the talisman, ‘No Popery,’ on his door, (the very Jews inscribing ‘This House True Protestant!’) every house showing blue flag, every wayfarer having donned the blue cockade – that night the Londoners with equal unanimity illuminated their windows. Still wider stupor of fear followed next day: and to it, a still longer sleepless night of prison-burning, drunken infatuation, and onsets from the military, let slip at last from civil leash. Six-and-thirty fires are to be seen simultaneously blazing in one new neighbourhood (Bloomsbury), not far from Blake’s and still nearer to Basire’s; whence are heard the terrible shouts of excited crowds, mingling with the fiercer roar of the flames, and with the reports of scattered musket-shots at distant points from the soldiery. Some inhabitants catch up their household effects and aimlessly run up and down the streets with them; others cheerfully pay their guinea a mile for a vehicle to carry them beyond the tumult. These were not favourable days for designing, or even quiet engraving.
Since his twentieth year, Blake’s energies had been ‘wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession’ as artist: too much so to admit of leisure or perhaps inclination for poetry. Engrossing enough was the indispensable effort to master the difficulties of Design, with pencil or in water-colours. With the still tougher mechanical difficulties of oil-painting he never fairly grappled; but confined himself to water-colours and tempera (on canvas), with in after years a curious modification of the latter – which he daringly christened ‘fresco.’ Original invention now claimed more than all his leisure. His working-hours during the years 1780 to 1782 were occupied by various bookplates for the publications already named. These voluminous, well-illustrated serials are infrequently stumbled on by the Collector at the second-hand booksellers. Very few are to be found in our Museum Library, professedly miscellaneous as that collection is. In the Print Room exists a fine series of engravings after Stothard; which, however, being undated, affords little help to those wishing to learn something about the engravers of them.
These were days of Courtship, too. And the course of Blake’s love did not open smoothly. ‘A lively little girl’ in his own, or perhaps a humbler station, the object of his first sighs readily allowed him, as girls in a humble class will, meaning neither marriage nor harm, to ‘keep company’ with her, to pay his court, take mutual walks, and be as lovesick as he chose; but nowise encouraged the idea of a wedding. In addition to the pangs of fruidess love, attacks of jealousy had stoically to be borne. When he complained that the favour of her company in a stroll had been extended to another admirer, ‘Are you a fool?’ was the brusque reply – with a scornful glance. That cured me of jealousy,’ Blake used naïvely to relate. One evening at a friend’s house he was bemoaning in a corner his love-crosses. His listener, a dark-eyed, generous-hearted girl, frankly declared ‘She pitied him from her heart.’ ‘Do you pity me?’ ‘Yes! I do, most sincerely.’ Then I love you for that!’ he replied, with enthusiasm: – such soothing pity is irresistible. And a second more prosperous courtship began. At this, or perhaps a later meeting, followed the confession, I dare say in lower tones, ‘Well! and I love you!’ – always, doubtless, a pretty one to hear.
The unsophisticated maiden was named Catherine Sophia Boucher – plebeian corruption, probably, of the grand historic name, Bourchier; – daughter of William and Mary Boucher of Battersea. So at least the Register gives the name: where, within less than ten years, no fewer than seven births to the same parents, including two sets of twins in succession, immediately precede hers. Her position and connexions in life were humble, humbler than Blake’s own; her education – as to book-lore – neglected, not to say omitted. For even the (at first) paltry makeshift of National Schools had not yet been invented; and Sunday Schools were first set going a little after this very time, namely, in 1784. When, by-and-by, Catherine’s turn came, as bride, to sign the Parish Register, she, as the same yet mutely testifies, could do no more than most young ladies of her class then, or than the Bourchiers, Stanleys, and magnates of the land four centuries before could do – viz. make a X as ‘her mark:’ her surname on the same occasion being mis-spelt for her and vulgarized into Butcher, and her second baptismal name omitted. A bright-eyed, dark-haired brunette, with expressive features and a slim graceful form, can make a young artist and poet overlook such trifles as defective scholarship. Nor were a fair outside and a frank accessible heart deceptive lures in this instance. Catherine – Christian namesake, by the way, of Blake’s mother – was endowed with a loving loyal nature, an adaptive open mind, capable of profiting by good teaching, and of enabling her, under constant high influence, to become a meet companion to her imaginative husband in his solitary and wayward course. Uncomplainingly and helpfully, she shared the low and rugged fortunes which over-originality insured as his unvarying lot in life. She had mind and the ambition which follows. Not only did she prove a good housewife on straitened means, but in after-years, under his tuition and hourly companionship, she acquired besides the useful arts of reading and writing, that which 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
