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[Illustration]
WILLIAM BLAKE.
A Critical Essay.
by
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
[Illustration: "_Going to and fro in the Earth._"]
With Illustrations from Blake's Designs in Facsimile,
_Coloured and Plain_.
London:
John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly.
1868.
[_All rights reserved._]
[Illustration: _WILLIAM BLAKE. A CRITICAL ESSAY._]
DEDICATION.
To WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI.
There are many reasons which should make me glad to inscribe your name
upon the forefront of this book. To you, among other debts, I owe this
one--that it is not even more inadequate to the matter undertaken; and to
you I need not say that it is not designed to supplant or to compete with
the excellent biography of Blake already existing. Rather it was intended
to serve as complement or supplement to this. How it grew, idly and
gradually, out of a mere review into its present shape and volume, you
know. To me at least the subject before long seemed too expansive for an
article; and in the leisure of months, and in the intervals of my natural
work, the first slight study became little by little an elaborate essay. I
found so much unsaid, so much unseen, that a question soon rose before me
of simple alternatives: to do nothing, or to do much. I chose the latter;
and you, who have done more than I to serve and to exalt the memory of
Blake, must know better how much remains undone.
Friendship needs no cement of reciprocal praise; and this book, dedicated
to you from the first, and owing to your guidance as much as to my
goodwill whatever it may have of worth, wants no extraneous allusion to
explain why it should rather be inscribed with your name than with
another. Nevertheless, I will say that now of all times it gives me
pleasure to offer you such a token of friendship as I have at hand to
give. I can but bring you brass for the gold you send me; but between
equals and friends there can be no question of barter. Like Diomed, I take
what I am given and offer what I have. Such as it is, I know you will
accept it with more allowance than it deserves; but one thing you will not
overrate--the affectionate admiration, the grateful remembrance, which
needs no public expression on the part of your friend
A. C. SWINBURNE.
_November, 1866._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I.--LIFE AND DESIGNS 1
II.--LYRICAL POEMS 85
III.--THE PROPHETIC BOOKS 185
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
[In justice to the fac-similist who has so faithfully copied the following
designs from Blake's works, the publisher would state they were made under
somewhat difficult circumstances, the British Museum authorities not
permitting tracing from the copies in their possession. In every case the
exact peculiarities of the originals have been preserved. The colouring
has been done by hand from the designs, tinted by the artist, and the
three illustrations from "Jerusalem" have been reduced from the original
in folio to octavo. The paper on which the fac-similes are given has been
expressly made to resemble that used by Blake.]
FRONTISPIECE. Gateway with eclipse. A reduction of plate 70; from
"JERUSALEM."
TITLE-PAGE. A design of borders, selected from those in "JERUSALEM"
(plates 5, 19, &c.), with minor details from "MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND
HELL," and "BOOK OF THEL."
P. 200. Title from "THE BOOK OF THEL."
P. 204. Title from "MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL."
P. 208. Plate 8, from the SAME (selected to show the artist's peculiar
method of blending text with minute design).
P. 224. The Leviathan. From "MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL."
P. 258. From "MILTON." Male figures; one in flames.
P. 276. Female figures. A reduction of Plate 81 from "JERUSALEM."
P. 282. Design with bat-like figure. A reduction of Plate 33 from
"JERUSALEM."
LIST OF AUTHORITIES.
1. LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. By Alexander Gilchrist. 1863.
2. POETICAL SKETCHES. By W. B. 1783.
3. SONGS OF INNOCENCE. 1789.
4. THE BOOK OF THEL. 1789.
5. THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL. 1790.
6. VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION. 1793.
7. AMERICA: A PROPHECY. 1793.
8. SONGS OF EXPERIENCE. 1794.
9. EUROPE: A PROPHECY. 1794.
10. THE FIRST BOOK OF URIZEN. 1794.
11. THE BOOK OF AHANIA. 1795.
12. THE SONG OF LOS. 1795.
13. MILTON: A POEM IN TWO BOOKS. 1804.
14. JERUSALEM, AN EMANATION OF THE GIANT ALBION. 1804.
15. IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL. (MS.)
16. TIRIEL. (MS.)
WILLIAM BLAKE.
Tous les grands poetes deviennent naturellement, fatalement, critiques. Je
plains les poetes que guide le seul instinct; je les crois incomplets.
Dans la vie spirituelle des premiers, une crise se fait infailliblement,
ou ils veulent raisonner leur art, decouvrir les lois obscures en vertu
desquelles ils ont produit, et tirer de cette etude une serie de preceptes
dont le but divin est l'infaillibilite dans la production poetique. Il
serait prodigieux qu'un critique devint poete, et il est impossible qu'un
poete ne contienne pas un critique.--CHARLES BAUDELAIRE.
I.--LIFE AND DESIGNS.
