THE PROPHETIC BOOKS
"The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they
dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them, and whether they did
not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, and so be the
cause of imposition?
"Isaiah answer'd. I saw no God nor heard any, in a finite organical
perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in everything, and as I
was then persuaded and remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest
indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote."
These words are quoted from one of Blake's "Memorable Fancies" in the
"Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and in some such vein as that which Blake
makes Isaiah describe, did he himself commence the writing of the
"Prophetic Books." The sense of his great, though somewhat indefinite
mission, came upon Blake gradually. Much of his time, even when engaged in
designing, engraving and painting, was spent in thinking immense and
original thoughts. They tyrannized over him, these thoughts, and instead
of his guiding their sun-ward and most daring flight, they drew him along
on their reckless course, sometimes bringing him to complete overthrow, as
did the horses of Apollo when driven by Phaethon.
In the same "Memorable Fancy" from which I have already quoted, Blake
continues, "Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He
(Isaiah) replied, All poets believe that it does, and in ages of
imagination this firm persuasion moved mountains: but many are not capable
of a firm persuasion of anything."
Blake, however, _was_. He had a fine contempt for argument and proof.
Nothing mattered to him but the inner witness, the lively intuition of
internal evidence. Convinced as he was of the cruelty of the fate that had
chained eternal man into the bondage of the life of the senses and the
division of the sexes; safe-guarding each self-hood from merging in the
universal, by laws of restraint and prohibition, Blake took upon himself
to proclaim a gospel of deliverance, to awaken man to the perception of
the Infinite which lay without the clogged-up chinks of his senses.
He passionately advocated--Blake, the peaceful citizen, the faithful
husband--the freedom of the senses, that all natural impulses should be
enjoyed to the utmost limit and with the frankest delight. The body is but
the accident of this life, and its free natural impulses may be trusted,
for everything that tends to freedom belongs to eternal life, he thought.
Christ was the supreme Saviour, but to his eyes the Christ of orthodox
religion was the God of this world, and therefore Christ needed to be held
up again before men and exhibited as He really is, before He could be
worshipped in truth.
And Jehovah was no other than Urizen, the cruel creator. In storm and
excitement, in wrapt ecstasy and complete carelessness of consequence,
Blake plunged into the sea of subjective mysticism, holding up from time
to time out of the swaying waters lipped with raging foam, some treasure
of thought, some broken image of speculative opinion for the world to gaze
at. The pity is, that Blake who, in the "Songs of Innocence and
Experience" and in his early poems, had so just, though instinctive and
irrational, a sense of the relation of poetic form to matter, as to weave
his lyrics into "a unity of effect, like that of a single strain of
music," should, in the "Prophetic Books" have suddenly lost, as it would
seem, all perception of the claims of his subject-matter to any body of
poetic form at all. The absence of almost all orderly sequence of thought,
and this total disregard of the paramount artistic obligations of form,
are the distinguishing characteristics of the mystic writings.
It must, however, be recorded in extenuation, that they were composed for
the intrinsic benefit which Blake himself derived from their creation.
Hints, symbols, rags of ideas set fluttering on the wind of his
ever-inventive imagination, suggested so complete a sequence of thought
and action to him, that he failed, in his passionate excitement and hot
pursuit of them, to reflect that he had forgotten to state for our
enlightenment that sequence which seemed to him so obvious. He was not
concerned to make his ideas or visions intelligible to the world (the
world must learn to decipher them for itself), for were they not fearfully
intelligible to himself, absorbing all his life and consciousness?
Like a man intent and fixed before a vast and ever-moving pageant, he
throws out a quick word of explanation, an occasional exclamation of
enthusiasm, to the blindfolded world at his side. So present is the
reality to his senses, that he feels only impatient with the dull creature
which requires so much explanation and description. "I have told you, and
you did not listen," he seems to say. But listen as we may, to the point
of an anguished intensity, the marvellous Vision, Representation, mystic
Something, which is being enacted before Blake, can, with the help of his
jerky and disjointed speech, be but vaguely and painfully guessed at by
us. Whatever virtue may reside in these dream-like books for the mystic
and the occultist, their poetry is not a winged and triumphant spirit any
more, but a poor, wan, and halting creature, creeping painfully upon the
earth on all fours. Swinburne writes on the subject with poetic eloquence:
"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.'... 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."
