than in the last of the _Songs of Experience_. "Tirzah," in his
mythology, represents the mere separate and human nature, mother of the
perishing body and daughter of the "religion" which occupies itself with
laying down laws for the flesh; which, while pretending (and that in all
good faith) to despise the body and bring it into subjection as with
control of bit and bridle, does implicitly overrate its power upon the
soul for evil or good, and thus falls foul of fact on all sides by
assuming that spirit and flesh are twain, and that things pleasant and
good for the one can properly be loathsome or poisonous to the other. This
"religion" or "moral law," the inexplicable prophet has chosen to baptize
under the singular type of "Rahab"--the "harlot virgin-mother," impure by
dint of chastity and forbearance from such things as are pure to the pure
of heart: for in this creed the one thing unclean is the belief in
uncleanness, the one thing forbidden is to believe in the existence of
forbidden things. Of this mystical mother and her daughter we shall have
to take some further account when once fairly afloat on those windy waters
of prophecy through which all who would know Blake to any purpose must be
content to steer with such pilotage as they can get. For the present it
will be enough to note how eager and how direct is the appeal here made
against any rule or reasoning based on reference to the mere sexual and
external nature of man--the nature made for ephemeral life and speedy
death, kept alive "to work and weep" only through that mercy which
"changed death into sleep"; how intense the reliance on redemption from
such a law by the grace of imaginative insight and spiritual freedom,
typified in "the death of Jesus."[18] Nor are any of these poems finer in
structure or nobler in metrical form.
This present edition of the _Songs of Experience_ is richer by one of
Blake's most admirable poems of childhood--a division of his work always
of especial value for its fresh and sweet strength of feeling and of
words. In this newly recovered _Cradle Song_ are perhaps the two loveliest
lines of his writing:
"Sleep, sleep: in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit and weep."[19]
Before parting from this chief lyrical work of the poet's, we may notice
(rather for its convenience as an explanation than its merit as a piece of
verse) this projected _Motto to the Songs of Innocence and of
Experience_, which editors have left hitherto in manuscript:
"The good are attracted by men's perceptions,
And think not for themselves
Till Experience teaches them how to catch
And to cage the Fairies and Elves.
And then the Knave begins to snarl,
And the Hypocrite to howl;
And all his[20] good friends show their private ends,
And the Eagle is known from the Owl."
Experience must do the work of innocence as soon as conscience begins to
take the place of instinct, reflection of perception; but the moment
experience begins upon this work, men raise against her the conventional
clamour of envy and stupidity. She teaches how to entrap and retain such
fugitive delights as children and animals enjoy without seeking to catch
or cage them; but this teaching the world calls sin, and the law of
material religion condemns: the face of "Tirzah" is set against it, in the
"shame and pride" of sex.
"Thou, mother of my mortal part,
With cruelty didst mould my heart,
And with false self-deceiving fears
Didst bind my nostrils, eyes, and ears."
And thus those who live in subjection to the senses would in their turn
bring the senses into subjection; unable to see beyond the body, they find
it worth while to refuse the body its right to freedom.
In these hurried notes on the _Songs_ an effort has been made to get that
done which is most absolutely necessary--not that which might have been
most facile or most delightful. Analytic remark has been bestowed on those
poems only which really cannot dispense with it in the eyes of most men.
Many others need no herald or interpreter, demand no usher or outrider:
some of these are among Blake's best, some again almost among his
worst.[21] Poems in which a doctrine or subject once before nobly stated
and illustrated is re-asserted in a shallower way and exemplified in a
feebler form,[22] require at our hands no written or spoken signs of
either assent or dissent. Such poems, as the editor has well indicated,
have places here among their betters: none of them, it may be added,
without some shell of outward beauty or seed of inward value. The simpler
poems claim only praise; and of this they cannot fail from any reader
whose good word is in the least worth having. Those of a subtler kind
(often, as must now be clear enough, the best worth study) claim more than
this if they are to have fair play. It is pleasant enough to commend and
to enjoy the palpable excellence of Blake's work; but another thing is
simply and thoroughly requisite--to understand what the workman was after.