In the year 1827, there died, after a long dim life of labour, a man as
worthy of remark and regret as any then famous. In his time he had little
enough of recognition or regard from the world; and now that here and
there one man and another begin to observe that after all this one was
perhaps better worth notice and honour than most, the justice comes as
usual somewhat late.
Between 1757 and 1827 the world, one might have thought, had time to grow
aware whether or not a man were worth something. For so long there lived
and laboured in more ways than one the single Englishman of supreme and
simple poetic genius born before the closing years of the eighteenth
century; the one man of that date fit on all accounts to rank with the old
great names. A man perfect in his way, and beautifully unfit for walking
in the way of any other man. We have now the means of seeing what he was
like as to face in the late years of his life: for his biography has at
the head of it a clearly faithful and valuable likeness. The face is
singular, one that strikes at a first sight and grows upon the observer; a
brilliant eager, old face, keen and gentle, with a preponderance of brow
and head; clear bird-like eyes, eloquent excitable mouth, with a look of
nervous and fluent power; the whole lighted through as it were from behind
with a strange and pure kind of smile, touched too with something of an
impatient prospective rapture. The words clear and sweet seem the best
made for it; it has something of fire in its composition, and something of
music. If there is a want of balance, there is abundance of melody in the
features; melody rather than harmony; for the mould of some is weaker and
the look of them vaguer than that of others. Thought and time have played
with it, and have nowhere pressed hard; it has the old devotion and desire
with which men set to their work at starting. It is not the face of a man
who could ever be cured of illusions; here all the medicines of reason and
experience must have been spent in pure waste. We know also what sort of
man he was at this time by the evidence of living friends. No one, artist
or poet, of whatever school, who had any insight or any love of things
noble and lovable, ever passed by this man without taking away some
pleasant and exalted memory of him. Those with whom he had nothing in
common but a clear kind nature and sense of what was sympathetic in men
and acceptable in things--those men whose work lay quite apart from
his--speak of him still with as ready affection and as full remembrance
of his sweet or great qualities as those nearest and likest him. There was
a noble attraction in him which came home to all people with any fervour
or candour of nature in themselves. One can see, by the roughest draught
or slightest glimpse of his face, the look and manner it must have put on
towards children. He was about the hardest worker of his time; must have
done in his day some horseloads of work. One might almost pity the poor
age and the poor men he came among for having such a fiery energy cast
unawares into the midst of their small customs and competitions. Unluckily
for them, their new prophet had not one point they could lay hold of, not
one organ or channel of expression by which to make himself comprehensible
to such as they were. Shelley in his time gave enough of perplexity and
offence; but even he, mysterious and rebellious as he seemed to most men,
was less made up of mist and fire than Blake.
He was born and baptized into the church of rebels; we can hardly imagine
a time or scheme of things in which he could have lived and worked without
some interval of revolt. All that was accepted for art, all that was taken
for poetry, he rejected as barren symbols, and would fain have broken up
as mendacious idols. What was best to other men, and in effect excellent
of its kind, was to him worst. Reynolds and Rubens were daubers and
devils. The complement or corollary of this habit of mind was that he
would accept and admire even small and imperfect men whose line of life
and action seemed to run on the same tramway as his own. Barry, Fuseli,
even such as Mortimer--these were men he would allow and approve of. The
devils had not entered into them; they worked, each to himself, on the
same ground as Michael Angelo. To such effect he would at times prophesy,
standing revealed for a brief glimpse on the cloudy and tottering height
of his theories, before the incurious eyes of a public which had no mind
to inhale such oracular vapour. It is hard to conjecture how his opinions,
as given forth in his _Catalogue_ or other notes on art, would have been
received--if indeed they had ever got hearing at all. This they naturally
never did; by no means to Blake's discouragement. He spoke with authority;
not in the least like the Scribes of his day.
So far one may at least see what he meant; although at sight of it many
would cover their eyes and turn away. But the main part of him was, and is
yet, simply inexplicable; much like some among his own designs, a maze of
cloudy colour and perverse form, without a clue for the hand or a feature
for the eye to lay hold of. What he meant, what he wanted, why he did this
thing or not that other, no man then alive could make out. Nevertheless it
was worth the trying. In a time of critical reason and definite division,
he was possessed by a fervour and fury of belief; among sane men who had
disproved most things and proved the rest, here was an evident madman who
believed a thing, one may say, only insomuch as it was incapable of proof.
