Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist. Richard Holmes
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At present, part tenanted by a shoemaker, the house is in an abject plight of stucco, dirt, and dingy desolation. In the previous year, as we have seen, friendly Flaxman had married and taken a house.
About this time, or a little earlier, Blake was introduced by the admiring sympathetic sculptor to the accomplished Mrs Mathew, his own warm friend. The ‘celebrated Mrs Mathew?’ Alas! for tenure of mortal Fame! This lady ranked among the distinguished blue-stockings of her day, was once known to half the Town, the polite and lettered part thereof, as the agreeable, fascinating, spirituelle Mrs Mathew, as, in brief, one of the most ‘gifted and elegant’ of women. As she does not, like her fair comrades, still flutter about the bookstalls among the half-remembered all-unread, and as no lettered contemporary has handed down her portrait, she has disappeared from us. Yet the lady, with her husband, the Rev. Henry Mathew, merit remembrance from the lovers of Art, as the first discoverers and fosterers of the genius of Flaxman, when a boy not yet in teens, and his introducer to more opulent patrons. Their son, afterwards Dr Mathew, was John Hunter’s favourite pupil. Learned as well as elegant, she would read Homer in Greek to the future sculptor, interpreting as she went, while the child sat by her side sketching a passage here and there; and thus she stimulated him to acquire hereafter some knowledge of the language for himself. She was an encourager of musicians, a kind friend to young artists. To all of promising genius the doors of her house, 27, Rathbone Place, were open. Rathbone Place, not then made over to papier-mache, Artist’s colours, toy-shops, and fancytrades, was a street of private houses, stiffly genteel and highly respectable, nay, in a sedate way, quasi fashionable; the Westbourne Street of that day, when the adjacent district of Bloomsbury with its Square, in which (on the countryward side) was the Duke of Bedford’s grand House, was absolutely fashionable and comparatively new, lying on the northern skirts of London; when Great Ormond Street, Queen’s Square, Southampton Row, were accounted ‘places of pleasure,’ being ‘in one of the most charming situations about town,’ next the open fields, and commanding a ‘beautiful landscape formed by the hills of Highgate and Hampstead and adjacent country.’ Among the residents of Rathbone Place, the rebel Lords Lovat, Kilmarnock, Balmarino had at one time numbered. Of the Mathews’ house, by the way, now divided into two, both of them shops, the library or back parlour, garrulous Smith (Nollekens’s biographer) in his Book for a Rainy Day tells us, was decorated by grateful Flaxman ‘with models in putty and sand, of figures in niches in the Gothic manner:’ quaere if still extant? The window was painted ‘in imitation of stained glass’ – just as that in Battersea church, those at Strawberry Hill, and elsewhere were, the practice being one of the valued arts or artifices of the day – by Loutherbourg’s assistant, young Oram, another protégé. The furniture, again, ‘bookcases, tables, and chairs, were also ornamented to accord with the appearance of those of antiquity.’