Let these gentle and appropriate words smooth the literary path of the
"Prophetic Books" for all who intend to read them. It will be a difficult
one for those who would study them seriously, even with the light shed by
Mr. Swinburne's and Messrs. Ellis and Yeats' pioneer lanterns, for the
road is rough and rock-bound, and shrouded, for the most part, in mist.
If we are forced to admit that in the prophecies Blake's power in the art
of poetry was declining, we shall have, on the other hand, the
satisfaction of seeing his art as draughtsman and colourist waxing in
grandeur, freedom and nobility. More than ever in Blake's strangely
sensitive pictorial temperament we find--to quote Pater's subtle
phrase--that "all things whatever, all poetry, all ideas, however abstract
or obscure, float up as visible scene or image." To many of his lovers,
the "Prophetic Books" are among his most precious gifts to us, not for
their intrinsic poetic value (which will be estimated in divers manners by
divers persons), but as being the vehicle of his finest art. The first one
we take up is the "Vision of the Daughters of Albion." (The daughters of
Albion, by the way, have little enough to do with the poem, their office
being merely like that of a Greek chorus, to hear the woes of the heroine
Oothoon and echo back her cries.) I am here referring to the one in the
Print Room, though the Library possesses an almost equally beautiful copy.
The book consists of eleven quarto pages, and appeared in 1793, just five
years later than "Thel," to whose mysterious and delicate beauty it has a
shadowy relationship. The thread of poetic suggestion running through it
like a streak of sunlight is not so easy of following as the broad golden
ray of "Thel." We are met at the very entrance by dim, unreal forms, with
strange names--Oothoon, the shadowy female around whom the story centres,
Theotormon, her jealous lover, and Bromion, a looming phantasmal
personage, not definite enough to be terrible, though he is the evil
genius of the piece. So now we are at last introduced to some of the
personages of Blake's curious mythology. The argument--a page of the most
delicate and energetic design, representing a radiant young woman
"plucking Leutha's flower," which, in the form of a man, leaps from the
blossom to her lips--contains in its two initial verses the clue to all
the ensuing legend. Oothoon is, according to Mr. Swinburne, the spirit of
the great western world, "born for freedom and rebellion, but half a slave
and half a harlot." Leutha is the spirit of sensual impulse and
indulgence.
Theotormon, to whom Oothoon wings her way across the seas, is the strong,
enslaved, convention-bound spirit of Europe. On her way, Oothoon is
ravished by Bromion, who appears to be merely brute strength personified,
and the jealous and revengeful Theotormon binds them back to back in a
cave by the sea, and sits down in utter wretchedness near by. All the rest
of the piece is occupied by the mournful wailing of Oothoon, who desires
to justify herself, and the sad answers of Theotormon, which make a
disquieting music like the wind among pine-trees.
Those who desire to know exactly what every vague phrase and unconnected
thought may be ingeniously supposed to symbolize, must be referred to
Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, who have possibly alighted on the real meaning
and intention of these wild fancies. No system, not even that of the Zoas,
ingenious as it is, seems quite to convince one that it is the ground plan
of Blake's work. For my own part I shall not attempt systematic
explanations of the "Prophetic Books," for which task, indeed, I am
entirely unfitted, but shall merely reserve to myself the right of making
suggestions as to possible meanings when they occur to me.
The beauty of the designs is the real glory of this and the following
books.
The Argument and a very notable bit of decorative design and colour,
representing the Eagle of Theotormon in the act of descending and tearing
the beautiful, abandoned, white body of Oothoon, lying on a billowy cloud,
should be specially noticed.