He lived and worked out of all rule, and yet by law. He had a devil, and
its name was Faith. No materialist has such belief in bread and meat as
Blake had in the substance underlying appearance which he christened god
or spectre, devil or angel, as the fit took him; or rather as he saw it
from one or the other side. His faith was absolute and hard, like a pure
fanatic's; there was no speculation in him. What could be made of such a
man in a country fed and clothed with the teapot pieties of Cowper and the
tape-yard infidelities of Paine? Neither set would have to do with him;
was he not a believer? and was he not a blasphemer? His licence of thought
and talk was always of the maddest, or seemed so in the ears of his
generation. People remember at this day with horror and pity the
impression of his daring ways of speech, but excuse him still on the old
plea of madness. Now on his own ground no man was ever more sane or more
reverent. His outcries on various matters of art or morals were in effect
the mere expression, not of reasonable dissent, but of violent belief. No
artist of equal power had ever a keener and deeper regard for the meaning
and teaching--what one may call the moral--of art. He sang and painted as
men write or preach. Indifference was impossible to him. Thus every shred
of his work has some life, some blood, infused or woven into it. In such a
vast tumbling chaos of relics as he left behind to get in time
disentangled and cast into shape, there are naturally inequalities enough;
rough sides and loose sides, weak points and helpless knots, before which
all mere human patience or comprehension recoils and reels back. But in
all, at all times, there is the one invaluable quality of actual life.
Without study of a serious kind, it is hopeless for any man to get at the
kernel of Blake's life and work. Nothing can make the way clear and smooth
to those who are not at once drawn into it by a sincere instinct of
sympathy. This cannot be done; but what can be done has been thoroughly
and effectually well done in this present biography.[1] A trained skill,
an exquisite admiration, an almost incomparable capacity of research and
care in putting to use the results of such long and refined labour, no
reader can fail to appreciate as the chief gifts of the author: one who
evidently had at once the power of work and the sense of selection in
perfect order. The loss of so admirable a critic, so wise and altogether
competent a workman, is a loss to be regretted till it can be replaced--a
date we are not likely to see in our days. At least his work is in no
danger of following him. This good that he did is likely to live after
him; no part of it likely to be interred in his grave. For the book,
unfinished, was yet not incomplete, when the writer's work was broken
short off. All or nearly all the biographical part had been ably carried
through to a good end. It remained for other hands to do the editing; to
piece together the loose notes left, and to supply all that was requisite
or graceful in the way of remark or explanation. With what excellent care
and taste this has been done, no one can miss of seeing. Of the critical
and editorial part there will be time to speak further in its own place.
All, in effect, which could be done for a book thus left suddenly and
sadly to itself, has been done as well as possible; no tenderness of
labour grudged, no power and skill spared to supply or sustain it. So that
we now have it in a fair and sufficient form, and can look with reasonable
hope for this first critical Life of Blake and selected edition of his
Works to make its way and hold its place among the precious records and
possessions of Englishmen.
What has been once well done need not be tried at again and done worse. No
second writer need now recapitulate the less significant details of
Blake's life: space and skill wanting, we can but refer readers to the
complete biography. That the great poet and artist was a hosier's son,[2]
born near Golden Square, put to school in the Strand to learn drawing at
ten of one Pars, apprenticed at fourteen to learn engraving of one Basire;
that he lived "smoothly enough" for two years, and was then set to work on
abbey monuments, "to be out of harm's way," other apprentices being
"disorderly," "mutinous," and given to "wrangling;" these facts and more,
all of value and weight in their way, Mr. Gilchrist has given at full in
his second and third chapters, adding just enough critical comment to set
the facts off and give them their proper relief and significance. His
labours among Gothic monuments, and the especial style of his training as
an engraver, left their marks on the man afterwards. Two things here put
on record are worthy of recollection: that he began seeing visions at
"eight or ten;" and that he took objections to Ryland (a better known
engraver than Basire), when taken to be apprenticed to him, on a singular
ground: "the man's face looks as if he will live to be hanged:" which the
man was, ten years later. But the first real point in Blake's life worth
marking as of especial interest is the publication of his _Poetical
Sketches_; which come in date before any of his paintings or illustrative
work, and are quite as much matters of art as these. Though never printed
till 1783, the latest written appears to belong to 1777, or thereabouts.
Here, at a time when the very notion of poetry, as we now understand it,
and as it was understood in older times, had totally died and decayed out
of the minds of men; when we not only had no poetry, a thing which was
bearable, but had verse in plenty, a thing which was not in the least
bearable; a man, hardly twenty years old yet, turns up suddenly with work
in that line already done, not simply better than any man could do then;
better than all except the greatest have done since: better too than some
still ranked among the greatest ever managed to do. With such a poet to
bring forward it was needless to fall back upon Wordsworth for excuse or
Southey for patronage. The one man of genius alive during any part of
Blake's own life who has ever spoken of this poet with anything like a
rational admiration is Charles Lamb, the most supremely competent judge
and exquisite critic of lyrical and dramatic art that we have ever had.
All other extant notices down to our own day, even when well-meaning and
not offensive, are to the best of our knowledge and belief utterly futile,
incapable and valueless: burdened more or less with chatter about
"madness" and such-like, obscured in some degree by mere dullness and
pitiable assumption.
