Mysterious Wisdom (12 page)

For some twenty years, the visionary genius relied almost entirely for his living upon the patronage of a government servant, Captain Thomas Butts, who, having accrued a modest fortune as the chief clerk in the office of the muster master general, became a steady buyer. Purchasing works at a rate of up to a drawing a week, he gradually transformed his Fitzroy Square house into a private gallery of miracles. For many years, Palmer was later to claim, Butts was the only man who stood ‘between the greatest designer in England and the workhouse'.
18

‘He who has few Things to desire cannot have many to fear,'
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Blake declared. He did not crave luxuries. He could have made his life easier by being a little more malleable, but he treasured his freedom far more highly than any hoard of worldly goods. ‘I know of no other Christianity and no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of the Imagination,'
20
he said. Sometimes his untameable enthusiasms could be alarming, as his wife knew only too well. Throughout their long marriage, Blake made frequent, sometimes bizarre and occasionally frightening, sexual demands on her. Such unbridled urges, he believed, were an essential life force. His forcible opinions could be whipped into a fury. Cumberland, ever eager to help, had once introduced him to a clergyman who had commissioned four watercolours, the initial pair of which was to represent malevolence and benevolence. As soon as the cleric saw the first of these images the commission was cancelled. It looked unreal, he thought: it was difficult to understand. Blake's pride was violently roused. ‘What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men,' he declared. ‘That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care.'
21
This was just one of a number of enraged quarrels which, over the course of Blake's life, left friendships in ruins. As poverty, neglect and the utter failure of an 1809 exhibition held in his brother's hosiery shop caused him mounting frustration, Blake picked bitter arguments with his erstwhile supporters. He turned on Flaxman with accusations of hypocrisy; he successfully alienated the peaceable Stothard and, by 1810, had even managed to fall out with the ‘Dear Friend of My Angels', the benevolent Butts. There were no more commissions forthcoming. ‘I found them blind and taught them how to see/ and now they know neither themselves or me,'
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wrote the despairing poet.

‘The Maker, the Inventor, one of the few in any age'
23
was how Palmer would describe him, yet Blake in his lifetime suffered a heartbreaking neglect. His first book of poems, the only one to be published, had been printed in 1783. His last piece of work, a set of illustrations to Dante, would still be incomplete at the time of his death. In between the visions of a rhapsodic imagination would pour forth like a torrent – anything from the simplest songs of childhood to the most elaborate apocalyptic scenes – and yet, by the time he was entering his sixties, Blake would be reduced to engraving pictures of crockery sets for the Wedgwood sample book. ‘The great author of Eternity was obliged to illustrate egg cups, tureens, candlesticks and coffee pots,' wrote Ackroyd.
24
Little wonder that over the course of his life he devoted more than seventy engravings to the story of that most embattled of biblical characters, Job. And yet, even as his spirits were flagging, his imagination would flare. ‘I laugh and sing,' he would cry: ‘for if on earth neglected I am in heaven a Prince among Princes.'
25
He lived all his life in the bright lands of the spirit. ‘I have very little of Mr Blake's company,' his wife once informed an inquirer: ‘He is always in Paradise.'
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Blake was at a low ebb when, in June 1818, John Linnell, having been introduced by George Cumberland, the son of the great collector and connoisseur, first visited his home. Linnell was twenty-six and his career was just beginning to gain momentum. He had met his first major patron, Lady Torrens, and within a year or two would be introduced (by the ever-generous Varley) to the even more influential Lady Stafford who, charmed by his portrait-miniatures, would offer him the run of her aristocratic connections which would mean that he could start putting his prices up. His prospects could hardly have been further from those of the sixty-one-year-old Blake. Nor were their artistic ideas alike. Varley had taught Linnell to ‘go to nature for everything' but to Blake nature was merely a mass of mundane material. He far preferred the spirits of his visionary life. And yet the two men had much in common. They were both religious dissenters and political radicals; they shared a reverence for the scriptures and had both learned Hebrew and Greek; they admired the art of Michelangelo, Dürer and Van Eyck and, both the sons of tradesmen, they preferred simple manners to a smart social life. Their friendship was to span the last decade of Blake's life. They would visit each other's studios, go to plays together, dine with mutual acquaintances and gaze at pictures side by side, including quite possibly, in the 1821 Academy summer show, an early landscape by Palmer whom, at that time, Linnell did not yet know.

Linnell, the down-to-earth businessmen, was determined to advance the career of the other-worldly Blake who had by then sold his ‘pension', his collection of prints. He introduced the old artist to a variety of possible patrons and, though none of the grand aristocrats wanted to commission him, the family doctor who had recently attended the birth of Linnell's first child, Hannah, offered Blake an engraving job. Dr Robert John Thornton, besides practising medicine, was an amateur botanist, a classical scholar and an enthusiastic pedagogue who at that time was interested in discovering which Latin classics would best serve as school books. Thornton did not believe in assisting children with direct translation and was preparing an edition of Virgilian pastorals in which the original text would be accompanied only by a simplified imitation of the first eclogue by the eighteenth-century poet Ambrose Philips. Now, encouraged by Linnell, he commissioned Blake to elucidate Virgil's work further with a series of small illustrative designs.

