among them have the grace of form and heat of life which are indivisible
in all higher works of poetry. One, _The Mental Traveller_, is full of
sweet and vigorous verses turned loose upon a somewhat arid and thorny
pasture. By a miracle of patient ingenuity this poem has been compelled to
utter some connected message; but it may perhaps be doubted whether the
message be not too articulate and coherent for Blake. Thus limited and
clarified, the broad chafing current of mysticism seems almost too pure
and too strait to issue from such a source: a well-head of living speech
that bursts up with sudden froth and steam through more outlets than one
at once. To have contrived such an elaborate allegory, so welded link by
sequent link together, seems an exercise of logical patience to which
Blake would hardly have submitted his passionate genius, his overstrained
and wayward will. Separate stanzas may be retraced wellnigh through every
word in other books. The latter part seems again to record, as in two
preceding poems, the perversion of love; which having annihilated all
else, falls at last to feed upon itself, to seek out strange things and
barren ways, to invent new loves and invert the old, to fill the emptied
heart and flush the subsiding veins with perverse passion. Alone in the
desert it has made, beguiled to second youth by the incessant diet of joy,
fear comes upon love; fear, and seeming hate, and weariness and cunning;
fruits of the second graft of love, not native to the simple stock: till
reduced at last to the likeness of the two extremes of life, age and
infancy, love can be no further abused or consumed. These stages of love,
once seen or heard of, allure lovers to eat of the strange fruits and herd
with the strange flocks of transforming or transformed desire; the visible
world, destroyed at the first advent of love and absorbed into the soul by
a single passion, is again felt nearer; the trees bring forth their
pleasure, and the planets lavish their light. For the second love, in its
wayward and strange delights, is a thing half material; not alien at least
from material forms, as was the first simple and spiritual ardour of equal
love. Passionate and perverse emotion touches all things with some fervent
colour of its own, mixes into all water and all wine some savour of the
dubious honey gathered from its foreign flowers. Pure first love will not
coexist with outward things, burns up with white fire all tangible form,
and so, an unfed lamp, must at last burn itself down to the stage of life
and sensation which breeds those latter loves. The babe that is "born a
boy," often painfully begot and joyfully brought forth, I take to signify
human genius or intellect, which none can touch and not be consumed except
the "woman old," faith or fear: all weaker things, pain and pleasure,
hatred and love, fly with shrieking averted faces from before it. The grey
and cruel nurse, custom or religion, crucifies and torments the child,
feeding herself upon his agony to false fresh youth; an allegory not even
literally inapt. Grown older, and seeing her made fair with his blood and
strong by his suffering, he weds her, and constrains her to do him
service, and turns her to use; custom, the daily life of men, once married
to the fresh intellect, bears fruit to him of profit and pleasure, and
becomes through him nobler than she was; but through such union he grows
old the sooner, soon can but wander round and look over his finished work
and gathered treasure, the tragic passions and splendid achievements of
his spirit, kept fresh in verse or colour; which he deals to all men
alike, giving to the poorest of this divine meat and drink, the body and
the blood of genius, caught in golden vessels of art and rhyme, that sight
and hearing may be fed. This, the supreme and most excellent delight
possible to man, is the fruit of his pain; of his suffering at the hands
of life, of his union with her as with a bride. The "female[45] babe"
sprung from the fire that burns always on his hearth, is the issue or
result of genius, which, being too strong for the father, flows into new
channels and follows after fresh ways; the thing which he has brought
forth knows him no more, but must choose its own mate or living form of
expression, and expel the former nature--casting off (as theologians say)
the old man. The outcast intellect can then be vivified only by a new
love, or by a new aim of which love is the type; a bride unlike the first,
who was old at root and in substance, young only in seeming and fair only
through cruel theft of his own life and strength; unlike also the art
which has now in its ultimate expression turned against him; love which
can change the face of former things and scatter in sunder the gatherings
of former friends; love which masters the senses and transfigures the
creatures of the earthly life, leaving no light or sustenance but what
comes of itself. Then follow the stages of love, and the phases of action
and passion bred from either stage; of these we have already taken
account. If this view of the poem be wholly or partially correct, then we
may roughly sum up the problem by saying that its real obscurity arises in
the main from a verbal confusion between the passion of art and the
passion of love. These are always spoken of by Blake in terms which prove
that in his nature the two feelings had actually grown into each other;
had become interfused past all chance of mutual extrication. Art was to
him as a lust of the body; appetite as an emotion of the soul. This
saying, true as to some extent it must be of all great men, was never so
exclusively and finally true of any other man as of this one. It is no bad
sample of Blake's hurried manner of speech, that having sustained half-way
through his poem an allegory of intellect in its relations to art and to
common life, he should suddenly stumble over a type of his own setting up,
and be led off into a new allegory of love which might better have made a
separate poem. As it is, the two symbols are welded together not without
strength and cunning of hand.