There is something too rough and hard, too faint and formless, in any
critical language yet devised, to pay tribute with the proper grace and
sufficiency to the best works of the lyrical art. One can say, indeed,
that some of these earliest songs of Blake's have the scent and sound of
Elizabethan times upon them; that the song of forsaken love--"My silks and
fine array"--is sweet enough to recall the lyrics of Beaumont and
Fletcher, and strong enough to hold its own even beside such as that one
of Aspatia--"Lay a garland on my hearse"--which was cut (so to speak) out
of the same yew; that Webster might have signed the "Mad Song," which
falls short only (as indeed do all other things of the sort) of the two
great Dirges in that poet's two chief plays; that certain verses among
those headed "To Spring," and "To the Evening Star," are worthy even of
Tennyson for tender supremacy of style and noble purity of perfection; but
when we have to drop comparison and cease looking back or forward for
verses to match with these, we shall hardly find words to suit our sense
of their beauty. We speak of the best among them only; for, small as the
pamphlet is (seventy pages long, with title-page and prefatory leaf), it
contains a good deal of chaff and bran besides the pure grain and sifted
honeymeal. But these best things are as wonderful as any work of Blake's.
They have a fragrance of sound, a melody of colour, in a time when the
best verses produced had merely the arid perfume of powder, the twang of
dry wood and adjusted strings; when here the painting was laid on in
patches, and there the music meted out by precedent; colour and sound
never mixed together into the perfect scheme of poetry. The texture of
these songs has the softness of flowers; the touch of them has nothing
metallic or mechanical, such as one feels in much excellent and elaborate
verse of this day as well as of that. The sound of many verses of Blake's
cleaves to the sense long after conscious thought of the meaning has
passed from one: a sound like running of water or ringing of bells in a
long lull of the wind. Like all very good lyrical verse, they grow in
pleasurable effect upon the memory the longer it holds them--increase in
relish the longer they dwell upon the taste. These, for example, sound
singularly plain, however sweet, on a first hearing; but in time, to a
reader fit to appreciate the peculiar properties and merits of a lyric,
they come to seem as perfect as well can be:
"Thou the golden fruit dost bear,
I am clad in flowers fair;
Thy sweet boughs perfume the air,
And the turtle buildeth there.
There she sits and feeds her young:
Sweet I hear her mournful song;
And thy lovely leaves among,
There is love, I hear his tongue."
The two songs "To Memory," and "To the Muses" are perhaps nearer being
faultless than any others in the book. This last especially should never
be omitted in any professedly complete selection of the best English
lyrics. So beautiful indeed is its structure and choice of language that
its author's earlier and later vagaries and erratic indulgences in the
most lax or bombastic habits of speech become hopelessly inexplicable.
These unlucky tendencies do however break out in the same book which
contains such excellent samples of poetical sense and taste; giving
terrible promise of faults that were afterwards to grow rank and run riot
over much of the poet's work. But even from his worst things here, not
reprinted in the present edition, one may gather such lines as these:
"My lord was like a flower upon the brows
Of lusty May: ah life as frail as flower!
My lord was like a star in highest heaven,
Drawn down to earth by spells and wickedness;
My lord was like the opening eye of day;
But he is darkened; like the summer moon
Clouded; fall'n like the stately tree, cut down:
The breath of heaven dwelt among his leaves."
Verses not to be despised, when one remembers that the boy who wrote them
(evidently in his earlier teens) was living in full eighteenth century.
But for the most part the blank verse in this small book is in a state of
incredible chaos, ominous in tone of the future "Prophetic Books," if
without promise of their singular and profound power or menace of their
impenetrable mistiness, the obscurity of confused wind and cloud. One is
thankful to see here some pains taken in righting these deformed limbs and
planing off those monstrous knots, by one not less qualified to decide on
such minor points of execution than on the gravest matters of art;
especially as some amongst these blank verse poems contain things of quite
original and incomparable grandeur. Nothing at once more noble and more
sweet in style was ever written, than part of this "To the Evening Star":
"Smile on our loves; and while thou drawest round
The sky's blue curtains, scatter silver dew
On every flower that closes its sweet eyes
In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake: _speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver_."
The two lines, or half lines, which make the glory of this extract
resemble perfectly, for vigorous grace and that subtle strength of
interpretation which transfigures the external nature it explains, the
living leader of English poets. Even he has hardly ever given a study of
landscape more large and delicate, an effect of verse more exquisite and
sonorous. Of the "Spring" we have already said something; but for that
poem nothing short of transcription would be adequate. The "Autumn," too,
should hardly have been rejected: it contains lines of perfect power and
great beauty, though not quite up to the mark of "Spring" or "Summer."
From another poem, certainly not worthier of the place it has been
refused, we have extracted two lines worth remembering for their terseness
and weight of scorn, recalling certain grave touches of satire in Blake's
later work:
"For ignorance is folly's leasing nurse,
And love of folly needs none other's curse."
All that is worth recollection in the little play of "Edward the Third"
has been here reproduced with a judicious care in adjusting and rejecting.