There is one extraordinarily fine plate worked in flat, even tints,
representing Oothoon and Bromion bound back to back on the sea-shore,
while Theotormon, with head buried in arms, sits on a rock above in the
very abandon of stony grief. We have seen nothing of Blake's yet, so bold,
decisive, nervous. The massive modelling of the Bromion torso is happily
contrasted with the shrinking white slenderness of Oothoon. Beyond this
passion-torn group, a calm sea, under a mild afternoon sun, shines deeply
blue. We shall come across this plate again in the large book of designs
in the Print Room. There, it is heavy and opaque in colouring, and totally
different in mood, being gloomy and sinister in the highest degree. The
blood-red sun hangs like a lamp in stormy purple clouds. The sea is deeply
green. All is ominous. Much more like this latter plate, in colour,
than the one issued in the complete work in the Print Room, is another,
printed off the same plate, of course, but laid on with an impasto. It was
sold at Messrs. Hodgson's on January 14th, 1904, for L29. Neither it nor
that in the "Book of Designs" is so beautiful as the one from which our
illustration is taken. The plate in the Library copy is another variation,
being soft, mysterious and pale in colour. The clarity and brilliance of
the colour, however, must be seen to be appreciated, and this of course,
our plate lacks. The writing and printed outlines of this book are in dead
beech brown.
[Illustration: BROMION AND OOTHOON BOUND BACK TO BACK IN THE CAVE OF
THEOTORMON
From "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," 1793. A printed and coloured
plate from the Print Room copy]
The next book appearing in this year, 1793, is entitled "America," a
prophecy. It consists of eighteen plates. For richness of invention and
design none of the books we have yet seen are equal to "America." The
Print Room copy is printed in a dull blue, with a very happy effect, while
the duplicate in the Library is in deep sombre green. Gilchrist says that
no one who has not seen a coloured copy can judge of the beauty and
splendour that adorn its pages. It is a difficult matter to see a coloured
copy, as the only one definitely known to exist for many years was Lord
Crewe's copy, which was sold last year at Sotheby's for L295. However,
another coloured copy has appeared from the hitherto unknown collection of
a lady in Scotland, and this I had the rare good luck to see before it was
sold at Messrs. Hodgson's in January, 1904, for L207. Indeed it is
beautiful, but with a quite other sort of beauty to that of the austere
blue-printed copy in the Museum. The two are so different in mood and key
as to seem like quite separate and distinct creations. Gilchrist says of
the coloured copy which he saw--Lord Crewe's--that so fair and open were
its pages, as to simulate an increase of light on the retina.
That which I examined had the brightness and delicacy of Blake's colour in
the earlier books, combined with the richness and grandeur of the later
ones, but happily without the opacity and heaviness that sometimes
accompany these later qualities.
Duerer's etching of "Melancholia" is the only thing in art to which the
design on the first page of "America" may be likened, but, in Beethoven's
words: "Es ist mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei." A great winged
giant or Titan, with his despondent head bowed on his knees, and his face
utterly shrouded by falling hair, sits chained on the ramparts of the City
of Night. Seated on a stone below is a beautiful undraped woman with a
little naked child in her arms, and another leaning against her thigh.
Heavy clouds roll up behind the genii and the ramparts. The mood of the
picture is unutterable. The winged figure is red Orc, who will presently
release himself and shatter the religions of Urizen, bringing fire and
pestilence and famine in his train. He is Orc, the deliverer, but, like
his great prototype, he comes not "to bring peace, but a sword."
In the wild clamorous poem Orc is described as the "serpent form'd who
stands at the gate of Enitharmon to devour her children." Now Enitharmon
is a vast mythic being without any defined personality; she symbolizes
sometimes Space and sometimes Nature, while another facet of her various
character, as we shall presently discover, is Pity. She is the mother of
Orc, of whom, however, she is terrified, and the woman with the children
in the frontispiece represents, I think, the same Enitharmon.
