We saw that William and Catherine Blake after their marriage settled at 23
Green Street, Leicester Fields. This was in 1782. Here they remained for
two years, learning, not without pain, to adjust themselves to each other.
Mrs Blake's love was maternal and whole-hearted. Hers was not a nature to
question why love should involve the accepting of immeasurable cares. The
cares came one by one and not always singly, and she meekly and bravely
accepted them, contented to live her life in her husband's life, and happy
when she perceived that she could smooth his path and shelter him from
rough blasts.
Blake at this time was an extraordinarily difficult man to live with. He
was by turns vehement, passionate, wildly self-assertive and submissive to
others far inferior to himself. His visions were less bright than they had
been, and his mind was choked with theories about the elemental things of
life that every woman understands by instinct. He was conscious of his own
genius and of the shortcomings of his successful contemporaries. His
rampant egotism sowed his consciousness with resentments that poisoned his
blood and bred bitterness. He made frantic efforts to grasp the liberty he
had seen from afar, but he only succeeded in confounding liberty with
licence, and peremptorily demanding the latter with his wife in a way that
was bound to give her pain. I will not attempt to lift further the veil
of their early married life. We have no right to pry. Mr Ellis has
constructed this period as far as is possible from the poems of Blake, and
to his _Real Blake_ I must refer the curious reader; but for my own part I
am content to note the signs of trouble in the various poems and not to
probe deeper into the secret things which no right-minded person can ever
wish to be proclaimed on the house-top. Suffice it to say that Mrs Blake's
self-forgetful love won the day, and when the early storms had passed, and
the adjustments been made, they were united by a bond which, untouched by
the fickleness of the flesh, could defy all shocks and changes because it
was founded on the enduring reality of the spirit.
In the early years of married life Blake continued with his wife's company
the long walks which had been an early habit. Nothing could have been
better for him. Walking till he was tired, rhythmic swing of his arms,
unchecked sweating, did more than all else to cleanse his whole being and
to cause that uprise of the spirit which was eventually to bring unity and
peace to his chaotic and divided self.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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