Mrs Mathew’s drawing-room was frequented by most of the literary and known people of the last quarter of the century, was a centre of all then esteemed enlightened and delightful in society. Reunions were held in it such as Mrs Montagu and Mrs Vesey had first set going, unconsciously contributing the word bluestocking to our language. There, in the list of her intimate friends and companions, would assemble those esteemed ornaments of their sex: unreadable Chapone, of well improved mind; sensible Barbauld; versatile, agreeable Mrs Brooke, novelist and dramatist; learned and awful Mrs Carter, a female Great Cham of literature, and protectress of ‘Religion and Morality.’ Thither, came sprightly, fashionable Mrs Montagu herself, Conyers Middleton’s pupil, champion of Shakspere in his urgent need against rude Voltaire, and a letter-writer almost as vivacious and piquante in the modish style as her namesake Lady Wortley; her printed correspondence remaining still readable and entertaining. This is the lady whose powers of mind and conversation Dr Johnson estimated so highly, and whose good opinion he so highly valued, though at last to his sorrow falling out of favour with her. It was she who gave the annual May-Day dinner to the chimney sweeps, in commemoration of a well-known family incident. As illustrative of their status with the public, let us add, on Smith’s authority, that the four last-named beaux-esprits figured as Muses in the Frontispiece to a Lady’s Pocket Book for 1778 – a flattering apotheosis of nine contemporary female wits, including Angelica Kauffman and Mrs Sheridan. Perhaps pious, busy Hannah More, as yet of the world, as yet young and kittenish, though not without claws, also in her youth a good letter-writer in the woman-of-the-world style; perhaps, being of the Montagu circle, she also would make one at Mrs Mathew’s, on her visits to town to see her publishers, the Cadells, about some ambling poetic 4to. Florio and the Bas-bleu, modest Sacred Drama, heavy 8vo. Strictures on Female Education, or other fascinating lucubration on
‘Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate:’
dissertations, which, after having brought their author in some thirty thousand pounds sterling, a capricious public consumes with less avidity than it did. Good heavens! what a frowsy, drowsy ‘party sitting in a parlour,’ now ‘all silent and all damned’ (in a literary sense), these venerable ladies and great literary luminaries of their day, ladies once lively and chatty enough, seem to an irreverent generation, at their present distance from us. The spiritual interval is an infinitely wider one than the temporal; so foreign have mere eighteenth-century habits of thought and prim conventions become. Let us charitably believe the conversation of the fair was not so dull as their books; that there was the due enlivenment of scandal and small talk; and that Mrs Mathew – by far the most pleasant to think of, because she did not commit herself to a book – that she, with perhaps Mrs Brooke and Mrs Montagu, took the leading parts.
The disadvantages of a neglected education, such as Blake’s, are considerable. But, one is here reminded, the disadvantages of a false one are greater: when the acquisition of a second nature of conventionality, misconception of high models and worship of low ones is the kind in vogue. An inestimable advantage for an original mind to have retained its freedom, the healthy play of native powers, of virgin faculties yet unsophisticate.
Mrs Mathew’s husband was a known man, too, man of taste and virtu, incumbent of the neighbouring Proprietary Chapel, Percy Chapel, Charlotte Street, built for him by admiring lay friends; an edifice known to a later generation as the theatre of Satan Montgomery’s displays. Mr Mathew filled also a post of more prestige as afternoon preacher at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields; and ‘read the church-service more beautifully than any other clergyman in London,’ a lady who had heard him informs me – and as others too used to think – Flaxman for one. With which meagre biographic trait, the inquisitive reader must be satisfied. The most diligent search yields nothing further. That he was an amiable, kindly man we gather from the circumstances of his first notice of the child Flaxman in the father’s castshop, coughing over his Latin behind the counter, and of his continued notice of the weakly child during the years which elapsed before he was strong enough to walk from the Strand to Rathbone Place, and be received into the sunshine of Mrs Mathew’s smiles.
To that lady’s agreeable and brilliant conversazioni Blake was made welcome. At one of them, a little later (in 1784), Nollekens Smith, most literal, most useful of gossips, then a youth of eighteen, first saw the poet-painter, and ‘heard him read and sing several of his poems’ – ‘often heard him.’ Yes! sing them; for Blake had composed airs to his verses. Wholly ignorant of the art of music, he was unable to note down these spontaneous melodies, and repeated them by ear: Smith reports that his tunes were sometimes ‘most singularly beautiful,’ and ‘were noted down by musical professors;’ Mrs Mathew’s being a musical house. I wish one of these musical professors or his executors would produce a sample. Airs simple and ethereal to match the designs and poems of William Blake would be a novelty in music. One would fain hear the melody invented for
How sweet I roam’d from field to field –
or for some of the Songs of Innocence. ‘He was listened to by the company,’ adds Smith, ‘with profound silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit.’ Phoenix amid an admiring circle of cocks and hens is alone a spectacle to compare mentally with this!
The accomplished hostess for a time took up Blake with much fervour. His poetic recitals