[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE TO "AMERICA: A PROPHECY," 1793
Printed in blue, from the Print Room copy]
I cannot attempt to decipher the poem here. Before its roaring frenzy of
excitement one is rendered dumb. There is no story properly so called. One
merely gathers, that Orc releases himself in order to marry the shadowy
daughter of Urthona,--Ah! shadowy indeed! After this, terrible things
occur; in especial, that which may be supposed to symbolize the War of
Independence between England and America. Whatever the prophecy contained
in the poem, this much is clear, that Blake saw in the new world the home
and harbinger of Freedom, the foe of spirit-crushing conventions, of
shackling traditions and customs. Strangely do the names of Washington,
Paine, and the King of England read in connection with "red Orc,"
"Enitharmon," and the mighty shadows of the Blakean mythology. With all
his enthusiasm and patient sympathetic study even Mr. Swinburne has to
admit of "America" that "it has more of thunder and less of lightning than
former prophecies--more of sonorous cloud, and less of explicit fire."
But a far other verdict must be passed on the designs, of which our
illustrations afford a very good idea, at least of the British Museum
copy. From the first mysterious print to the last, every page is instinct
with vigour and invention, and the disposition of the writing and the
design on each page is in accordance with the most exacting and sensitive
feeling for composition and decorative effect. Blake had the gift of
decoration as Mozart had that of melody. He simply could not help being
decorative, though preoccupation with decoration as an end in itself was a
thing utterly foreign to his earnest and high artistic aims. In "America"
Blake's outlines are put in with a thick strong line, a singularly happy
method of expressing the bold designs. Plate 6, is specially interesting
as being evidently his first feeling out after the top part of the design
called Death's Door, which afterwards appeared in its perfected embodiment
in Blair's "Grave." The lower part of the same design which we saw first
in the "Gates of Paradise," is again repeated with differences in Plate 12
of the "America." The idea was a favourite one with Blake, and in its
various representations is always vigorously and poetically treated.
Plate 7, coming after so much that is alarming, exciting, or of sustained
grandeur, comforts the eye and heart with its delicate pastoral
tenderness.
A tree, with willowy bending sprays such as only Blake could draw, arches
over a green sward, whereon a ram with woolly fleece and heraldically
curly horns, lies sleeping. Beside him, on the grass, a naked child lies,
relaxed in slumber, while another, cushioned on the ram's soft back,
sleeps too, in joyous ease. In the coloured copy this page appeared
particularly rich and satisfying. It has a brilliant iridescent background
after the style of the first few pages of the "Songs of Innocence," but
less vernal, more autumnal, in its richness of colour.
In what strange dreams did Blake see the pale woman of Plate 13 lying on
the bed of ocean. Quick moving fishes flash around her body in the dim
blue twilight, and a sea snake is coiled about her legs. On the top of the
same page the body floating on waves is being torn by a vulture.
Many of the plates are quivering with flames which shoot up in spiral
tongues to play about the letters of the writing. Incidentally, the
writing used in "America" is more fluent--running into dainty pennons and
fluttering streamers of decoration--than any used before.
At the sale of Messrs. Hodgson's before mentioned, a single loose coloured
plate of the frontispiece to "America" (Orc chained by the wrists) sold
for L20 10_s._
We close "America" regretfully, for a wild enchantment emanates from its
pages, and entering into the spectator's mind makes him realize that
indeed "everything possible to be believed is an image of truth."
[Illustration: PAGE FROM "AMERICA: A PROPHECY," 1793
Printed in blue, from the Print Room copy]
In 1794 appeared "Europe, a prophecy." It has fifteen large plates, but
before dwelling on them a word must be said about the prophecy itself.
The prelude is the lament of a nameless shadowy female, who rises from out
the breast of Orc. She is also daughter to Enitharmon. Her complaint is
often musical enough if we could but know what it was all about:
I wrap my turban of thick clouds around my lab'ring head,
And fold the sheety waters as a mantle round my limbs,
Yet the red sun and moon,
And all the overflowing stars, rain down prolific pains.
