explanation; two points connected, but not inseparable; his mysticism and
his mythology. This latter is in fact hardly more in its relation to the
former, than the clothes to the body or the body to the soul. To make
either comprehensible, it is requisite above all things to get sight of
the man in whom they became incarnate and active as forces or as opinions.
Now, to those who regard mysticism with distaste or contempt, as
essentially in itself a vain or noxious thing--a sealed bag or bladder
that can only be full either of wind or of poison--the man, being above
all and beyond all a mystic in the most subtle yet most literal sense,
must remain obscure and contemptible. Such readers--if indeed such men
should choose or care to become readers at all--will be (for one thing)
unable to understand that one may think it worth while to follow out and
track to its root the peculiar faith or fancy of a mystic without being
ready to accept his deductions and his assertions as absolute and durable
facts. Servility of extended hand or passive brain is the last quality
that a mystic of the nobler kind will demand or desire in his auditors.
Councils and synods may put forth notes issued under their stamp, may
exact of all recipients to play the part of clerks and indorse their paper
with shut eyes: to the mystic such a way of doing spiritual business would
seem the very frenzy of fatuity; whatever else may be profitable, that (he
would say) is suicidal. And assuredly it is not to be expected that
Blake's mystical creed, when once made legible and even partially
coherent, should prove likely to win over proselytes. Nor can this be the
wish or the object of a reasonable commentator, whose desire is merely to
do art a good turn in some small way, by explaining the "faith and works"
of a great artist. It is true that whatever a good poet or a good painter
has thought worth representing by verse or design must probably be worth
considering before one deliver judgment on it. But the office of an
apostle of some new faith and the business of a commentator on some new
evangel are two sufficiently diverse things. The present critic has not
(happily) to preach the gospel as delivered by Blake; he has merely, if
possible, to make the text of that gospel a little more readable. And this
must be worth doing, if it be worth while to touch on Blake's work at all.
What is true of all poets and artists worth judging is especially true of
him; that critics who attempt to judge him piecemeal do not in effect
judge him at all, but some one quite different from him, and some one (to
any serious student) probably more inexplicable than the real man. For
what are we to make of a man whose work deserves crowning one day and
hooting the next? If the "Songs" be so good, are not those who praise them
bound to examine and try what merit may be latent in the
"Prophecies"?--bound at least to explain as best they may how the one
comes to be worth so much and the other worth nothing? On this side alone
the biography appears to us emphatically deficient; here only do we feel
how much was lost, how much impaired by the untimely death of the writer.
Those who had to complete his work have done their part admirably well;
but here they have not done enough. We are not bound to accept Blake's
mysticism; we are bound to take some account of it. A disciple must take
his master's word for proof of the thing preached. This it would be folly
to expect of a biographer; even Boswell falls short of this, having
courage on some points to branch off from the strait pathway of his
teacher and strike into a small speculative track of his own. But a
biographer must be capable of expounding the evangel (or, if such a word
could be, "dysangel") of his hero, however far he may be from thinking it
worth acceptance. And this, one must admit, the writers on Blake have upon
the whole failed of doing. Consequently their critical remarks on such
specimens of Blake's more speculative and subtle work as did find favour
in their sight have but a narrow range and a limited value. Some clue to
the main character of the artist's habit of mind we may hope already to
have put into the reader's hands--some frayed and ravelled "end of the
golden string," which with due labour he may "wind up into a ball." To
pluck out the heart of Blake's mystery is a task which every man must be
left to attempt for himself: for this prophet is certainly not "easier to
be played on than a pipe." Keeping fast in hand what clue we have, we may
nevertheless succeed in making some further way among the clouds. One
thing is too certain; if we insist on having hard ground under foot all
the way we shall not get far. The land lying before us, bright with fiery
blossom and fruit, musical with blowing branches and falling waters, is
not to be seen or travelled in save by help of such light as lies upon
dissolving dreams and dividing clouds. By moonrise, to the sound of wind
at sunset, one may tread upon the limit of this land and gather as with
muffled apprehension some soft remote sense of the singing of its birds
and flowering of its fields.