Blake had probably never seen the praiseworthy but somewhat verbose
historical drama on the same subject, generously bestowed upon Shakespeare
by critics of that German acuteness which can accept as poetry the most
meritorious powers of rhetoric. His own disjointed and stumbling fragment,
deficient as it is in shape or plan or local colour, has far more of the
sound and savour of Shakespeare's style in detached lines: more indeed
than has ever been caught up by any poet except one to whom his editor has
seized the chance of paying tribute in passing--the author of "Joseph and
his Brethren;" a poem which, for strength of manner and freshness of
treatment, may certainly recall Blake or any other obscurely original
reformer in art; although we may not admit the resemblance claimed for it
on spiritual grounds to the works of Blake, in whose eyes the views taken
by the later poet of the mysteries inherent in matters of faith or
morality, and generally of the spiritual side of things, would, to our
thinking, probably have appeared shallow and untrue by the side of his own
mystic personal creed. In dramatic passion, in dramatic character, and in
dramatic language, Mr. Wells' great play is no doubt far ahead, not of
Blake's work only, but of most other men's: in actual conception of things
that lie beyond these, it keeps within the range of common thought and
accepted theory; falling therefore far short, in its somewhat over
frequent passages of didactic and religious reflection, of much less
original thinkers than Blake.
One other thing we may observe of these "Sketches;" that they contain,
though only in the pieces rejected from our present collection, sad
indications of the inexplicable influence which an early reading of the
detestable pseudo-Ossian seems to have exercised on Blake. How or why such
lank and lamentable counterfeits of the poetical style did ever gain this
luckless influence--one, too, which in after years was to do far worse
harm than it has done here--it is not easy to guess. Contemporary vice of
taste, imperfect or on some points totally deficient education, may
explain much and more than might be supposed, even with regard to the
strongest untrained intellect; but on the other hand, the songs in this
same volume give evidence of so rare a gift of poetical judgment, such
exquisite natural sense and art, in a time which could not so much as
blunder except by precedent and machinery, that such depravity of error as
is implied by admiration and imitation of such an one as Macpherson
remains inconceivable. Similar puzzles will, however, recur to the student
of Blake's art; but will not, if he be in any way worthy of the study, be
permitted for a minute to impair his sense of its incomparable merits.
Incomparable, we say advisedly: for there is no case on record of a man's
being quite so far in advance of his time, in everything that belongs to
the imaginative side of art, as Blake was from the first in advance of
his.
In 1782 Blake married, it seems after a year or two of engaged life. His
wife Catherine Boucher deserves remembrance as about the most perfect wife
on record. In all things but affection, her husband must have been as hard
to live with as the most erratic artist or poet who ever mistook his way
into marriage. Over the stormy or slippery passages in their earlier life
Mr. Gilchrist has passed perhaps too lightly. No doubt Blake's aberrations
were mainly matters of speech or writing; it is however said, truly or
falsely, that once in a patriarchal mood he did propose to add a second
wife to their small and shifting household, and was much perplexed at
meeting on one hand with tears and on all hands with remonstrances. For
any clandestine excursions or furtive eccentricities he had probably too
much of childish candour and impulse; and this one hopeful and plausible
design he seems to have sacrificed with a good grace, on finding it
really objectionable to the run of erring men. As to the rest, Mrs.
Blake's belief in him was full and profound enough to endure some amount
of trial. Practically he was always, as far as we know, regular,
laborious, immaculate to an exception; and in their old age she worked
after him and for him, revered and helped and obeyed him, with an
exquisite goodness.
For the next eighteen years we have no continuous or available record
under Blake's own hand of his manner of life; and of course must not
expect as yet any help from those who can still, or could lately, remember
the man himself in later days. He laboured with passionate steadiness of
energy, at work sometimes valueless and sometimes invaluable; made,
retained, and lost friends of a varying quality. Even to the lamentable
taskwork of bad comic engravings for dead and putrescent "Wit's Magazines"
his biographer has tracked him and taken note of his doings. The one thing
he did get published--his poem, or apology for a poem, called "The French
Revolution" (the first of seven projected books)--is, as far as I know,
the only original work of its author worth little or even nothing;
consisting mainly of mere wind and splutter. The six other books, if
extant, ought nevertheless to be looked up, as they can hardly be without
some personal interest or empirical value, even if no better in
workmanship than this first book. During these years however he produced
much of his greatest work; among other things, the "Songs of Innocence and
Experience," and the prophetic books from "Thel" to "Ahania;" of all which
we shall have to speak in due time and order. The notes on Reynolds and
Lavater, from which we have here many extracts given, we must hope to see
some day printed in full. Their vivid and vigorous style is often a model
in its kind; and the matter, however violent and eccentric at times,
always clear, noble, and thoughtful; remarkable especially for the
eagerness of approbation lavished on the meanest of impulsive or fanciful
men, and the fervour of scorn excited by the best works and the best
intentions of others. The watery wisdom and the bland absurdity of
Lavater's axioms meet with singular tolerance from the future author of
the "Proverbs of Hell;" the considerate regulations and suggestions of
Reynolds' "Discourses" meet with no tolerance at all from the future
illustrator of Job and Dante. In all these rough notes, even we may say in
those on Bacon's Essays, there is always a bushel of good grain to an
ounce of chaff. What is erroneous or what seems perverse lies for the most
part only on the surface; what is falsely applied is often truly said;
what is unjustly worded is often justly conceived. A man insensible to the
perfect manner and noble matter of Bacon, while tolerant of the lisping
and slavering imbecilities of Lavater, seems at first sight past hope or
help; but subtract the names or alter the symbols given, and much of
Blake's commentary will seem, as it is, partially true and memorable even
in its actual form, wholly true and memorable in its implied meaning.
