BLAKE AT FELPHAM

Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it is more Spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her Golden Gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours. Voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard & their forms more distinctly seen.
—LETTER, 21 Sept. 1800

The visionary poet and artist William Blake never lacked optimism. Even when his mood turned dark and the world seemed a prison, he remained buoyed by his gift for inspired joy. During the opening years of the nineteenth century, Blake’s resilience met its most severe test.

In the summer of 1800, Blake and his wife, Catherine, lived in the London borough of Lambeth, near the eastern bank of the Thames. Here Blake practiced his art while making an inadequate living as a printer and engraver. Possibly it was his straitened financial circumstances—or perhaps the perpetually baffled disregard of his contemporaries—but this period proved a gloomy one for Blake. He’d already lived through both the American and French Revolutions; these events had ignited him with apocalyptic enthusiasm—which inevitably subsided into restless disillusionment. Though he remained extraordinarily productive, his commercial prospects dwindled, and his hopes for both himself and the world grew dim. Little wonder, then, that Blake described himself during this time as having sunk into “a deep pit of Melancholy.”

Salvation arrived in the person of William Hayley—a rich country squire, scholarly dilettante, talentless poet, and generous patron of the arts. The two men had met fifteen years earlier through a mutual friend; now Hayley extended an invitation to move to Felpham—the tiny seaside village in Sussex where Hayley’s Turret House stood—and enjoy a steady stream of commissions orchestrated by Hayley himself.

In September the Blakes transplanted themselves from London to a thatched cottage on the Felpham shore.

At first the idyllic setting entranced them. After so many years in the grime and crush of the city, the rustic farm community felt like Paradise. Walking along its lanes, surrounded by endless fields, one might just as soon meet a shoat or a lamb as a drover or a blacksmith. The local tavern often rang with boisterous song, and on Sundays the flintstone steeple of St. Mary’s proudly chimed its bells. Catherine soon grew fond of the pebbled beach; at night, the crash of the surf—only a few hundred yards away—lent its soothing rhythms to her sleep. Blake himself eagerly absorbed the influence of the natural world, filling his poetry with the larks and spiders and thistles he now found so close at hand. Together, the couple cultivated a private garden. But the most significant event of the early days in Felpham was a vision Blake experienced while gazing out over the sea; as though to celebrate its new freedom, his consciousness spontaneously expanded—flooding his heart with inspiration and dazzling his eyes with “jewels of Light.”

Blake’s work for Hayley began just as auspiciously. As soon as Blake had moved his engraving tools and drawing supplies into the Turret House study, the two men convened there nearly every day for long, industrious hours. Hayley’s talent for initiating ambitious ventures produced an endless stream of tasks—to etch and illustrate Hayley’s occasional doggerel; to produce miniature portraits of literary figures like Homer, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Spencer to adorn Hayley’s library; to design and execute plates for Hayley’s biography of his friend, the poet William Cowper—all of which Blake tackled with characteristic energy. Even their leisure time together proved fruitful. Hayley taught Blake Greek and Hebrew. He also gave Blake access to his vast collection of material concerning John Milton, on whom Hayley boasted an unrivaled expertise. Thus Blake’s new life continued to unfold in a way that inspired wonder and gratitude.

But intimations of flaws in the scheme appeared early—and Blake was too perceptive not to notice them.

Hayley’s son, Thomas, recently dead at age nineteen, became the first point of conflict. In Hayley’s estimation, the young man—who’d exhibited a precocious flair for sculpture and painting—had been a prodigy on par with Michelangelo himself. One can easily understand such exuberance from a grieving father; Blake, in fact, was never a more valuable friend to Hayley than when he provided his condolence and support. Yet Hayley demanded more—namely, that Blake share his lofty opinion of his dead son’s gifts and that he dutifully participate in Hayley’s mourning. To that end, Hayley, already an incurable memorializer, devised elaborate projects in honor of Thomas—projects to which Blake was obliged to subordinate himself. Naturally, Blake chafed under his patron’s inconsiderate expectations—especially as it became clear that these were symptomatic of a larger problem. In short, Hayley was blind to Blake’s true nature and needs—and this blindness was reinforced by Hayley’s high social standing, his tendency to blithe smugness, and his unshakable belief in his own benevolence.

In retrospect it’s easy to see that, at their cores, Blake and Hayley were inevitable antagonists, no matter how much good will each man brought to bear. Hayley, after all, perfectly embodied the cultural milieu that had been so hostile to Blake, and, in his demeanor and unspoken assumptions, Hayley constantly revealed that he regarded Blake as a kind of pet project—a childish, wayward personality who required avuncular grooming. Hayley sincerely believed Blake would be better off as an obedient miniature painter and tried with all his power to tamp down Blake’s “eccentricity.” That Blake possessed a prophetic imaginative genius Hayley simply could not bring himself to acknowledge—yet, as time went on, he involuntarily reacted to it with a blend of envy, fear, and hatred that simmered behind his condescending smile. The trap had sprung. Blake’s financial troubles required that he hock his talents, yet his best hope for survival rested with a man who not only monopolized his time and energy but also regarded his desire to pursue his true calling as a ridiculous folly.