This premised, we may start with a clear conscience. Of Blake's faith we
have by this time endeavoured to give the reader some conception--if a
faint one, yet at least not a false: of the form assumed by that faith
(what we have called the mythology) we need not yet take cognizance. To
follow out in full all his artistic and illustrative work, with a view to
extract from each separate fruit of it some core of significance, would be
an endless labour: and we are bound to consider what may be feasible
rather than what, if it were feasible, might be worth doing. Therefore the
purpose of this essay is in the main to deal with the artist's personal
work in preference to what is merely illustrative and decorative. Designs,
however admirable, made to order for the text of Blair, of Hayley, or of
Young, are in comparison with the designer's original and spontaneous work
mere extraneous by-play. These also are if anything better known than
Blake's other labours. Again, the mass of his surviving designs is so
enormous and as yet (except for the inestimable _Catalogue_ in Vol. 2 of
the _Life_) so utterly chaotic and unarrangeable that in such an element
one can but work as it were by fits and plunges. Of these designs there
must always be many which not having seen we cannot judge; many too on
which artists alone are finally competent to deliver sentence by
authority. Moreover the supreme merits as well as the more noticeable
qualities merely special and personal of Blake are best seen in his mixed
work. Where both text and design are wholly his own, and the two forms or
sides of his art so coalesce or overlap as to become inextricably
interfused, we have the best chance of seeing and judging what the workman
essentially was. In such an enterprise, we must be always duly grateful
for any help or chance of help given us: and for one invaluable thing we
have at starting to give due honour and thanks to the biographer. He has,
one may rationally hope, finally beaten to powder the rickety and flaccid
old theory of Blake's madness. Any one wishing to moot that question again
will have to answer or otherwise get over the facts and inferences so
excellently set out in Chap. xxxv.: to refute them we may fairly consider
impossible. Here at least no funeral notice or obsequies will be bestowed
on the unburied carcase of that forlorn fiction. Assuming as a reasonable
ground for our present labour that Blake was superior to the run of men,
we shall spend no minute of time in trying to prove that he was not
inferior. Logic and sense alike warn us off such barren ground.
Of the editing of the present selections--a matter evidently of most
delicate and infinite labour--we have here to say this only; that as far
as one can see it could not have been done better: and indeed that it
could only have been done so well by the rarest of happy chances. Even
with the already published poems there was enough work to get through; for
even these had suffered much from the curiously reckless and helpless
neglect of form which was natural to Blake when his main work was done and
his interest in the matter prematurely wound up. Those only who have dived
after the original copies can fully appreciate or apprehend with what
tenderness of justice and subtlety of sense these tumbled folds have been
gathered up and these ragged edges smoothed off. As much power and labour
has gone to the perfect adjustment of these relics of another man's work
as a meaner man could have dreamed only of expending on his own. Nor can
any one thoroughly enter into the value and excellence of the thing here
achieved who has not in himself the impulsive instinct of form--the
exquisite desire of just and perfect work. Alike to those who seem to be
above it as to those who are evidently below, such work must remain always
inappreciable and inexplicable. To the ingeniously chaotic intellect, with
its admirable aptitude for all such feats of conjectural cleverness as are
worked out merely by strain and spasm, it will seem an offensive waste of
good work. But to all who relish work for work's sake and art for art's it
will appear, as it is, simply invaluable--the one thing worth having yet
not to be had at any price or by any means, except when it falls in your
way by divine accident. True however as all this is of the earlier and
easier part of the editor's task, it is incomparably more true of the
arrangement and selection of poems fit for publishing out of the priceless
but shapeless chaos of unmanageable MSS. The good work here done and good
help here given it is not possible to over-estimate. Every light slight
touch of mere arrangement has the mark of a great art consummate in great
things--the imprint of a sure and strong hand, in which the thing to be
done lies safe and gathers faultless form. These great things too are so
small in mere size and separate place that they can never get praised in
due detail. They are great by dint of the achievement implied and the
forbearance involved. Only a chief among lyric poets could so have praised
the songs of Blake; only a leader among imaginative painters could so have
judged his designs; only an artist himself supreme at once in lordship of
colour and mastery of metre could so have spoken of Blake's gifts and
feats in metre and colour. Reading these notes, one can rest with
sufficient pleasure on the conviction that, wherever else there may be
failure in attaining the right word of judgment or of praise, here
certainly there is none. Here there is more than (what all critics may
have) goodwill and desire to give just thanks; for here there is
authority, and the right to seem right in delivering sentence.