Some further and final notice may here be taken of the manifold designs
scattered about the MS. pages which we have found so prodigal of verse.
Among the most curious of these we rank a series of drawings not quite so
roughly pencilled as the rest, each inscribed with a brief text or
metrical motto. Many of these have been wrought up into the "Gates of
Paradise"; many more remain to speak and shift for themselves as they
may.[46] Published as it stands here, the series would exceed in length
the whole of that little book: and there is evidently some thread of
intended connexion between all, worn thin and all but broken. They are
numbered in a different order from that in which they stand, which is
indeed plainly a matter of chance. Several have great grace and beauty;
one in especial, where Daphne passes into the laurel; her feet are roots
already and grasp the ground with strong writhing fibres; her lifted arms
and wrestling body struggle into branch and stem, with strange labour of
the supple limbs, with agony of convulsed and loosening hair. One of the
larger designs seems to be a rough full-length study for Adam and Eve,
with these lines opposite by way of suggested epigraph:
"What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of gratified desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of gratified desire."
These are barely to be recognised in the crude sketch: the faces are
merely serious and rather grim: though designed to reproduce the sweet
silence of beauty, filling features made fair with soft natural pleasure
and a clear calm of soul and body. There is however a certain grace and
nobility of form in the straight limbs and flowing hair, not unworthy the
typical man and woman. Another design which deserves remark is a fine
sketch after the manner of the illustrations to Blake's prophecies, in
which a figure caught in the fierce slanting current of a whirlwind is
drifted sideways like a drowning swimmer under sea, below the orbit of
three mingling suns or planets seen above thick drifts of tempestuous air.
Other and better notices than ours, of various studies hidden away in the
chaos of this MS., the reader will find on reference to that admirable
Catalogue which will remain always the great witness for Blake's genius
before the eyes of all who read his life.
We have done now with the lyrical side of this poet's work,[47] and pass
on to things of less direct attraction. Those who have found any in the
record of his life and character, the study of his qualities and
abilities, may safely follow him further. The perfect sweetness and
sufficiency of his best lyrics and his best designs, we may not find; of
these we take now farewell, with thanks and final praise such as we have
to give; but we shall not fail to find the traces of a great art and an
exalted spirit, to feel about us the clear air of a great man's presence.
III.--THE PROPHETIC BOOKS.
Before entering upon any system of remark or comment on the Prophetic
Books, we may set down in as few and distinct words as possible the
reasons which make this a thing seriously worth doing; nay, even requisite
to be done, if we would know rather the actual facts of the man's nature
than the circumstances and accidents of his life. Now, first of all, we
are to recollect that Blake himself regarded these works as his greatest,
and as containing the sum of his achieved ambitions and fulfilled desires:
as in effect inspired matter, of absolute imaginative truth and eternal
import. We shall not again pause to rebut the familiar cry of response, to
the effect that he was mad and not accountable for the uttermost madness
of error. It must be enough to reply here that he was by no means mad, in
any sense that would authorise us in rejecting his own judgment of his own
aims and powers on a plea which would be held insufficient in another
man's case. Let all readers and all critics get rid of that notion for
good--clear their minds of it utterly and with all haste; let them know
and remember, having once been told it, that in these strangest of all
written books there is purpose as well as power, meaning as well as
mystery. Doubtless, nothing quite like them was ever pitched out headlong
into the world as they were. The confusion, the clamour, the jar of words
that half suffice and thoughts that half exist--all these and other more
absolutely offensive qualities--audacity, monotony, bombast, obscure play
of licence and tortuous growth of fancy--cannot quench or even wholly
conceal the living purport and the imperishable beauty which are here
latent.
