14 August: Boreham on Catherine Blake

A Peep Behind The Scenes
The anniversary of the burial at Bunhill Fields of William Blake on August 14, 1827, with his heartbroken widow, poor Catherine, as the central figure, raises an intriguing question. In three distinct realms—poesy, painting, and engraving—William Blake has become an encrusted tradition; but should we ever have heard of him, or enjoyed the wealthy fruitage of his versatile genius, if it had not been for the simple-hearted but understanding woman who held all his heart and presided over his modest home? Catherine was by no means a talented girl. The daughter of a small market gardener at Battersea, she was engaged in domestic service when she and Blake first met. Through her gentle but serious face there shone a soul that seemed capable of infinite depths of emotion. Her conversation struck her young admirer as the very essence of womanly commonsense. She dressed, not showily or expensively, but nattily and attractively; everything she wore seemed part and parcel of her pleasing personality.

Blake, who, in the days of his courtship, was concentrating on his painting, and had already experienced the thrill of seeing one of his canvases hanging on the wall of the Royal Academy, felt that Catherine represented the perfect combination of womanly sense and womanly sweetness. If, he thought, he could coax this black-eyed, black-haired beauty into marrying him, his felicity would be assured. He idealised her. Every word that fell from her lips was music; heaven thronged her footsteps wherever she went. It was the outstanding distinction of Blake that he sublimated every mundane object upon which his imaginative eye rested. On a wet day in London, when the air was smoky and the mud tenacious, he heard the seraphim singing their "Holy, holy, holy!" above the city's central roar. He met Ezekiel in Hyde Park; conversed with Moses, Homer and Dante on the sands at Bognor; and saw the shining pillars of the Holy City at Marylebone and Islington.

An Idyll Of Wedded Bliss
Is it any wonder that a youth of this rapturous temperament should have seen in the dark, demure, and trimly-dressed little servant girl what no other eyes had discerned in her? Since the world began, the most prosaic and commonplace lovers have discovered in their ladies, beauties to which all ordinary eyes were blind. Blake was far from being prosaic and was by no means commonplace. His view of Catherine, therefore, was tinged with such celestial splendour that it could only be expressed in glowing verse:—

My feet are wing'd while o'er the dewy lawn
I meet my maiden risen with the
morn;
Oh, bless those holy feet, like angel's feet!
Oh, bless those limbs
beaming with heavenly light!

As when an angel glittering in the
sky,
In times of innocent and holy joy,
The joyful shepherd stops his
grateful song
To hear the music of that angel's tongue;

So when
she speaks, the voice of Heaven I hear;
So, when we walk, nothing impure
comes near.
Each field seems Eden and each calm retreat;
Each village
seems the haunt of holy feet.

They were married in 1782, he being then twenty-five and she a year or two younger, making their first modest home in an alley near Leicester Fields. The beauteous idyll of their romantic youth remained unbroken through the long years that followed. It is to Catherine's everlasting credit that, although she could make neither head nor tail of the things that her strange husband said and did, she remained inordinately proud of him, yielding him the full homage of her heart's rich sympathy. It was something to which he was quite unaccustomed. Some years earlier, on returning from a stroll in Peckham Rye, he had assured his parents that he had passed a tree that was crowded with angels, their dazzling wings bespangling the boughs like stars. His father, horrified, bluntly called him a liar; and when he unfolded similar adventures to his workmates and companions, they tapped their foreheads and said that he was mad.

Sympathy ln The Absence Of Comprehension
But Catherine was lost in bewildered exultation. She watched him as, seated in their scantily furnished room, with the door wide open to admit the sunshine in which he revelled, he scribbled away at the manuscript that littered his bare deal table, his face glowing with the intensity of his lofty thought, and his eyes sparkling with secret admiration of the gorgeous imagery which he had just conceived. Her attitude was that of the wife whom Tennyson describes in "In Memoriam":

He thrids the labyrinth of the mind,
He reads the secret of the star,
He
seems so near and yet so far,
He looks so cold; she thinks him
kind.

Her faith is fixt and cannot move,
She darkly feels him
great and wise,
She dwells on him with faithful eyes,
'I cannot
understand: I love!'

Swinburne thought Catherine the perfect wife, and these still exists a pretty memorial representing her as sitting up all through the night in an earnest attempt to assist her husband in the elucidation and expression of one of his most ethereal fantasies. She kept the little home specklessly clean, studied all her husband's whims and tastes, and would have broken her heart if he had been deprived of anything that she could possibly supply. Into the chalice of their pure affection there fell one drop of bitter disappointment. Loving children, they longed for one of their own with a hunger that deepened with the passing of the years. To their infinite sorrow, no child came. Yet their mutual grief never affected the bond that held them to each other. Both lived to a good old age. On his deathbed, Blake loved to watch his Catherine moving on tiptoe about the room. Even then, he thought her the fairest and sweetest of the daughters of men, whilst she, during the years that followed, worshipped every meanest trifle that his hand had ever touched.

F W Boreham

Image: Catherine Blake