But these notes, good as they are and altogether valuable, are the least
part of the main work. To the beauty and nobility of style, the exquisite
strength of sifted English, the keen vision and deep clearness of
expression, which characterize as well these brief prefaces as the notes
on _Job_ and that critical summary in the final chapter of the _Life_, one
need hardly desire men's attention; that splendid power of just language
and gift of grace in detail stand out at once distinguishable from the
surrounding work, praiseworthy as that also in the main is; neither from
the matter nor the manner can any careful critic mistake the exact moment
and spot where the editor of the poems has taken up any part of the
business, laid any finger on the mechanism of the book. But this work,
easier to praise, must have been also easier to perform than the more
immediate editorial labours which were here found requisite. With care
inappreciable and invaluable fidelity has the editing throughout been
done. The selection must of necessity have been to a certain degree
straitened and limited by many minor and temporary considerations;
publishers, tasters, and such-like, must have fingered the work here and
there, snuffing at this and nibbling at that as their manner is. For the
work and workman have yet their way to make in the judicious reading
world; and so long as they have, they are more or less in the lax limp
clutch of that "dieu ganache des bourgeois" who sits nodding and
ponderously dormant in the dust of publishing offices, ready at any jog of
the elbow to snarl and start--a new Pan, feeding on the pastures of a fat
and foggy land his Arcadian herds of review or magazine:
[Greek: enti ge pikros,
kai hoi aei drimeia chola poti rhini kathetai].
Arcadian virtue and Boeotian brain, under the presidency of such a
stertorous and splenetic goat-god, given to be sleepy in broadest noonday,
are not the best crucibles for art to be tried in. Then, again, thought
had to be taken for the poems themselves; not merely how to expose them in
most acceptable form for public acceptance, but how at the same time to
give them in the main all possible fullness of fair play. This too by
dint of work and patience, still more by dint of pliable sense and taste,
has been duly accomplished. Future editions may be, and in effect will
have to be, altered and enlarged: it is as well for people to be aware
that they have not yet a final edition of Blake; that will have to be some
day completed on a due scale. But for the great mass of his lyrical verse
all there was to do has been done here, and the ground-plan taken of a
larger building to come. These preliminaries stated, we pass on to a rapid
general review of those two great divisions which may be taken as resuming
for us the ripe poetry of Blake's manhood. Two divisions, the one already
published and partially known, the other now first brought into light and
baptized with some legible name; the _Songs of Innocence and Experience_,
and the _Ideas of Good and Evil_. Under this latter head we will class for
purposes of readier reference as well the smaller MS. volume of fairly
transcribed verses as the great mass of more disorderly writing in verse
and prose to which the name above given is attached in a dim broad scrawl
of the pencil evidently meant to serve as general title, though set down
only on the reverse page of the second MS. leaf. This latter and larger
book, extending in date at least from 1789 to (August) 1811, but
presumably beyond the later date, is the great source and treasure-house
from which has been drawn out most of the fresh verse and all of the fresh
prose here given us: and is of course among the most important relics left
of Blake.
First then for the _Songs of Innocence and Experience_. These at a first
naming recall only that incomparable charm of form in which they first
came out clothed, and hence vex the souls of men with regretful
comparison. For here by hard necessity we miss the lovely and luminous
setting of designs, which makes the _Songs_ precious and pleasurable to
those who know or care for little else of the master's doing; the infinite
delight of those drawings, sweeter to see than music to hear, where herb
and stem break into grace of shape and blossom of form, and the
branch-work is full of little flames and flowers, catching as it were from
the verse enclosed the fragrant heat and delicate sound they seem to give
back; where colour lapses into light and light assumes feature in colour.
If elsewhere the artist's strange strength of thought and hand is more
visible, nowhere is there such pure sweetness and singleness of design in
his work. All the tremulous and tender splendour of spring is mixed into
the written word and coloured draught; every page has the smell of April.
Over all things given, the sleep of flocks and the growth of leaves, the
laughter in dividing lips of flowers and the music at the moulded mouth of
the flute-player, there is cast a pure fine veil of light, softer than
sleep and keener than sunshine. The sweetness of sky and leaf, of grass
and water--the bright light life of bird and child and beast--is so to
speak kept fresh by some graver sense of faithful and mysterious love,
explained and vivified by a conscience and purpose in the artist's hand
and mind. Such a fiery outbreak of spring, such an insurrection of fierce
floral life and radiant riot of childish power and pleasure, no poet or
painter ever gave before: such lustre of green leaves and flushed limbs,
kindled cloud and fervent fleece, was never wrought into speech or shape.
Nevertheless this decorative work is after all the mere husk and shell of
the _Songs_. These also, we may notice, have to some extent shared the
comparative popularity of the designs which serve as framework to them.
