet village’ where he wooed her.
When early morn walks forth in sober grey,
Then to my black-ey’d maid I haste away,
When evening sits beneath her dusky bow’r
And gently sighs away the silent hour,
The village-bell alarms, away I go,
And the vale darkens at my pensive woe.
To that sweet village, where my black-ey’d maid
Doth drop a tear beneath the silent shade,
I turn my eyes; and pensive as I go,
Curse my black stars, and bless my pleasing woe.
Oft when the summer sleeps among the trees,
Whisp’ring faint murmurs to the scanty breeze,
I walk the village round; if at her side
A youth doth walk in stolen joy and pride,
I curse my stars in bitter grief and woe,
That made my love so high and me so low.
The last is an inapplicable line to the present case, – decidedly unprophetic. In a better, more Blake-like manner is the other poem, apposite to how many thousand lovers, in how many climes, since man first came into the planet.
My feet are wing’d while o’er the dewy lawn
I meet my maiden risen with the morn:
Oh, bless those holy feet, like angel’s feet!
Oh, bless those limbs beaming with heavenly light!
As when an angel glitt’ring in the sky
In times of innocence and holy joy,
The joyful shepherd stops his grateful song
To hear the music of that angel’s tongue:
So when she speaks, the voice of Heav’n I hear,
So when we walk, nothing impure comes near,
Each field seems Eden and each calm retreat;
Each village seems the haunt of holy feet.
But that sweet village where my black-ey’d maid
Closes her eyes in sleep beneath Night’s shade,
Whene’er I enter, more than mortal fire
Burns in my soul, and does my song inspire.
The occasional hackneyed rhyme, awkward construction, and verbal repetition, entailed by the requirements of very inartificial verse, are technical blemishes any poetical reader may by ten minutes’ manipulation mend, but such as clung to Blake’s verse in later and maturer years.
The lovers were married, Blake being in his twenty-fifth year, his bride in her twenty-first, on a Sunday in August (the 18th), 1782, in the then newly rebuilt church of Battersea: a ‘handsome edifice,’ say contemporary topographers. Which, in the present case, means a whitey-brown brick building in the church-warden style, relying for architectural effect, externally, on a nondescript steeple, a low slate roof, double rows of circular-headed windows, and an elevated western portico in a strikingly picturesque and unique position: almost upon the river as it were, which here takes a sudden bend to the south-west, the body of the church stretching alongside it. The interior, with its galleries (in which are interesting seventeenth and eighteenth century mural tablets from the old church, one by Roubiliac), and elaborately decorated apsidal dwarf-chancel, has an imposing effect and a strongly marked characteristic accent (of its Day), already historical and interesting. There, standing above the vault wherein lies the coronetted coffin of Pope’s Bolingbroke, the two plighted troth. The vicar who joined their hands, Joseph Gardnor, was himself an amateur artist of note in his day, copious ‘honorary contributor’ (not above customers) to the Exhibitions; sending ‘Views from the Lakes,’ from Wales, and other much-libelled Home Beauties, and even Landscape Compositions ‘in the style of the Lakes,’ whatever that may mean. Specimens of this master – pasteboard-like model of misty mountain, old manorial houses as of cards, perspectiveless diagram of lovely vale – may be inspected in Williams’ plodding History of Monmouthshire, and in other books of topography. Engravers had actually to copy and laboriously bite in these young-lady-like Indian ink drawings. Conspicuous mementoes of the vicar’s Taste and munificence still survive, parochially, in the ‘handsome crimson curtains’ trimmed with amber, and held up by gold cord with heavy gold tassels, festooned about the painted eastern window of the church: or rather in deceptively perfect imitations of such upholstery, painted (‘tis said) by the clergyman’s own skilled hand on the light-grained wall of the circular chancel. The window is an eighteenth century remnant piously preserved from the old church: a window literally painted not stained – the colours not burnt in, that is; so that a deluded cleaner on one occasion rubbed out a portion. The subjects are armorial bearings of the St Johns, and (at bottom) portraits of three august collateral connexions of the Family: Margaret Beauchamp, Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth. The general effect is good in colour, not without a tinge of ancient harmony, yellow being the predominating hue. From the vicar’s hand, again, are the two small ‘paintings on glass,’ – The Lamb bearing the sacred monogram, and The Dove (descending), – which fill the two circular sidewindows, of an eminently domestic type, in the curvilinear chancel-wall: paintings so ‘natural’ and familiarly ‘like,’ an innocent spectator forgets perhaps their sacred symbolism – as possibly did the artist too! Did the future designer of The Gates of Paradise, the Jerusalem, and the Job, kneel beneath these trophies of religious art?
SIX Introduction to the Polite World 1782-84 [ÆT. 24-27]
To his father, Blake’s early and humble marriage is said to have been unacceptable; and the young couple did not return to the hosier’s roof. They commenced housekeeping on their own account in lodgings, at 23, Green Street, Leicester Fields: in which Fields or Square, on the north side, the junior branches of Royalty had lately abode, on the east (near Green Street) great Hogarth. On the west side of it Sir Joshua in these very years had his handsome house and noble gallery. Green Street, then the abode of quiet private citizens, is now a nondescript street, given up to curiosity shops, shabby lodging-houses, and busy feet hastening to and from the Strand. No. 23, on the right-hand side going citywards, next to the house