Blake would seem to have got fairly drunk with the excitement of wild
words and musical phrases. There is little or no sequence of ideas, and
the prophecy which follows the prelude comes storming forth, full of
sonorous sound, but "without form and void."
All that can be made out from the din of frenetic words is that Enitharmon
calls upon her son Orc, "the horrent demon," to arise and bring with him
his brothers and sisters. But in the middle of her speech she falls into a
primaeval doze of some eighteen hundred years. Patient and painstaking as
the reader may be, an incident of this kind taxes his temper somewhat too
severely, more especially as it seems a gratuitously irritating freak on
Blake's part, without any apparent sense or reason to justify it.
Persevering, we find that while she is asleep all kinds of dire affliction
come upon the race of man, and the wild pelter of words and ideas hither
and thither continues to increase in fury. It is like the dancing of the
Dervishes--faster and faster, furious and more furious, higher and higher,
so quick at last that the eye cannot follow the movements,--and then comes
the breaking out of the wild demoniac cries, and the convulsive
excitement, which is finally satisfied with nothing but the letting of
blood.
After all this incoherent clash of words, full of "flames of Orc, howlings
and hissings, shrieks and groans, and voices of despair," Enitharmon
calmly awakes, "nor knew that she had slept, and eighteen hundred years
had fled," and proceeds with the roll call of her sons and daughters as if
nothing had happened.
Rintrah, Palamabron, Elynittria Albion's Angel, Ethinthus,
Manatha-Varcyon, Leutha, Antamon, Sotha, Thiralatha and Urizen are the
names of some of the spectral shadows which pass before the spectator.
It is a dream of Walpurgis Nacht, obscure and vague; its warrings being no
more than the dissolving shadows of fighting men partially discerned on a
dark wall.
But if Blake can no longer take us with him into the infinite on the wings
of his poetry, he can with his pencil create on a sheet of paper a world
of imagination, which in relation to this actual world is evanescent and
to some impalpable. But Blake's magic has caught and held it, as Peleus
caught and held the silver-footed Thetis, though she changed from one form
to another hoping to frighten him into letting her go, till tired of his
persistence she revealed herself to him in her own wondrous form. Even so,
Blake caught and held that which his imagination discriminated, undismayed
by conditions which cause some men's heads to reel, until he succeeded in
committing it to outline and colour.
The first plate represents "The Ancient of Days setting a compass upon the
face of the earth." (See Proverbs, viii. 27.) The Museum copy has a
passage from "Paradise Lost" written, or rather scrawled, in black ink
underneath the picture. One wonders whose could have been the irreverent
pen to deface in this way a page of the Master's work. The design itself
is one of the finest that ever came from Blake's hand. The thing is
tremendous! Involuntarily the mind seeks for its like only on the roof of
the Sistine. Blake's art owns no master, links itself to no predecessor,
save Michael Angelo.
[Illustration: THE ANCIENT OF DAYS SETTING A COMPASS UPON THE FACE OF THE
EARTH. (_See_ PROVERBS, VIII. 27)
Frontispiece to "Europe: a Prophecy," printed 1794
Print coloured by hand]
This was the last design to be repeated by his hand. On his deathbed he
executed it for his young friend Mr. Tatham. The latter refers to the
incident in a letter published in 1803, in the "Rossetti Papers":
"The Ancient of Days with the compasses was the subject that Blake
finished for me on his deathbed. He threw it down and said, 'There, I hope
Mr. Tatham will like it,' and then said, 'Kate, I will draw your portrait;
you have been a good wife to me.' And he made a frenzied sketch of her,
which, when done, he sang himself joyously and most happily--literally
with songs--into the arms of the grim enemy, and yielded up his sweet
spirit."
The conception is of sublimity and boldness, and in the execution of this
particular plate the colour is laid on with great care, being shaded and
stippled to a high degree of finish. The attitude of the Architect of the
Universe is heroic, and is characteristic of Blake in his best manner.