Again, partly through ingrained humour, partly through the rough shifts of
his imperfect and tentative education, Blake was much given to a certain
perverse and defiant habit of expression, meant rather to scare and offend
than to allure and attract the common run of readers or critics. In his
old age we hear that he would at times try the ironic method upon
objectionable reasoners; not, we should imagine, with much dexterity or
subtlety.
The small accidents and obscure fluctuations of luck during these eighteen
years of laborious town life, the changes of residence and acquaintance,
the method and result of the day's work done, have been traced with much
care and exhibited in a direct distinct manner by the biographer. Nothing
can be more clear and sufficient than the brief notices of Blake's
favourite brother and pupil, in character seemingly a weaker and somewhat
violent _replica_ of his elder, not without noble and amiable qualities;
of his relations with Fuseli and Flaxman, with Johnson the bookseller, and
others, whose names are now fished up from the quiet comfort of obscurity,
and made more or less memorable for good or evil through their connection
with one who was then himself among the obscurest of men. His alliance
with Paine and the ultra-democrats then working or talking in London is
the most curious episode of these years. His republican passion was like
Shelley's, a matter of fierce dogmatic faith and rapid assumption. Looking
at any sketch of his head and face one may see the truth of his assertion
that he was born a democrat of the imaginative type. The faith which
accepts and the passion which pursues an idea of justice not wholly
attainable looks out of the tender and restless eyes, moulds the eager
mobile-seeming lips. Infinite impatience, as of a great preacher or
apostle--intense tremulous vitality, as of a great orator--seem to me to
give his face the look of one who can do all things but hesitate. We need
no evidence to bid us believe with what fervour of spirit and singleness
of emotion he loved the name and followed the likeness of freedom,
whatever new name or changed likeness men might put upon her. Liberty and
religion, taken in a large and subtle sense of the words, were alike
credible and adorable to him; and in nothing else could he find matter for
belief or worship. His forehead, largest (as he said) just over the eyes,
shows an eager steadiness of passionate expression. Shut off any single
feature, and it will seem singular how little the face changes or loses by
the exclusion. With all this, it is curious to read how the author of
"Urizen" and "Ahania" saved from probable hanging the author of the
"Rights of Man" and "Age of Reason." Blake had as perfect a gift of ready
and steady courage as any man: was not quicker to catch fire than he was
safe to stand his ground. The swift quiet resolution and fearless instant
sense of the right thing to do which he showed at all times of need are
worth notice in a man of such fine and nervous habit of mind and body.
In the year after Paine's escape from England, his deliverer published a
book which would probably have been something of a chokepear for the
_conventionnel_. This set of seventeen drawings was Blake's first series
of original designs, not meant to serve as merely illustrative work. Two
of the prophetic books, and the "Songs of Innocence," had already been
engraved; but there the designs were supplementary to the text; here such
text as there was served only to set out the designs; and even these
"Keys" to the "Gates of Paradise," somewhat of the rustiest as they are,
were not supplied in every copy. The book is itself not unavailable as a
key to much of Blake's fitful and tempestuous philosophy; and it would
have been better to re-engrave the series in full than to give random
selections twisted out of their places and made less intelligible than
they were at first by the headlong process of inversion and convulsion to
which they have here been subjected.
The frontispiece gives a symbol of man's birth into the fleshly and
mutable house of life, powerless and painless as yet, but encircled by the
likeness and oppressed by the mystery of material existence. The
pre-existent spirit here well-nigh disappears under stifling folds of
vegetable leaf and animal incrustation of overgrowing husk. It lies dumb
and dull, almost as a thing itself begotten of the perishable body,
conceived in bondage and brought forth with grief. The curled and clinging
caterpillar, emblem of motherhood, adheres and impends over it, as the
lapping leaves of flesh unclose and release the human fruit of corporeal
generation. With mysterious travail and anguish of mysterious division,
the child is born as a thing out of sleep; the original perfect manhood
being cast in effect into a heavy slumber, and the female or reflective
element called into creation. This tenet recurs constantly in the
turbulent and fluctuating evangel of Blake; that the feminine element
exists by itself for a time only, and as the shadow of the male; thus
Space is the wife of Time, and was created of him in the beginning that
the things of lower life might have air to breathe and a place to hide
their heads; her moral aspect is Pity. She suffers through the lapse of
obscure and painful centuries with the sufferings of her children; she is
oppressed with all their oppressions; she is plagued with all the plagues
of transient life and inevitable death. At sight of her so brought forth,
a wonder in heaven, all the most ancient gods or daemons of pre-material
life were terrified and amazed, touched with awe and softened with
passion; yet endured not to look upon her, a thing alien from the things
of their eternal life; for as space is impredicable of the divine world,
so is pity impredicable of the daemonic nature. (See the "First Book of
Urizen.") For of all the minor immortal and uncreated spirits Time only is
the friend of man; and for man's sake has given him Space to dwell in, as
under the shadow and within the arms of a great compassionate mother, who
has mercy upon all her children, tenderness for all good and evil things.
