THE PROPHETIC BOOKS CONTINUED
In studying the next book which Blake produced in 1794--the "Book of
Urizen"--it is necessary to disabuse our minds of the idea that Blake's
thoughts were not clear to himself. However confused and troubled they
appear to us, they were certainly clear as sunlight to him, but he failed
in the labour of reducing them to terms of intellectual definiteness, much
less to terms of poetic art. The excitement which these visions brought
upon his tremulous and sensitive brain seems to have induced a kind of
"possession," similar to that of the maenads at the festival of Dionysus
of old, so that no very consecutive utterance may be expected from him.
Yet there _is_ a kind of sequence in "Urizen," and the marvellous
illustrations to the book cannot be properly appreciated without holding
the thread of the so-called poem. Setting aside the ancient Biblical
tradition, our prophet undertakes no less a task than the writing of a new
Genesis, which in its naked horror and despair causes the very gods
themselves to hide their faces out of pity to the sons of men.
Urizen the creator, the god of restraints and prohibitions, becomes
self-inclosed and divides himself from Eternity and the Eternals.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF "URIZEN." PUBLISHED 1794]
In fire and strife and anguish he creates the world, "like a black globe,
viewed by the Sons of Eternity, standing on the shore of the Infinite
Ocean, like a human heart struggling and beating, the vast world of
Urizen appears." But after this effort he is laid in "stony sleep
unorganized rent from eternity." Los, who is Time, was then wrenched out
of Urizen, and suffers fierce pain in the act of separation and division.
Then, while Time works with hammers at his forge, fires belching around,
he sees, nay! appears to assist at, the further changes of Urizen. For the
"formless god" is gradually taking form, and inclosing himself in a human
body. He assumes bones, heart, brain, eyes, ears, nostrils, stomach,
throat, tongue, arms, legs, and feet. And now "his eternal life like a
dream was obliterated." An age of intense agony and stress was allotted to
the evolution and development of each created portion of the body.
Meanwhile Los "forged chains new and new, numbering with links, hours,
days and years."
When Los had finished his unwilling task, and saw Urizen all bound with
the chains of time, the senses, and the enclosing boundaries of his own
selfhood, "Pity began." This is another painful division and shrinkage,--
In tears and cries imbodied
A female form trembling and pale,
Waves before his deathy face.
Her name is Pity or Enitharmon. She is also Space, and her union with Los
or Time naturally follows. The Eternals are so terrified at what Urizen
has done, that they enclose the new creation in a tent to hide it from
their sight, and call the tent Science. From the union of Space and Time
springs a child, Orc, hereafter the deliverer, whom the father and mother
chain with the chain of jealousy below the deathful shadow of Urizen.
Urizen then explores his new kingdom, and, looking on his teeming world,
he sickened, for he saw "that no flesh nor spirit could keep his iron laws
(of prohibition and restraint) one moment." So he made a great Web or
Net, and flung it over all, and this was called the Net of Religion. And
of his now finished Creation it is written,
Six days they shrunk up from existence
And on the seventh day they rested.
And they blessed the seventh day in sick hope,
And forgot their eternal life.
The evolution or changes of Urizen form the subjects of a great number of
the plates. Blake has wrought here through the pictorial medium as Dante
wrought the "Inferno" in his own art. The same high imagination, the same
passionate and unshrinking realization of it, the same terrible force are
integral parts of the minds of both artists, and inspire both works,
different in kind as they are and separated by centuries of thought and
feeling. No wonder that Linnell desired Blake in his old age to make
drawings from the "Inferno," "thinking him the very man and only to
illustrate Dante."
The prelude to the book is set in a tender and lovely key, very difficult,
however, to harmonize with what follows. It is not obvious why it occurs
here or what connection it has with the dark story of Urizen. The same
little picture will be found in the smaller Book of Designs, but there it
is quite differently rendered as to colour, and I think more beautifully.
Our reproduction is from the latter plate.
The cloud-like form of a beautiful woman, drifts across the sky, drawing
by the hand a little baby, with the ideal face of sweet infancy. There is
a delicious curve in the woman's body, a swirl of the garments, and a
quick, fish-like, darting movement about the action of the child which
contribute to the impression of flight through a buoyant atmosphere.
Turning over the pages of "Urizen" one terror after another takes the
breath and quickens the pulse. Urizen--or is it Orc?--his terrible face
averted, strides through a world of fire dividing the flames with his
arms.
[Illustration: LOS HOWLING
Colour-printed plate from "Urizen." 1794]
A human figure, snake-encircled, falls headlong into raging flames,
recalling a somewhat similar idea in "America." Los is next seen, howling
in fire, because of his painful separation from Urizen.