They have absolutely achieved the dignity of a reprint; have had a chance
before now of swimming for life; whereas most of Blake's offspring have
been thrown into Lethe bound hand and foot, without hope of ever striking
out in one fair effort. Perhaps on some accounts this preference has been
not unreasonable. What was written for children can hardly offend men; and
the obscurities and audacities of the prophet would here have been clearly
out of place. It is indeed some relief to a neophyte serving in the outer
courts of such an intricate and cloudy temple, to come upon this little
side-chapel set about with the simplest wreaths and smelling of the fields
rather than incense, where all the singing is done by clear children's
voices to the briefest and least complex tunes. Not at first without a
sense of release does the human mind get quit for a little of the clouds
of Urizen, the fires of Orc, and all the Titanic apparatus of prophecy.
And these poems are really unequalled in their kind. Such verse was never
written for children since verse-writing began. Only in a few of those
faultless fragments of childish rhyme which float without name or form
upon the memories of men shall we find such a pure clear cadence of verse,
such rapid ring and flow of lyric laughter, such sweet and direct choice
of the just word and figure, such an impeccable simplicity; nowhere but
here such a tender wisdom of holiness, such a light and perfume of
innocence. Nothing like this was ever written on that text of the lion
and the lamb; no such heaven of sinless animal life was ever conceived so
intensely and sweetly.
"And there the lion's ruddy eyes
Shall flow with tears of gold,
And pitying the tender cries,
And walking round the fold,
Saying _Wrath by His meekness
And by His health sickness
Is driven away
From our immortal day.
And now beside thee, bleating lamb,
I can lie down and sleep,
Or think on Him who bore thy name,
Graze after thee, and weep._"
The leap and fall of the verse is so perfect as to make it a fit garment
and covering for the profound tenderness of faith and soft strength of
innocent impulse embodied in it. But the whole of this hymn of _Night_ is
wholly beautiful; being perhaps one of the two poems of loftiest
loveliness among all the _Songs of Innocence_. The other is that called
_The Little Black Boy_; a poem especially exquisite for its noble
forbearance from vulgar pathos and achievement of the highest and most
poignant sweetness of speech and sense; in which the poet's mysticism is
baptized with pure water and taught to speak as from faultless lips of
children, to such effect as this.
"And we are put on earth a little space
_That we may learn to bear the beams of love_;
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Are like a cloud and like a shady grove."
Other poems of a very perfect beauty are those of the Piper, the Lamb, the
Chimney-sweeper, and the two-days-old baby; all, for the music in them,
more like the notes of birds caught up and given back than the modulated
measure of human verse. One cannot say, being so slight and seemingly
wrong in metrical form, how they come to be so absolutely right; but right
even in point of verses and words they assuredly are. Add fuller formal
completion of rhyme and rhythm to that song of _Infant Joy_, and you have
broken up the soft bird-like perfection of clear light sound which gives
it beauty; the little bodily melody of soulless and painless laughter.
Against all articulate authority we do however class several of the _Songs
of Experience_ higher for the great qualities of verse than anything in
the earlier division of these poems. If the _Songs of Innocence_ have the
shape and smell of leaves or buds, these have in them the light and sound
of fire or the sea. Entering among them, a fresher savour and a larger
breath strikes one upon the lips and forehead. In the first part we are
shown who they are who have or who deserve the gift of spiritual sight: in
the second, what things there are for them to see when that gift has been
given. Innocence, the quality of beasts and children, has the keenest
eyes; and such eyes alone can discern and interpret the actual mysteries
of experience. It is natural that this second part, dealing as it does
with such things as underlie the outer forms of the first part, should
rise higher and dive deeper in point of mere words. These give the
distilled perfume and extracted blood of the veins in the rose-leaf, the
sharp, liquid, intense spirit crushed out of the broken kernel in the
fruit. The last of the _Songs of Innocence_ is a prelude to these poems;
in it the poet summons to judgment the young and single-spirited, that by
right of the natural impulse of delight in them they may give sentence
against the preachers of convention and assumption; and in the first poem
of the second series he, by the same "voice of the bard," calls upon earth
herself, the mother of all these, to arise and become free: since upon her
limbs also are bound the fetters, and upon her forehead also has fallen
the shadow, of a jealous law: from which nevertheless, by faithful
following of instinct and divine liberal impulse, earth and man shall
obtain deliverance.