And secondly we are to recollect this; that these books are not each a set
of designs with a text made by order to match, but are each a poem
composed for its own sake and with its own aim, having illustrations
arranged by way of frame or appended by way of ornament. On all grounds,
therefore, and for all serious purpose, such notices as some of those
given in this biography are actually worse than worthless. Better have
done nothing than have done this and no more. All the criticism included
as to the illustrative parts merely, is final and faultless, nothing
missed and nothing wrong; this could not have been otherwise, the work
having fallen under hands and eyes of practical taste and trained to
actual knowledge, and the assertions being therefore issued by authority.
So much otherwise has it fared with the books themselves, that (we are
compelled in this case to say it) the clothes are all right and the body
is all wrong. Passing from some phrase of high and accurate eulogy to the
raw ragged extracts here torn away and held up with the unhealed scars of
mutilation fresh and red upon them, what is any human student to think of
the poet or his praisers? what, of the assertion of his vindicated sanity
with such appalling counterproof thrust under one's eyes? In a word, it
must be said of these notices of Blake's prophetic books[48] (except
perhaps that insufficient but painstaking and well-meant chapter on the
_Marriage of Heaven and Hell_) that what has been done should not have
been done, and what should have been done has not been done.
Not that the thing was easy to do. If any one would realize to himself for
ever a material notion of chaos, let him take a blind header into the
midst of the whirling foam and rolling weed of this sea of words. Indeed
the sound and savour of these prophecies constantly recall some such idea
or some such memory. This poetry has the huge various monotonies, the
fervent and fluent colours, the vast limits, the fresh sonorous strength,
the certain confusion and tumultuous law, the sense of windy and weltering
space, the intense refraction of shadow or light, the crowded life and
inanimate intricacy, the patience and the passion of the sea. By no manner
of argument or analysis will one be made able to look back or forward with
pure confidence and comprehension. Only there are laws, strange as it must
sound, by which the work is done and against which it never sins. The
biographer once attempts to settle the matter by asserting that Blake was
given to contradict himself, by mere impulse if not by brute instinct, to
such an extent that consistency is in no sense to be sought for or
believed in throughout these works of his: and quotes, by way of ratifying
this quite false notion, a noble sentence from the _Proverbs of Hell_,
aimed by Blake with all his force against that obstinate adherence to one
external opinion which closes and hardens the spirit against all further
message from the new-grown feelings or inspiration from the altering
circumstances of a man. Never was there an error more grave or more
complete than this. The expression shifts perpetually, the types blunder
into new forms, the meaning tumbles into new types; the purpose remains,
and the faith keeps its hold.
There are certain errors and eccentricities of manner and matter alike
common to nearly all these books, and distinctly referable to the
character and training of the man. Not educated in any regular or rational
way, and by nature of an eagerly susceptible and intensely adhesive mind,
in which the lyrical faculty had gained and kept a preponderance over all
others visible in every scrap of his work, he had saturated his thoughts
and kindled his senses with a passionate study of the forms of the Bible
as translated into English, till his fancy caught a feverish contagion and
his ear derived a delirious excitement from the mere sound and shape of
the written words and verses. Hence the quaint and fervent imitation of
style, the reproduction of peculiarities which to most men are meaningless
when divested of their old sense or invested with a new. Hence the
bewildering catalogues, genealogies, and divisions which (especially in
such later books as the _Jerusalem_) seem at first invented only to strike
any miserable reader with furious or lachrymose lunacy. Hence, though
heaven knows by no fault of the originals, the insane cosmogony, blatant
mythology, and sonorous aberration of thoughts and theories. Hence also
much of the special force and supreme occasional loveliness or grandeur in
expression. Conceive a man incomparably gifted as to the spiritual side of
art, prone beyond all measure to the lyrical form of work, incredibly
contemptuous of all things and people dissimilar to himself, of an
intensely sensitive imagination and intolerant habit of faith, with a
passionate power of peculiar belief, taking with all his might of mental
nerve and strain of excitable spirit to a perusal and reperusal of such
books as Job and Ezekiel. Observe too that his tone of mind was as far
from being critical as from being orthodox. Thus his ecstacy of study was
neither on the one side tempered and watered down by faith in established
forms and external creeds, nor on the other side modified and directed by
analytic judgment and the lust of facts. To Blake either form of mind was
alike hateful. Like the Moses of Rabbinical tradition, he was "drunken
with the kisses of the lips of God." Rational deism and clerical religion
were to him two equally abhorrent incarnations of the same evil spirit,
appearing now as negation and now as restriction. He wanted supremacy of
freedom with intensity of faith. Hence he was properly neither Christian
nor infidel: he was emphatically a heretic. Such men, according to the
temper of the times, are burnt as demoniacs or pitied as lunatics. He
believed in redemption by Christ, and in the incarnation of Satan as
Jehovah. He believed that by self-sacrifice the soul should attain freedom
and victorious deliverance from bodily bondage and sexual servitude; and
also that the extremest fullness of indulgence in such desire and such
delight as the senses can aim at or attain was absolutely good, eternally
just, and universally requisite. These opinions, and stranger than these,
he put forth in the cloudiest style, the wilfullest humour, and the
stormiest excitement. No wonder the world let his books drift without
caring to inquire what gold or jewels might be washed up as waifs from the
dregs of churned foam and subsiding surf. He was the very man for fire and
faggot; a mediaeval inquisitor would have had no more doubt about him than
a materialist or "theophilanthropist" of his own day or of ours.