Poor solitary thinker! what shuddering emotions must have rent Blake as
his relentless hand drew and coloured the visionary appearances of these
monsters of imagination!
To the hot and lurid impression of Plate 6 succeeds one, in which a pallid
skeleton, bowed head between knees, sits grisly on the ground. Urizen
assumes bones. In much the same attitude, but now turned to the spectator,
the next plate shows us an arresting figure. An old man, nude, with white
hair, and patriarchal beard sweeping the ground, shows an upturned
despairing blind face. Suggestions of indescribable suffering are
incarnate in this design. I shall take the liberty of calling the type the
"Blake old man." We come across it again and again, and it instances his
tendency to concentrate all varieties into a type, to make his artistic
language as bare and simple and elemental as possible.
The story can be traced through all the plates. Urizen visiting his new
world forms a series of six wonderful plates, of which one is very Gothic,
representing as it does an amphibious-looking old man very like a gargoyle
sinking slowly through a world of water. It is a true grotesque.
The most poetic of all the pictures is, I think, the one which represents
the Birth of Enitharmon or Pity. Rising from a cloudy abyss with that
bubble-like buoyancy which Blake knew so well how to breathe into his
figures, a nude woman with body bowed in anguish floats upward. The face,
with its strange dim, tortured eyes, speaks of the suffering which only
the complex and self-conscious soul born of the mingled forces that
produced the French Revolution and the New Age is capable of experiencing.
The body is of wonderful beauty and purity. On the brink of the abyss from
which she rises like the smoke of a hidden fire, Los kneels with head
bowed in arms. His deep musings have brought forth this strange
sorrow-laden beauty.
Another picture, Humanity chained by the wrists and ankles in slavery, its
blind eyes raining tears, but with the light of Eternity like an aureole
behind its head, is seen waiting, waiting, with an endless and most
painful patience, for some final deliverance. Like Michael Angelo's "Il
Penseroso," "it fascinates and is intolerable." No more piteous or
significant symbol of humanity has ever been conceived, in the full
compass of its sorrow, its slavery, and its hope. Blake utters a
Promethean cry in "Urizen." He calls out on the creator for having
imprisoned and tormented us. A wild ineffectual cry enough, and one not
consistent with brighter and saner views, which he held as passionately,
but then,--it is Blake! And Blake was never able "to build a house large
enough for his ideas." The Print Room does not contain a copy of the "Book
of Ahania" which is a continuation of the theme of "Urizen," but short and
unillustrated.
The small Book of Designs should be looked at in conjunction with "Thel,"
"Urizen," the "Daughters of Albion" and the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell,"
for the plates are repetitions from these books often far more rich in
colour and delicate in execution than those in the complete works.
The large Book of Designs contains, among many plates familiar in design
to us, though varied always in colouring, four, which we have not seen
before, and can see nowhere else. The first is a colour-print of morning
or Glad Day. It is a radiant design, but like many of these
colour-prints of Blake, somewhat the worse for time, having the paint
rubbed off and blackened in parts. Blake's colour-printing process was as
follows, according to the only extant account:
[Illustration: COLOUR-PRINTED DESIGN FROM "URIZEN." 1794
Reproduced from the "Small Book of Designs"]
He drew the outline heavily in chalk on a mill-board and put on the colour
diluted with oil or glue in thick patches, and printed the wet impression
off on to paper. He then worked upon this rough ground, when dry, in water
colour. But only in a few instances did he show complete mastery of the
ingenious method.
The second plate I would call attention to is a nightmare horror entitled
the "Accusers of Theft, Adultery and Murder." There are a trio of furies,
only male instead of female; the watermark of the paper is 1794. A similar
design, not so finely coloured, was sold at Messrs. Hodgson's for L15
10_s._ The third is a lovely little gem representing John the Baptist
preaching to a beautifully grouped crowd. Its fellow sold at the same sale
for L26 10_s._ The fourth represents a semi-nude figure, with head
downcast, sitting beneath the bent and blasted stump of a tree, while to
the left a woman nude and of remarkable beauty tosses a child high in arm.
It is thought that this plate may have been intended for a cancel in
"America"; for another one, more beautiful in colouring than this, which
was also sold at Messrs. Hodgson's, and for L42, was found to bear some
text from "America," faintly discernible under the colouring on the upper
half of the plate, which could be read only from the back.
In 1795 Blake produced the "Song of Los." The Print Room copy is heavy and
opaque in colour, though very splendid and rich, and the Library copy is
similar in most respects. It was evidently colour-printed after the method
described above, for the peculiar mottled backgrounds are an effect that
could not very well have been realized by any other method, nor even then
are they understandable, unless indeed Blake had a wooden stamp which he
impressed on the blobs of colour first laid on the paper itself.