"Hear the voice of the bard!
Who present, past, and future sees:
Whose ears have heard
The ancient Word
That walked among the silent trees:
Calling the lapsed soul
And weeping in the evening dew;
That might control
The starry pole
And fallen fallen light renew!"
If they will hear the Word, earth and the dwellers upon earth shall be
made again as little children; shall regain the strong simplicity of eye
and hand proper to the pure and single of heart; and for them inspiration
shall do the work of innocence; let them but once abjure the doctrine by
which comes sin and the law by which comes prohibition. Therefore must the
appeal be made; that the blind may see and the deaf hear, and the unity of
body and spirit be made manifest in perfect freedom: and that to the
innocent even the liberty of "sin" may be conceded. For if the soul suffer
by the body's doing, are not both degraded? and if the body be oppressed
for the soul's sake, are not both the losers?
"O Earth, O Earth, return!
Arise from out the dewy grass!
Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from the slumberous mass.
Turn away no more;
Why wilt thou turn away?
The starry shore,
The watery floor,
Are given thee till the break of day."
For so long, during the night of law and oppression of material form, the
divine evidences hidden under sky and sea are left her; even "till the
break of day." Will she not get quit of this spiritual bondage to the
heavy body of things, to the encumbrance of deaf clay and blind
vegetation, before the light comes that shall redeem and reveal? But the
earth, being yet in subjection to the creator of men, the jealous God who
divided nature against herself--father of woman and man, legislator of sex
and race--makes blind and bitter answer as in sleep, "her locks covered
with grey despair."
"Prisoned on this watery shore,
Starry Jealousy does keep my den;
Cold and hoar,
Weeping o'er,
I hear the father of the ancient men."
Thus, in the poet's mind, Nature and Religion are the two fetters of life,
one on the right wrist, the other on the left; an obscure material force
on this hand, and on that a mournful imperious law: the law of divine
jealousy, the government of a God who weeps over his creature and subject
with unprofitable tears, and rules by forbidding and dividing: the
"Urizen" of the prophetic books, clothed with the coldness and the grief
of remote sky and jealous cloud. Here as always, the cry is as much for
light as for license, the appeal not more against prohibition than against
obscurity.
"Can the sower sow by night,
Or the ploughman in darkness plough?"
In the _Songs of Innocence_ there is no such glory of metre or sonorous
beauty of lyrical work as here. No possible effect of verse can be finer
in a great brief way than that given in the second and last stanzas of the
first part of this poem. It recals within one's ear the long relapse of
recoiling water and wash of the refluent wave; in the third and fourth
lines sinking suppressed as with equal pulses and soft sobbing noise of
ebb, to climb again in the fifth line with a rapid clamour of ripples and
strong ensuing strain of weightier sound, lifted with the lift of the
running and ringing sea.
Here also is that most famous of Blake's lyrics, _The Tiger_; a poem
beyond praise for its fervent beauty and vigour of music. It appears by
the MS. that this was written with some pains; the cancels and various
readings bear marks of frequent rehandling. One of the latter is worth
transcription for its own excellence and also in proof of the artist's
real care for details, which his rapid instinctive way of work has induced
some to disbelieve in.
"Burnt in distant deeps or skies
The cruel fire of thine eyes?
Could heart descend or wings aspire?[16]
What the hand dare seize the fire?"
Nor has Blake left us anything of more profound and perfect value than
_The Human Abstract_; a little mythical vision of the growth of error;
through soft sophistries of pity and faith, subtle humility of abstinence
and fear, under which the pure simple nature lies corrupted and
strangled; through selfish loves which prepare a way for cruelty, and
cruelty that works by spiritual abasement and awe.
"Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the caterpillar and fly
Feed on the Mystery.
And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the raven his nest has made
In the thickest shade."
Under the shadow of this tree of mystery,[17] rooted in artificial belief,
all the meaner kind of devouring things take shelter and eat of the fruit
of its branches; the sweet poison of false faith, painted on its outer
husk with the likeness of all things noble and desirable; and in the
deepest implication of barren branch and deadly leaf, the bird of death,
with priests for worshippers ("the priests of the raven of dawn," loud of
lip and hoarse of throat until the light of day have risen), finds house
and resting-place. Only in the "miscreative brain" of fallen men can such
a thing strike its tortuous root and bring forth its fatal flower; nowhere
else in all nature can the tyrants of divided matter and moral law, "Gods
of the earth and sea," find soil that will bear such fruit.