Only through his help and through her pity can flesh or spirit endure life
for a little, under the iron law of the maker and the oppressor of man.
Alone among the other co-equal and co-eternal daemons of his race, the
Creator is brought into contact and collision with Space and Time; against
him alone they struggle in Promethean agony of conflict to deliver the
children of men; and against them is the Creator compelled to fight, that
he may reach and oppress those whose weakness is defended by all the
warring hands of Time, sheltered by all the gracious wings of Space.
In the first plate of the "Gates of Paradise," the woman finds the child
under a tree, sprung of the earth like a mandrake, which he who plucks up
and hears groan must go mad or die; grown under the tree of physical life,
which is rooted in death, and the leaf of it is poisonous, and it bears
as fruit the wisdom of the serpent, moral reason or rational truth, which
invents the names of virtue and vice, and divides moral life into good and
evil. Out of earth is rent violently forth the child of dust and clay,
naked, wide-eyed, shrieking; the woman bends down to gather him as a
flower, half blind with fierce surprise and eagerness, half smiling with
foolish love and pitiful pleasure; with one hand she holds other children,
small and new-blown also as flowers, huddled in the lap of her garment;
with the other she plucks him up by the hair, regardless of his deadly
shriek and convulsed arms, heedless that this uprooting of the mandrake is
the seal of her own death also. Then follow symbols of the four created
elements from which the corporeal man is made; the water, blind and
mutable as doting age, emblem of ignorant doubt and moral jealousy; the
heavy melancholy earth, grievous to life, oppressive of the spirit, type
of all sorrows and tyrannies that are brought forth upon it, saddest of
all the elements, tightest as a curb and painfullest as a load upon the
soul: then the air wherein man is naked, the fire wherein man is blind;
ashamed and afraid of his own nature and its nakedness, surrounded with
similitudes of severance and strife: overhung by rocks, rained upon by all
the storms of heaven, lighted by unfriendly stars, with clouds spread
under him and over; "a dark hermaphrodite," enlightened by the light
within him, which is darkness--the light of reason and morality; evil and
good, who was neither good nor evil in the eternal life before this
generated existence; male and female, who from of old was neither female
nor male, but perfect man without division of flesh, until the setting of
sex against sex by the malignity of animal creation. Round the new-created
man revolves the flaming sword of Law, burning and dividing in the hand of
the angel, servant of the cruelty of God, who drives into exile and debars
from paradise the fallen spiritual man upon earth. Round the woman (a
double type perhaps at once of the female nature and the "rational truth"
or law of good and evil) roar and freeze the winds and snows of
prohibition, blinding, congealing, confusing; and in that tempest of
things spiritual the shell of material things hardens and thickens,
excluding all divine vision and obscuring all final truth with
solid-seeming walls of separation. But death in the end shall enlighten
all the deluded, shall deliver all the imprisoned; there, though the worm
weaves, the Saviour also watches; the new garments of male and female to
be there assumed by the spirit are so woven that they shall no longer be
as shrouds or swaddling-clothes to hamper the newly born or consume the
newly dead, but free raiment and fair symbol of the spirit. For the power
of the creative daemon, which began with birth, must end with death; upon
the perfect and eternal man he had not power till he had created the
earthly life to bring man into subjection; and shall not have power upon
him again any more when he is once resumed by death. Where the Creator's
power ends, there begins the Saviour's power; where oppression loses
strength to divide, mercy gains strength to reunite. For the Creator is at
most God of this world only, and belongs to the life which he creates; the
God of this world is a thing of this world, but the Saviour or perfect man
is of eternity, belonging to the spiritual life which was before birth
and shall be after death.
In these first six plates is the kernel of the book; round these the
subsequent symbols revolve, and toward these converge. The seventh we may
assume to be an emblem of desire as it is upon earth, blind and wild, glad
and sad, destroying the pleasures it catches hold of, losing those it lets
go. One Love, a moth-like spirit, lies crushed at the feet of the boy who
pursues another, flinging his cap towards it as though to trap a
butterfly; startled with the laugh of triumphant capture even at his lips,
as the wingless flying thing eludes him and soars beyond the enclosure of
summer leaves and stems toward upper air and cloud. To the original sketch
was appended this quotation from Spenser, Book 2, Canto 2, v. 2:
"Ah luckless babe, born under cruel star,
And in dead parents' baleful ashes bred;
Full little weenest thou what sorrows are
Left thee for portion of thy livelyhed."