The "Song of Los" is the Song of Time, and includes the "Songs of Africa,
and Asia." So now Blake has written a song of prophecy for each of the
four great parts of the earth. "Africa" deals in a wild incoherent way
with the rise of the various religions. Urizen delivers his laws of brass
and iron and gold to all the Nations. These were "the nets and gins and
traps to clutch the joys of Eternity," and Har and Heva--representatives
of natural humanity--find "all the vast of Nature shrunk before their
shrunken eyes," for the senses are the limits put upon perception.
Thus the terrible race of Los and Enitharmon gave
Laws and Religions to the Sons of Har, binding them more
And more to Earth: closing and restraining:
Till a philosophy of the Five Senses was complete.
Urizen wept and gave it into the hands of Newton and Locke!
In "Asia" Urizen hears the despairing cry of his creation, and himself
shudders and weeps, but unavailingly. Orc is heard raging on Mount Atlas,
where he is chained down with the chain of jealousy. Orc is the Flame of
Genius, the true deliverer of the Race. He was chained by his father and
mother in fear of Urizen's jealousy, but we know that he will break free
at last, and bring his living fire into the hearts of the chosen of the
peoples.
The book contains but five pages, of which the most beautiful is a design
of a boy and girl with arms wound around each other, running over a
hill-top, with a passionate sunset sky behind them. The "Book of Los,"
which must not be confounded with the Song, appeared in the same year. The
Print Room has no copy, so we must descend to the Library, which happily
possesses one. It consists of four chapters on the old themes, written
in a sort of metrical prose. The frontispiece, representing a woman in the
characteristic attitude so often adopted by Blake--the figure being seated
on the ground, with head supported on knees in a mysterious lone place
among rocks--is an arresting and powerful design. The writing in this book
is particularly fine and clear. It is the last of Blake's "London Books of
Prophecy."
[Illustration: THE ACCUSERS: OR, SATAN'S TRINITY
Colour-print from the Large Book of Designs in the Print Room]
What shall I say of "Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion"--this
longest and perhaps most mystical of all Blake's dithyrambic books?
It was written, as well as the "Milton," during the Felpham period, though
probably added to, and finally finished after his return to London.
Those who have heard the extraordinary tone-poem called "Also sprach
Zarathustra," by Richard Strauss, may not think it far-fetched to suggest
a parallel between revolutionary, chaotic, yet somehow great music, such
as it is, and the so-called poem of "Jerusalem." To the authors of both,
the classical, the established forms of expression belonging to their
respective arts, seem outworn, inadequate, cramped. They feared to trust
the new wine of their fermenting ideas to the old bottles of recognized
form, and each has invented for himself a way of escape--somewhat
dangerous, nay, almost suicidal--from the pressure of precedent, law, and
order. Strange harmonies, horrid discords, sweetness as of honey, to be
succeeded by a sharp acridity like that of unripe lemons, great marshalled
orchestral forms, and wild abortive sounds, tormenting alike to ear and
heart, are to be discerned in "Zarathustra," not without irrational
excitement, anger, dismay, and occasional delight on the part of the
hearer. And in "Jerusalem" is it not much the same?
With an Olympian audacity Blake writes, "When this Verse was first
dictated to me, I considered a monotonous cadence like that used by
Milton and Shakespeare, and all writers of English blank verse, derived
from the modern bondage of rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensable
part of verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true orator, such
monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I
therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences and
number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into
its place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the
mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, and the prosaic for the
inferior parts; all are necessary to each other; Poetry fettered, fetters
the human race."
Self-assertion such as this is the apology for arts like those of Strauss
and Walt Whitman, and our very admiration for Blake's youthful lyrical
gift compels us to lament that his muse was brought at last, after those
early days of soaring flight, to wading through such quagmires of
so-called poetry as this and the ensuing book. Mysticism had engulfed the
poet in its dim cloud, though poetic phrases and passages like crystal dew
glitter amid the gloom.
The "Jerusalem" may be regarded as an attempted poetic statement of
Blake's mystic philosophy regarding the development of humanity and its
various states.
