The Mystic Master: Exploring the Profound Imagination of William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, artist, and visionary of the Romantic era, born in 1757. He is celebrated for his creative brilliance in both literature and art. Blake’s works, known for their mystical and symbolic content, delved into themes of spirituality, the imagination, and the human condition.

The text below is the excerpt of the book William Blake (ISBN: 9781783107773), written by Osbert Burdett, published by Parkstone International.

At the moment intellectual systems and mystical matters did not, however, wholly occupy his mind. Like everyone else at the time, and with a memory of the American Revolutionary War, Blake was deeply stirred by events in France. Circumstances threw him into the company of sympathisers with the French Revolution in London, and these he met at the shop of Johnson, the bookseller. Fuseli had introduced the pair to one another, and Blake had been doing some engravings for him. Johnson was the publisher of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman (1792) and Godwin’s Political Justice (1793), and he was the friend of Thomas Paine, whose Rights of Man he thought it prudent to decline.

All these and more of similar themes landed at Johnson’s shop in St. Paul’s Churchyard, and Blake was employed by him to design and to engrave, among other work, six plates after Mary Wollstonecraft’s Tales for Children. Johnson was not only a bookseller and a publisher but a patron and a host, who gave weekly dinners to the circle that gathered around him. At this time Blake attended these dinners; it was an odd society for him to enter. With their political ideas – a vague worship of liberty – he thought himself in sympathy, though political matters never much engaged him. To their scepticism and rationalism he was violently opposed. Atheists would have thought him a Christian, and Christians a heretic.

With all his courage, Blake had an excellent sense for practical affairs, and it was he who, as he would afterward relate, saved Paine from the clutches of the panic-ridden authorities. In 1792 these began to take repressive measures against “seditious publications,” and in September – the very month in which the author of the Rights of Man had been elected by the Department of Calais a member of the National Convention – the English Government began to take an action against Paine for libel. This made the most recently-published second part of his book even more popular, and encouraged Paine and the “friends of liberty” to reply with inflammatory meetings and public addresses.

One day in September, after Paine had recounted at Johnson’s shop an exciting speech which he had delivered at a meeting on the previous evening, Blake, who was present, stopped Paine at the moment of his departure and said to him: “You must not go home or you are a dead man,” and hurried him off to France. Only twenty minutes after Paine had left Dover for France, a warrant for his arrest reached the officials of the port. Six years later, Johnson himself was fined and imprisoned for publishing “a seditious book,” but he continued to give his weekly dinners and encourage lively debates.

His prompt service to Paine is not the only instance of Blake’s courage in an emergency. His back rooms in Poland Street overlooked the premises of Astley’s Circus, where its animals and their keepers could be seen. One day, according to Tatham, Blake saw a boy limping painfully about with his feet chained to a horse’s hobble. Angry at the sight, Blake made a successful appeal to the circus men to set the lad free, and when Mr. Astley came round later to protest against the interference, Blake pacified his anger.

During the year 1792, both Sir Joshua Reynolds and Blake’s mother died. Mrs. Blake had reached the age of seventy, and was buried on September 4 in Bunhill Fields. This is virtually all that is known about her, for the friends of Blake’s later years remember that, while he often talked of his brother Robert, he hardly ever mentioned either his mother or his father. Earlier in the year, on February 23, the funeral procession of Sir Joshua Reynolds passed in state from his house in Leicester Fields to St. Paul’s Cathedral. The two had met, but between men so different in their gifts and in their fortune, there had been little in common. Gilchrist speaks of “a surviving friend” who remembered a conversation of Blake’s about Reynolds:

He became furious about what Reynolds had dared to say of his early works. When a very young man he had called on Reynolds to show him some designs, and had been recommended to work with less extravagance and with more simplicity, and to correct his drawing. This Blake seemed to regard as an affront never to be forgotten. He was very indignant when he spoke of it. 

At this or some other interview it is also recorded that Blake found Reynolds very pleasant personally, and no doubt they were equally matched in their manners.

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