First get well hold of the mystic, and you will then at once get a better
view and comprehension of the painter and poet. And if through fear of
tedium or offence a student refuses to be at such pains, he will find
himself, while following Blake's trace as poet or painter, brought up
sharply within a very short tether. "It is easy," says Blake himself in
the _Jerusalem_, "to acknowledge a man to be great and good while we
derogate from him in the trifles and small articles of that goodness;
those alone are his friends who admire his minute powers."
Looking into the larger MS. volume of notes we seem to gain at once a
clearer insight into the writer's daily habit of life and tone of thought,
and a power of judging more justly the sort of work left us by way of
result. Here, as by fits and flashes, one is enabled to look in upon that
strange small household, so silent and simple on the outside, so content
to live in the poorest domestic way, without any show of eccentric
indulgence or erratic aspiration; husband and wife to all appearance the
commonest citizens alive, satisfied with each other and with their minute
obscure world and straitened limits of living. No typical churchwarden or
clerk of the parish could rub on in a more taciturn modest manner, or seem
able to make himself happy with smaller things. It may be as well for us
to hear his own account of the matter:
PRAYER.
I.
"I rose up at the dawn of day;
'Get thee away; get thee away!
Pray'st thou for riches? away, away!
This is the throne of Mammon grey.'
II.
Said I, 'This sure is very odd;
I took it to be the throne of God;
For everything besides I have;
It is only for riches that _I_ can crave.
III.
'I have mental joys and mental health,
And mental friends and mental wealth;
I've a wife I love and that loves me;
I've all but riches bodily;
IV.
'Then, if for riches I must not pray,
God knows I little of prayers need say;
So, as a church is known by its steeple,
If I pray, it must be for other people.
V.
'I am in God's presence night and day,
And he never turns his face away;
The accuser of sins by my side does stand,
And he holds my money-bag in his hand;
VI.
'For my worldly things God makes him pay,
And he'd pay for more if to him I would pray;
And so you may do the worst you can do,
Be assured, Mr. Devil, I won't pray to you.
VII.
'He says, if I do not worship him for a God,[23]
I shall eat coarser food and go worse shod;
So, as I don't value such things as these,
You must do, Mr. Devil--just as God please.'"
One cannot doubt that to a man of this temper his life was endurable
enough. Faith in God and goodwill towards men came naturally to him, being
a mystic; on the one side he had all he wanted, and on the other he wanted
nothing. The praise and discipleship of men might no doubt have added a
kind of pleasure to his way of life, but they could neither give nor take
away what he most desired to have; and this he never failed of having. His
wife, of whose "goodness" to him he has himself borne ample witness, was
company enough for all days. And indeed, by all the evidence left us, it
appears that this goodness of hers was beyond example. Another woman of
the better sort might have had equal patience with his habit of speech and
life, equal faith in his great capacity and character; but hardly in
another woman could such a man have found an equal strength and sweetness
of trust, an equal ardour of belief and tenderness, an equal submission of
soul and body for love's sake;--submission so perfect and so beautiful in
the manner of it, that the idea of sacrifice or a separate will seems
almost impossible. A man living with such a wife might well believe in
some immediate divine presence and in visible faces like the face of an
angel. We have not now of course much chance of knowing at all what
manner of angel she was; but the few things we do know of her, no form of
words can fitly express. To praise such people is merely to waste words in
saying that divine things are praiseworthy. No doubt, if we knew how to
praise them, they would deserve that we should try.[24]
The notes bearing in any way upon this daily life of Blake's are few and
exceptional. In the mass of floating verse and prose there is absolutely
no hint of order whatever, save that, at one end of the MS., some short
poems are transcribed in a slightly more coherent form. Among these and
the other lyrics, strewn as from a liberal but too lax hand about the
chaotic leaves of his note-book, are many of Blake's best things. Some of
the slight and scrawled designs, as noted in the _Catalogue_ (pp. 242,
243), have also a merit and a power of their own; but it is with the
poet's lyrical work that we have to do at this point of our present notes;
and here we may most fitly wind up what remains to be said on that matter.
The inexhaustible equable gift of Blake for the writing of short sweet
songs is perceptible at every turn we take in this labyrinth of lovely
words, of strong and soft designs. Considering how wide is the range of
date from the earliest of these songs to the latest, they seem more
excellently remote than ever from the day's verse and the day's habit.