A wish is expressed in the _Life_ that we could accompany the old man who
appears entering an open door, star in hand, at the beginning of the
_Jerusalem_, and thread by his light those infinite dark passages and
labyrinthine catacombs of invention or thought. In default of that
desirable possibility, let us make such way as we can for ourselves into
this submarine world, along its slippery and unpaven ways, under its roof
of hollow sound and tumbling storm.
"We shall see, while above us
The waves roar and whirl,
A ceiling of amber,
A pavement of pearl."
At the entrance of the labyrinth we are met by huge mythologic figures,
created of fire and cloud. Titans of monstrous form and yet more monstrous
name obstruct the ways; sickness or sleep never formed such savage
abstractions, such fierce vanities of vision as these: office and speech
they seem at first to have none: but to strike or clutch at the void of
air with feeble fingers, to babble with vast lax lips a dialect barren of
all but noise, loud and loose as the wind. Slowly they grow into something
of shape, assume some foggy feature and indefinite colour: word by word
the fluctuating noise condenses into music, the floating music divides
into audible notes and scales. The sound which at first was as the mere
collision of cloud with cloud is now the recognizable voice of god or
demon. Chaos is cloven into separate elements; air divides from water, and
earth releases fire. Upon each of these the prophet, as it were, lays
hand, compelling the thing into shape and speech, constraining the
abstract to do service as a man might. These and such as these make up the
personal staff or executive body of his prophecies. But it would be waste
of time to conjecture how or why he came to inflict upon them such
incredible names. These hapless energies and agencies are not simply cast
into the house of allegoric bondage, and set to make bricks without straw,
to construct symbols without reason; but find themselves baptized with
muddy water and fitful fire, by names inconceivable, into a church full of
storm and vapour; regenerated with a vengeance, but disembodied and
disfigured in their resurrection. Space fell into sleep, and awoke as
Enitharmon: Time suffered eclipse, and came forth as Los. The Christ or
Prometheus of this faith is Orc or Fuzon; Urizen takes the place of
"Jehovah, Jove, or Lord." Hardly in such chaotic sounds can one discern
the slightest element of reason gone mad, the narrowest channel of
derivation run dry. In this last word, one of incessant recurrence, there
seems to flicker a thin reminiscence of such names as Uranus, Uriel, and
perhaps Urien; for the deity has a diabolic savour in him, and Blake was
not incapable of mixing the Hellenic, the Miltonic, and the Celtic
mythologies into one drugged and adulterated compound. He had read much
and blindly; he had no leaning to verbal accuracy, and never acquired any
faculty of comparison. Any sound that in the dimmest way suggested to him
a notion of hell or heaven, of passion or power, was significant enough to
adopt and register. Commentary was impossible to him: if his work could
not be apprehended or enjoyed by an instinct of inspiration like his own,
it was lost labour to dissect or expound; and here, if ever, translation
would have been treason. He took the visions as they came; he let the
words lie as they fell. These barbarous and blundering names are not
always without a certain kind of melody and an uncertain sort of meaning.