Of course, the full extent of this dynamic emerged only gradually. Meanwhile, Blake and Hayley forged ahead, politely sustaining their increasingly precarious friendship. Eventually, though, Blake deemed the arrangement untenable. As early as January 1802 he’d decided to return to London—although, as it turned out, over a year and a half of delay and an agonizing ordeal awaited him yet in Felpham.

In the world beyond the tiny village, warfare consumed England and France. Although the two nations signed the Peace of Amiens in 1802, the treaty collapsed only a year later. Fighting quickly resumed. Thousands of British soldiers marched to the southern coast to defend against Napoleon’s flatboat navy, now gathering across the Channel. In the summer of 1803, about 75 such soldiers—cavalry from the First Regiment of Royal Dragoons—arrived in Felpham to be lodged at The Fox Inn. The group included one John Schofield, a former sergeant demoted five years earlier to private for drunkenness, and his fellow dragoon, John Cock. These two men would intrude on Blake’s life with a sudden brutality that wrenched him out of joint for months.

It all began in Blake’s garden, where the hostler from The Fox Inn—whose proprietor was also Blake’s landlord—worked while Blake composed poetry in his cottage. Blake soon heard a third man strike up a conversation with the hostler. When the tone of the stranger’s voice grew belligerent, Blake came out to find Schofield leaning against the garden wall. Blake politely asked the soldier to leave. Schofield refused. Blake insisted—and an argument quickly developed. Both men insulted one another, Schofield threatened to knock Blake’s eyes out, and finally Blake took Schofield by the elbows and marched him out of the garden, down the lane about fifty yards, and deposited him in front of The Fox Inn. Schofield, who protested loudly throughout and so drew a sizable crowd, felt humiliated. He found his friend John Cock. The two men conferred in the stable and hatched a plan to charge Blake with sedition. In the prevailing atmosphere of wartime hysteria, such a charge proved an effective and dangerous weapon—especially since the soldiers were only too willing to perjure themselves.

The legal process thus set in motion required two trials—the first to determine whether the charge merited prosecution, and the second—if necessary—to try the case itself. The next opportunity to appear would come in early October, at the Quarter Sessions held in nearby Petworth.

In the meantime, Blake and Catherine concluded their affairs in Felpham and returned to London in September—exactly three years after their previous move.

A few weeks later, Blake traveled alone to Petworth. He knew that some of his former neighbors would be sitting on the bench, but, although he hoped his peaceable reputation—along with the obvious absurdity of the accusation itself—would carry the day, he also knew that wealthy magistrates generally side with the military—especially if they themselves are officers in good standing. In a courtroom packed with jackbooted soldiers, propertied squires, and an indignant jury eager for a scapegoat, Blake must have felt outnumbered. Ironically, his single ally was William Hayley, who delivered a passionate defense of Blake’s character. Nevertheless, the jury not only ruled that the case should go to trial, but added for good measure that Blake was “a Wicked Seditious and Evil disposed person” who tried “with force and arms” to “encourage and incite as far as in him lay the Enemies of our said Lord the King to invade this Realm,” that he’d said “Damn the King and his Country; his Subjects and all you Soldiers are sold for Slaves,” and furthermore that he “did beat, wound, and ill treat [John Schofield], so that his Life was greatly despaired of.” This last embellishment went even farther than Schofield himself had dared.

Blake pleaded Not Guilty and agreed to appear at the next Quarter Sessions in Chichester the following January. Then he returned to London to brood on the possibility of leaving his wife in poverty while he himself went to jail.

In the end, Blake was acquitted. Hayley again testified on Blake’s behalf and justice ultimately prevailed. Blake expressed his sincere gratitude to Hayley, even running business errands for him in London. But the damage was already done.

Blake had hoped that his sojourn in Felpham would be a period of regenerative incubation. Instead, it proved a searing disappointment, an ordeal by fire, an unwelcome encounter with the Beast itself. But Blake and Catherine soon found their footing again. It’s worth noting that Blake’s moment of illumination on the seashore had not been his last; several more had followed, sustaining him through an intensely difficult time. These moments returned with fresh force in London. Blake’s characteristic cheerfulness revived. Still, he and Catherine had grown more wary, having learned—never for the last time—the fate reserved for genius in the fallen world of men.

* * *

Biography is gossip. Art alone is permanent. Blake himself insisted that “The Real Man The Imagination”—the visionary intelligence that wrote the poetry and painted the pictures—is the true Blake. The flawed personality that suffered and stumbled through everyday life is false—Blake called it his Spectre, the ugly shadow cast into the material world by his immortal part. It is the duty of each of us to destroy our Spectre continually and so to join Blake in building the City of God in eternity. From the incidents described above grew Blake’s crowning poetic achievement—a “brief epic” in two parts, Milton and Jerusalem. Though the poems contain explicit traces of their biographical origins, they transcend those origins utterly, as an oak does its acorn. To rummage in an artist’s life for the meaning of his work is wrong-headed to the point of necrophilic. Let the corpse lie. Mark the music.