They reach in point of time from the season of Mason to the season of
Moore; and never in any interval of work by any chance influence do these
poems at their weakest lapse into likeness or tolerance of the accepted
models. From the era of plaster to the era of pinchbeck, Blake kept
straight ahead of the times. To the pseudo-Hellenic casts of the one
school or the pseudo-Hibernian tunes of the other he was admirably deaf
and blind. While a grazing public straightened its bovine neck and
steadied its flickering eyelids to look up betweenwhiles, with the day's
damp fodder drooping half-chewed from its relaxed jaw, at some dim sick
planet of the Mason system, there was a poet, alive if obscure, who had
eyes to behold
"the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the sun, that now
From ancient melody have ceased;"
who had ears to hear and lips to reveal the music and the splendour and
the secret of the high places of verse. Again, in a changed century, when
the reading and warbling world was fain to drop its daily tear and stretch
its daily throat at the bidding of some Irish melodist--when the "female
will" of "Albion" thought fit to inhale with wide and thankful nostril the
rancid flavour of rotten dance-roses and mouldy musk, to feed "in a
feminine delusion" upon the sodden offal of perfumed dog's-meat, and take
it for the very eucharist of Apollo--then too, while this worship of ape
or beetle went so noisily on, the same poet could let fall from lavish
hand or melodious mouth such grains of solid gold and flakes of perfect
honey as this:--
"Silent, silent night,
Quench the holy light
Of thy torches bright;
For possessed of day,
Thousand spirits stray,
That sweet joys betray.
Why should love be sweet,
Used with deceit,
Nor with sorrows meet?"
Verse more nearly faultless and of a more difficult perfection was never
accomplished. The sweet facility of being right, proper to great lyrical
poets, was always an especial quality of Blake's. To go the right way and
do the right thing, was in the nature of his metrical gift--a faculty
mixed into the very flesh and blood of his verse.
There is in all these straying songs the freshness of clear wind and
purity of blowing rain: here a perfume as of dew or grass against the sun,
there a keener smell of sprinkled shingle and brine-bleached sand; some
growth or breath everywhere of blade or herb leaping into life under the
green wet light of spring; some colour of shapely cloud or mound of
moulded wave. The verse pauses and musters and falls always as a wave
does, with the same patience of gathering form, and rounded glory of
springing curve, and sharp sweet flash of dishevelled and flickering foam
as it curls over, showing the sun through its soft heaving side in veins
of gold that inscribe and jewels of green that inlay the quivering and
sundering skirt or veil of thinner water, throwing upon the tremulous
space of narrowing sea in front, like a reflection of lifted and vibrating
hair, the windy shadow of its shaken spray. The actual page seems to take
life, to assume sound and colour, under the hands that turn it and the
lips that read; we feel the falling of dew and have sight of the rising of
stars. For the very sound of Blake's verse is no less remote from the
sound of common things and days on earth than is the sense or the
sentiment of it.
"O what land is the land of dreams?
What are its mountains and what are its streams?
--O father, I saw my mother there,
Among the lilies by waters fair.
* * * * *
--Dear child, I also by pleasant streams
Have wandered all night in the land of dreams;
But though calm and warm the waters wide
I could not get to the other side."
We may say of Blake that he never got back from that other side--only came
and stood sometimes, as Chapman said of Marlowe in his great plain fashion
of verse, "up to the chin in that Pierian flood," and so sang half-way
across the water.
Nothing in the _Songs of Innocence_ is more beautiful as a study of
childish music than the little poem from which we have quoted; written in
a metre which many expert persons have made hideous, and few could at any
time manage as Blake did--a scheme in which the soft and loose iambics
lapse into sudden irregular sound of full anapaests, not without increase
of grace and impulsive tenderness in the verse. Given a certain attainable
average of intellect and culture, these points of workmanship, by dint of
the infinite gifts or the infinite wants they imply, become the swiftest
and surest means of testing a verse-writer's perfection of power, and what
quality there may be in him to warrant his loftiest claim. By these you
see whether a man can sing, as by his drawing and colouring whether he can
paint. Another specimen of indefinable sweetness and significance we may
take in this symbolic little piece of song;
"I walked abroad on a sunny day;
I wooed the soft snow with me to play.