Such as they are, they must be endured; or the whole affair must be tossed
aside and thrown up. Over these clamorous kingdoms of speech and dream
some few ruling forces of supreme discord preside: and chiefly the lord of
the world of man; Urizen, God of cloud and star, "Father of jealousy,"
clothed with a splendour of shadow, strong and sad and cruel; his planet
faintly glimmers and slowly revolves, a horror in heaven; the night is a
part of his thought, rain and wind are in the passage of his feet; sorrow
is in all his works; he is the maker of mortal things, of the elements
and sexes; in him are incarnate that jealousy which the Hebrews
acknowledged and that envy which the Greeks recognized in the divine
nature; in his worship faith remains one with fear. Star and cloud, the
types of mystery and distance, of cold alienation and heavenly jealousy,
belong of right to the God who grudges and forbids: even as the spirit of
revolt is made manifest in fiery incarnation--pure prolific fire, "the
cold loins of Urizen dividing." These two symbols of "cruel fear" or
"starry jealousy" in the divine tyrant, of ardent love or creative lust in
the rebellious saviour of man, pervade the mystical writings of Blake.
Orc, the man-child, with hair and flesh like fire, son of Space and Time,
a terror and a wonder from the hour of his birth, containing within
himself the likeness of all passions and appetites of men, is cast out
from before the face of heaven; and falling upon earth, a stronger Vulcan
or Satan, fills with his fire the narrowed foreheads and the darkened eyes
of all that dwell thereon; imprisoned often and fed from vessels of iron
with barren food and bitter drink,[49] a wanderer or a captive upon earth,
he shall rise again when his fire has spread through all lands to inflame
and to infect with a strong contagion the spirit and the sense of man, and
shall prevail against the law and the commandments of his enemy. This
endless myth of oppression and redemption, of revelation and revolt, runs
through many forms and spills itself by strange straits and byways among
the sands and shallows of prophetic speech. But in these books there is
not the substantial coherence of form and reasonable unity of principle
which bring within scope of apprehension even the wildest myths grown out
of unconscious idealism and impulsive tradition. A single man's work,
however exclusively he may look to inspiration for motive and material,
must always want the breadth and variety of meaning, the supple beauty of
symbol, the infectious intensity of satisfied belief, which grow out of
creeds and fables native to the spirit of a nation, yet peculiar to no man
or sect, common yet sacred, not invented or constructed, but found growing
and kept fresh with faith. But for all the dimness and violence of
expression which pervert and darken the mythology of these attempts at
gospel, they have qualities great enough to be worth finding out. Only let
none conceive that each separate figure in the swarming and noisy life of
this populous daemonic creation has individual meaning and vitality. Blake
was often taken off his feet by the strong currents of fancy, and
indulged, like a child during its first humour of invention, in wild
byplay and erratic excesses of simple sound; often lost his way in a maze
of wind-music, and transcribed as it were with eyes closed and open ears
the notes caught by chance as they drifted across the dream of his
subdued senses. Alternating between lyrical invention and gigantic
allegory, it is hard to catch and hold him down to any form or plan. At
one time we have mere music, chains of ringing names, scattered jewels of
sound without a thread, tortuous network of harmonies without a clue; and
again we have passages, not always unworthy of an Aeschylean chorus, full
of fate and fear; words that are strained wellnigh in sunder by strong
significance and earnest passion; words that deal greatly with great
things, that strike deep and hold fast; each inclusive of some fierce
apocalypse or suggestive of some obscure evangel. Now the matter in hand
is touched with something of an epic style; the narrative and characters
lose half their hidden sense, and the reciter passes from the prophetic
tripod to the seat of a common singer; mere names, perhaps not even
musical to other ears than his, allure and divert him; he plays with
stately cadences, and lets the wind of swift or slow declamation steer him
whither it will. Now again he falls with renewed might of will to his
purpose; and his grand lyrical gift becomes an instrument not sonorous
merely but vocal and articulate. To readers who can but once take their
stand for a minute on the writer's footing, look for a little with his
eyes and listen with his ears, even the more incoherent cadences will
become not undelightful; something of his pleasure, with something of his
perception, will pass into them; and understanding once the main gist of
the whole fitful and high-strung tune, they will tolerate, where they
cannot enjoy, the strange diversities and discords which intervene.