Again, Youth, with the bow of battle lifted in his right hand, turns his
back upon Age, and leaves him lamenting in vain remonstrance and piteous
reclamation: the fruit of vain-glory and vain teaching, ending in
rebellion and division of spirit, when the beliefs and doctrines of a man
turn against him and he becomes at variance with himself and with his own
issue of body or of soul. In the ninth plate, men strive to set a ladder
against the moon and climb by it through the deepest darkness of night; a
white segment of narrow light just shows the sharp tongue of precipitous
land upon which they are gathered together in vain counsel and effort.
This was originally a satirical sketch of "amateurs and connoisseurs,"
emblematic merely of their way of studying art, analyzing all great things
done with ready rule and line, and scaling with ladders of logic the
heaven of invention; here it reappears enlarged and exalted into a general
type of blind belief and presumptuous reason, indicative also of the
helpless hunger after spiritual things ingrained in those made subject to
things material; the effusion and eluctation of spirits sitting in prison
towards the truth which should make them free. In the tenth plate, the
half-submerged face and outstretched arm of a man drowning in a trough of
tumbling sea show just above the foam, against the glaring and windy
clouds whose blown drift excludes the sky. Perhaps the noble study of sea
registered in the Catalogue as No. 128 of the second list was a sketch for
this design of man sinking under the waves of time. Of the two this sketch
is the finer; a greater effect of tempest was never given by the work of
any hand than in this weltering and savage space of sea, with the aimless
clash of its breakers and blind turbulence of water veined and wrinkled
with storm, enridged and cloven into drifting array of battle, with no
lesser life visible upon it of man or vessel, fish or gull: no land beyond
it conceivable, no heaven above it credible. This drawing, which has been
reproduced by photography, might have found a place here or later in the
book. In the eleventh plate, emblematic of religious restraint and the
severities of artificial holiness, an old man, spectacled and
strait-mouthed, clips with his shears the plumes of a winged boy, who
writhes vainly in a passionate attempt at self-release, his arm hiding
his face, his lithe slight limbs twisting with pain and fear, his curled
head bent upon the curve of his elbow, his hand straining the air with
empty violence of barren agony; a sun half risen lights up the expansion
of his half-shorn wings and the helpless labour of his slender body. The
twelfth plate continues this allegory under the type of father and sons,
the vital energy and its desires or passions, thrust down into
prison-houses of ice and snow. Next, man as he is upon earth attains for
once to the vision of that which he was and shall be; his eyes open upon
the sight of life beyond the mundane and mortal elements, and the chains
of reason and religion relax. In the evening he travels towards the grave;
a figure stepping out swiftly and steadily, staff in hand, over rough
country ground and beside low thick bushes and underwood, dressed as a man
of Blake's day; a touch of realism curious in the midst of such mystical
work. Next in extreme age he passes through the door of death to find the
worm at her work; and in the last plate of the series, she is seen
sitting, a worm-like woman, with hooded head and knees drawn up, the
adder-like husk or shell of death at her feet, and behind her head the
huge rotting roots and serpentine nether fibres of the tree of life and
death: shapes of strange corruption and conversion lie around her, and
between the hollow tree-roots the darkness grows deep and hard. "I have
said to corruption, thou art my father; to the worm, thou art my mother
and my sister." This is she who is nearest of kin to man from his birth to
his death:
"Weaving to dreams the sexual strife,
And weeping over the web of life."
I have given thus early a rough and tentative analysis of this set of
designs, rather than leave it to find a place among the poems or
prophecies, because it does in effect belong rather to art than poetry,
the verses being throughout subordinate to the engravings, and indeed
scarcely to be accounted of as more than inscriptions or appendages. It
may however be taken as being in a certain sense one of the prophetic or
evangelic series which was afterwards to stretch to such strange lengths.
In this engraved symbolic poem of life and death, most of Blake's chief
articles of faith are advanced or implied; noticeably, for example, that
tenet regarding the creative deity and his relations to time and to the
sons of men. Thus far he can see and no farther; for so long and no longer
he has power upon the actions and passions of created and transient life.
Him let no Christians worship, nor the law of his covenant; the written
law which its writer wept at and hid beneath his mercy-seat; but instead
let them write above the altars of their faith a law of infinite
forgiveness, annihilating in the measureless embrace of its mercy the
separate existences of good and evil. So speaks Blake in his prologue; and
in his epilogue thus:
_To the Accuser, who is the God of this World._
Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce,
And dost not know the garment from the man;
Every harlot was a virgin once,
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.
Though thou are worshipped by the names divine
Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary night's decline;
The lost traveller's dream under the hill.