Leaning far out from the centre of the sun itself, a grand male figure,
with hair and beard streaming in the wind of cosmic motion, measures the
space below him with a compass, indicating the orbit on which the world is
to travel.
The Museum possesses another edition, as a separate drawing, in one of the
portfolios, which we shall examine later. Mr. Sydney Morse possesses yet
another, which was on view at Messrs. Carfax's Gallery; and a fourth,
probably the finest of all these different renderings, was sold with the
title-page and three plates of "Europe," at Messrs. Hodgson's sale for
L80.
The frontispiece to "Europe" has a magnificent evil-looking snake on the
centre of the page, blue hills and distance seen through its mottled
coils.
"The Pilgrim," some verses by Ann Radcliffe, are scrawled on the blank
reverse of the leaf. The first and last time it may be supposed that Ann
Radcliffe found herself in such august company! All of the plates in this
book are defaced by the same handwriting.
Blake's writing and the engraved outlines are of a bluish green colour.
"Red Orc" is seen in the second plate climbing up the sky and about to
take his station on a bank of cloud outlined boldly against the blue.
Below him, in a limbo of darkness, three naked passions in the form of
demons are struggling together and falling down into the nether heavens.
On the page entitled "a Prophecy" a lovely angel takes her despairing
flight through the sky. Her wings merge from white and mauve to a deep
blue like that of a pigeon's neck, her beautiful feet gleam white against
the rosy cloud behind, and her hair falls over her face in abandon of
grief or fear or despair--we know not which. All the different and
delicate shades in an hydrangea are to be found in this plate, and would
seem to have suggested its subtle colour harmonies.
For pure melody of line the next plate surpasses it, however. Enitharmon,
fierce, beautiful, nude, descends in a cloud to awaken Orc, who lies face
downward on the earth, the outline of his figure suggesting a young
love-god rather than the fierce personality of the terrible Orc. Even the
flames about his head might be those of love. The colour is very delicate
and transparent.
Then follow two full-page interiors, which, in spite of the fine drawing
and colour, oppress, with the uncomfortable sensation of confinement,
airlessness! The fact is, that we are so accustomed to Blake's open air
windy wilds, and broad spaces of sky and cloud, that we do not feel at
home with him when he takes us within doors.
[Illustration: PLATE FROM "EUROPE, A PROPHECY," 1794
Printed and coloured by hand]
Another plate from the "Europe," the lines of which we reproduce,
represents two lithe nude women springing upwards with incomparable grace
and the true Blake vigour, among arching wheat stems. They blow horns
through which descends a fall of blight upon the corn. The decorative
rightness, the exquisite appreciation of the melodies of form, the
vitality of action, cannot be too much admired. And the colour! The tender
flesh-painting contrasted with the young green of the corn!--Yet Mr.
Swinburne, usually so intensely alive to the beautiful, and especially
Blake's beautiful, describes the plate in these terms: "Mildews are seen
incarnate as foul, flushed women with strenuous limbs contorted, blighting
ears of corn with the violent breath of their inflated mouths."
There is some delicate tracery of cobwebs, among leaves and greenery, on
another page, exhibiting Blake in a marvellously naturalistic mood for
once, and a final plate of a man rescuing a woman and child from fierce,
rolling flames. No one ever painted fire as Blake did, and over and over
again in his treatment of this favourite motive we shall have to own that
he is, as Mr. William Michael Rossetti says, in this respect at least,
"supreme painter."
As I do not know where to place the tiny book or pamphlet entitled, "There
is no Natural Religion,"--it having no date affixed to it,--I shall refer
to it here. It consists of eleven illustrated leaves, each containing in
the engraved text a didactic statement or thesis by Blake on this
favourite subject. Below the words, which give much illumination to his
peculiar opinions, are small, rough drawings made with a brush full of
heavy black, relieved in parts by outlines in sepia.