She played and she melted in all her prime;
And the winter called it a dreadful crime."[25]
Against the "winter" of ascetic law and moral prescription Blake never
slackens in his fiery animosity; never did a bright hot wind of March make
such war upon the cruel inertness of February. In his obscure way he was
always hurrying into the van of some forlorn hope of ethics. Even Shelley,
who as we said was no less ready to serve in the same camp all his life
long, never shot keener or hotter shafts of lyrical speech into the
enemy's impregnable ground. Both poets seem to have tried about alike, and
with equally questionable results, at a regular blockade of the steep
central fortress of "Urizen;" both after a little personal practice fell
back, not quite unscarred, upon light skirmishing and the irregular work
of chance guerilla campaigns. Moral custom, "that twice-battered god of
Palestine" round which all Philistia rallies (specially strong in her
British brigade), seemed to suffer little from all their slings and
arrows. Being mere artists, they were perhaps at root too innocent to do
as much harm as they desired, or to desire as much harm as they might have
done. Blake indeed never proposed to push matters quite to such a verge as
the other was content to stand on during his _Laon and Cythna_ period;
from that inconceivable edge of theory or sensation he would probably have
drawn back with some haste. But such sudden cries of melodious revolt as
this were not rare on his part.[26]
"Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,
But desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there."
Assuredly he never made a more supremely noble and enjoyable effect of
verse than that; the cadence of the first two lines is something hardly to
be matched anywhere: the verse (to resume our old simile for a moment)
turns over and falls in with the sudden weight and luminous motion of a
strong long roller coming in with the wind. So again, lying sad and sick
under his marriage myrtle, even in a full rain of fragrant and brilliant
blossoms that fall round him to waste, he must needs ask and answer the
fatal final question.
"Why should I be bound to thee,
O my lovely myrtle-tree?
Love, free love, cannot be bound
To any tree that grows on ground."
Mixed with this fervour of desire for more perfect freedom, there appears
at times an excess of pity (like Chaucer's in his early poems) for the
women and men living under the law, trammelled in soul or body. For
example, the poem called _Infant Sorrow_, in the _Songs of Experience_,
ran at first to a greater length and through stranger places than it now
overflows into; and is worth giving here in its original form as extracted
by cautious picking and sifting from a heap of tumbled readings.
I.
"My mother groaned, my father wept;
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
II.
Struggling in my father's hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother's breast.
III.
When I saw that rage was vain
And to sulk would nothing gain,
Twining many a trick and wile
I began to soothe and smile.
IV.
And I grew[27] day after day,
Till upon the ground I lay;
And I grew[27] night after night,
Seeking only for delight.
V.
And I saw before me shine
Clusters of the wandering vine;
And many a lovely flower and tree
Stretched their blossoms out to me.
VI.
But many a priest[28] with holy look,
In their hands a holy book,
Pronounced curses on his head
Who the fruit or blossoms shed.
VII.
I beheld the priests by night;
They embraced the blossoms bright;
I beheld the priests by day;
Underneath the vines they lay.
VIII.
Like to serpents in the night,
They embraced my blossoms bright;
Like to holy men by day,
Underneath my vines they lay.
IX.
So I smote them, and their gore
Stained the roots my myrtle bore;
But the time of youth is fled,
And grey hairs are on my head."
Now not even the spilt blood of those who forbid and betray shall quicken
the dried root or flush the faded leaf of love; the myrtle being past all
comfort of soft rain or helpful sun. So in the _Rose-Tree_ (vol. ii. p.
60), when for the sake of a barren material fidelity to his "rose" of
marriage, he has passed over the offered flower "such as May never bore,"
the rose herself "turns away with jealousy," and gives him thorns for
thanks: nothing left of it for hand or lip but collapsed blossom and
implacable edges of brier. Blake might have kept in mind the end of his
actual wild vine (vol. i. p. 100 of the _Life_), which ran all to leaf and
never brought a grape worth eating, for fault of pruning-hooks and
vine-dressers.
In all this there is a certain unmistakeable innocence which accounts for
the practical modesty and peaceable forbearance of the man's way of
living. The material shape of his speculations never goes beyond a sort of
boyish defiant complaint, a half-humorous revolt of the will. Inconstancy
with him is not rooted in satiety, but in the freshness of pure pleasure;
he would never cast off the old to put on the new. The chain once broken,
against which between sleeping and waking he chafes and wrestles, he would
lie for most hours of the day with content enough in the old shade of
wedded rose or myrtle tree. Nor in leaping or reaching after the new
flower would he wilfully bruise or break the least bud of the old. His
desire is towards the freedom of the dawn of things--not towards the "dark
secret hour" that walks under coverings of cloud.