The engravers greeted Blake's first attempts with derision; the publishers wanted to abandon the project; but Blake, thanks to Linnell's behind-the-scenes persuasions, was allowed to continue. He worked on in the face of considerable difficulty for, to meet the needs of the printers, he had to remake his images as woodcuts and this was a technique which he had never before tried. The result was a series of small but daringly idiosyncratic pastorals that glitter with light.

Linnell also commissioned Blake: an act of benevolence and respect which was later to involve him in hurtful controversy with the artist's widow who, befuddled and frightened after her husband's death, would accuse him of taking advantage of Blake's impoverished circumstances. In fact, Linnell had saved the proud visionary from penury (and the added indignity of a job doing pictures of poultry and pigs) by commissioning him first to engrave copies of his watercolour illustrations to the
Book of Job
and then, when the old man was in his mid-seventies, to illustrate Dante's
Divine Comedy
(Blake set himself to learning Italian so that he could fulfil this commission) originally with a series of watercolours and then with engravings for which he would pay him on weekly account. This allowance was all that stood between the Blakes and starvation. ‘I do not know how I shall ever repay you,' Linnell recalled Blake saying. ‘I do not want you to repay me,' Linnell replied. ‘I am only too glad to be able to serve.'
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7

Palmer Meets Blake

 

More attractive than the threshold of princes

from
The Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

Palmer's ‘never-to-be-forgotten first interview'
1
with Blake took place on 9 October 1824 when he and Linnell called round at Fountain Court, a tall, plain and rather morose red-brick building on the Strand, on the first floor of which the sixty-seven-year-old visionary lived with his wife, seldom venturing out for anything more pressing than to fetch a jug of porter.

Palmer crossed the reception room, its walls plastered with pictures, to reach a second chamber beyond, a space which served as workshop, bedroom, kitchen and study all at once. It was crowded, but it felt far from squalid, Palmer reported. Everything was clean and orderly; everything was in its place, from the cooking utensils to the engraving implements which were laid out ready on a table in the corner, a print of Dürer's
Melancholia
pinned onto the wall above. Blake was in his bed by the window, from which he could just glimpse the Thames shining like a bar of gold beyond. He was unable to walk, having badly scalded his foot, and so was sitting propped up on pillows ‘like one of the Antique patriarchs or a dying Michelangelo'
,
Palmer recalled, surrounded by open volumes and drawing the ‘sublimest designs'
2
in the pages of a great book.

The awed nineteen-year-old gazed into Blake's face, its high forehead, snub nose and stubborn jaw now familiar from the life mask that was cast around this time by a neighbour, a keen amateur phrenologist who had wanted to record the cranial protrusions that spelt out an advanced imaginative faculty. Blake's eye, Palmer said, was the finest he ever saw: ‘brilliant, but not roving, clear and intent, yet susceptible'. It could flash with genius, he said, or melt with tenderness. And it could be terrible, too. ‘Cunning and falsehood quailed under it,' he wrote, ‘but it pierced them and turned away.'
3
This was the eye that Blake turned upon Palmer at that first meeting. ‘Do you work with fear and trembling?' he asked. ‘Yes indeed,' came the reply. ‘“Then,” said he, “you'll do.”'
4

A copperplate was lying on the table and Palmer took a peep. It was an illustration to the
Book of Job
. ‘How lovely it looked by lamplight strained through the tissue paper,' Palmer remembered. But then, through the veil of this man's vision, the whole world could be transformed. ‘The millionaire's upholsterer,' Palmer said, could ‘furnish no enrichments like Blake's enchanted rooms. He ennobled poverty and . . . by the influence of his genius, made two small rooms in Fountain Court more attractive than the threshold of princes.'
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Palmer was a dandy in those days. Growing up in the Regency, he liked to cut a dash and despite his small stature and pronounced tendency to corpulence, would deck himself out in white duck trousers, waistcoat and cravat and walk with a swagger, swinging his slender cane. Blake's clothes, in contrast, were threadbare. ‘His grey trousers had worn black and shiny in front, like a mechanic's,'
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Palmer said. Yet he saw in the shabby impoverished figure not a misfit or a madman but a noble and dignified mentor.

On their first meeting, Palmer ventured to show Blake a few of his drawings. The old man's kindly response – ‘for Christ blessed little children'
7
– left Palmer grateful but not self-satisfied. Blake ‘was energy itself': he ‘shed around him a kindling influence; an atmosphere of life, full of the ideal',
8
he said. And Blake in his turn recognised some special gift in Palmer. The two, who had many things in common, from their Nonconformist backgrounds to their affection for cats, grew increasingly close. Palmer from then on would often call round at Fountain Court, Blake rising to greet him with a smile as he arrived with his bundles of sketches and his burgeoning ideas.