"Are not the joys of morning sweeter
Than the joys of night?"
The sinless likeness of his seeming "sins"--mere fancies as it appears
they mostly were, mere soft light aspirations of theory without body or
flesh on them--has something of the innocent immodesty of a birds' or
babies' paradise--of a fools' paradise, too, translated into the practice
and language of the untheoretic world. Shelley's "Epipsychidion" scarcely
preaches a more bodiless evangel of bodily liberty. That famous and
exquisitely written passage beginning, "True love in this differs from
gold and clay," delivers in more daringly definite words the exact message
of Blake's belief.
Nowhere has the note of pity been more strongly and sweetly struck than in
those lovely opening verses of the "Garden of Love," which must here be
read once again:--
"I laid me down upon a bank
Where Love lay sleeping:
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.
Then I went to the heath and the wild,
To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
And they told me how they were beguiled,
Driven out, and compelled to be chaste."
The sharp and subtle change of metre here and at the end of the poem has
an audacity of beauty and a justice of impulse proper only to the leaders
of lyrical verse: unfit alike for definition and for imitation, if any
copyist were to try his hand at it. The next song we transcribe from the
"Ideas" is lighter in tone than usual, and admirable for humorous
imagination; a light of laughter shines and sounds through the words.
THE WILL AND THE WAY.
"I asked a thief to steal me a peach;
He turned up his eyes;
I asked a lithe lady to lie her down
Holy and meek, she cries.
As soon as I went
An angel came;
He winked at the thief
And smiled at the dame;
And without one word spoke
Had a peach from the tree;
And 'twixt earnest and joke
Enjoyed the lady."[29]
A much better and more solid version of the same fancy than the one given
in the "Selections" under the head of "Love's Secret;" which is rather
weakly and lax in manner. Our present poem has on the other hand an
exquisite "lithe" grace of limb and suppleness of step, suiting
deliciously with the "light high laugh" in its tone: while for sweet and
rapid daring, for angelically puerile impudence as it were, it may be
matched against any song of its fantastic sort.
Less complete in a small way, but worth taking some care of, is this carol
of a fairy, emblem of a man's light hard tyranny of will, calling upon the
birds in the harness of Venus and the shafts in the hand of her son for
help in setting up the kingdom of established and legal love: but caught
himself in the very setting of his net.
THE MARRIAGE RING.
"'Come hither, my sparrows,
My little arrows.
If a tear or a smile
Will a man beguile,
If an amorous delay
Clouds a sunshiny day,
If the step of a foot
Smites the heart to its root,
'Tis the marriage ring
Makes each fairy a king.'
So a fairy sang.
From the leaves I sprang;
He leaped from his spray
To flee away:
But in my hat caught,
He soon shall be taught,
Let him laugh, let him cry,
He's my butterfly:
For I've pulled out the sting
Of the marriage ring."
It is not so easy to turn wasps to butterflies in the world of average
things; but, as far as verses go, there are few of more supple sweetness
than some of these. They recall the light lapse of measure found in the
beautiful older germs of nursery rhyme;[30] and the seeming retributive
triumph of married lovers over unmarried, of wedlock over courtship, could
not well be more gracefully translated than in the "Fairy's" call to his
winged and feathered "arrows"--the lover's swift birds of prey, not
without beak and claw. "If they do for a minute or so darken our days,
dupe our fancies, prevail upon our nerves and blood, once well married we
are kings of them at least." Pull out that sting of jealous reflective
egotism, and your tamed "fairy"--the love that is in a man once set
right--has no point or poison left it, but only rapid grace of wing and
natural charm of colour.
Throughout the "Ideas" one or two other favourite points of faith and
feeling are incessantly thrown out in new fugitive forms; such as the last
(rejected) stanza of "Cupid," which, though the song may well dispense
with it and even gain by such a loss in the qualities of shape or sound,
must be saved if only as a specimen of the persistent way in which Blake
assumed the Greek and Roman habits of mind or art to be typical of "war"
and restraint; an iron frame of mind good to fight in and not good for
love to grow under.
"'Twas the Greek love of war
That turned Love into a boy[31]
And woman into a statue of stone;
And away fled every joy."