I give you the end of a golden string
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate
Built in Jerusalem's wall,
writes Blake in the course of the book. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have wound
it into a very tangible ball, taking the symbolizism of the four Zoas as
the clue to the whole mystery. Blake mentions the Zoas here frequently:
"Four universes round the mundane egg remain chaotic" (nothing could be
more true!) "One to the North Urthona; one to the South Urizen; one to the
East Luvah; one to the west Tharmas. They are the four Zoas that stood
around the throne divine." But if the symbolism of the Zoas is in reality
woven into the very tissue of the story, and forms its vital and coherent
argument, it must be discovered on some mathematical principle very
foreign, and, indeed, repugnant to the lover of true poetry. It is in no
sense obvious or sequential. The value of the book lies, not in its
poetical merit, nor even primarily in its mystic significance, but in the
insight which it affords into the byways of Blake's mind. The knowledge of
his opinions gained here (they have been shortly commented on in a former
chapter) enable us to form correct estimates of the scope of his plastic
art, and his outlook on the world. Messrs. Maclaggan and Russell have
edited a plain-typed and unillustrated edition of "Jerusalem," and promise
an expository essay on it to follow in due course, so that to earnest
readers its study will be greatly facilitated. The book is concerned with
one Albion, the father as it would seem of all created men, and Los (Time)
who is his friend. Jerusalem and Vala are his emanations--Jerusalem being
his wife. The city of Golgonooza--that is, I believe, Spiritual Art--is
also described, and bears its part in the story.
On page 13, line 30, we read, "Around Golgonooza lies the land of death
eternal; a land of pain and misery and despair and ever-brooding
misery"--the repetition of the word "misery," does not sound as if every
word had been studied and put in its place! But the idea that the
beautiful city of spiritual Art should be built in the midst of pain and
despair reminds one of a similar idea of Goethe's, "Art enshrines the
great sadness of the world, but is itself not sad." And the following
lines develop the suggestion, page 16, line 61: "All things acted on
Earth are seen in the Bright Sculptures of Los's Halls, and every age
renews its powers from these works. With every pathetic story possible to
happen from Hate or Wayward Love and every sorrow and distress is carved
here."
The introduction of localities, streets and districts, has an almost
ludicrous effect, as for instance in the following lines: "What are those
golden builders doing near mournful ever-weeping Paddington?" Is it, one
wonders, a prophetic announcement of the erection of the Great Western
Terminus? Had Blake possessed the saving grace of humour, he would never
have committed such laughter-provoking solecisms as this and other
passages of the same kind. Humour is a means of restoring and keeping the
balances true. It assists the sense of proportion, and like a fresh wind
blows the cobwebs away; but, alas! Blake had no faintest trace of it.
In a kind of Dionysiac rage he has flung his noble ideas, original
conceptions, pell-mell into the cauldron along with mere windy,
mouth-filling rodomontade. There is a great deal of confused noise, but by
snatches we distinguish the half-drowned but heavenly music. The fact is
that his material (God-dictated, as he thought) so excited him that he was
unable to deal with it, unable to direct the heat of his genius into
fusing the heterogeneous mass into the perfect artistic unity. The vision
unnerved him, and he all but lost his balance. Well might he too have
cried:
A veil 'twixt us and Thee, dread Lord,
A veil 'twixt us and Thee,
Lest we should hear too clear, too clear
And unto madness see.
The illustrations to the book have all the concentration, power and grasp
which the literary matter lacks. The pages seem to throb beneath the
teeming forms of life with which his hand has adorned them. Each in the
disposition of the beautiful writing is a picture. Wild passionate little
figures, drawn with exquisite feeling, leap, climb, and fly about some of
the borders while on others the writing is interrupted and entwined with
creeping tendrils, or adorned with flames, stars, serpents, and
processions of insects--a riot of decoration.
"Jerusalem" is a folio of 100 pages, one side of each leaf only being
printed. From the first page to the twenty-fifth of the Museum copy the
writing is in black, while the designs are left white outlined in black,
on a dense sable ground. Pages 26 to 50 are in deep green, the printed
designs being sometimes finished by hand, the deepest tones being laid on
with a brush full of heavy colour. Pages 51 to 100 are again black and
white--the black being always of great intensity.
In the first plate a man is seen entering through a door into darkness,
with a lamp in his hand. This is our old friend Los entering into the dark
places of Albion's mind--Albion having turned his back on "the Divine
Vision." Curiously poetical suggestions are to be found in the title-page,
whereon a cherubim with covering wings weeps over a beautiful prostrate
female. This lovely body forms the central vein of a rose leaf, and is
incorporated in its vegetable life. But above the woman's head are the
wings that have become atrophied, and the moon and stars, like the eyes of
a peacock's feathers, are seen on them, suggesting reminiscences and
possibilities of spiritual development in "Vegetative humanity" beyond
verbal expression. Glanced at as a whole without discriminating the parts,
this fanciful and Gothic conception bears a strange resemblance to a
butterfly. Did not the Greeks find in the butterfly a symbol of the
immortality of the soul and its renewal in youth, and Blake, who was so
profoundly sensitive to analogies of this kind, was not likely to have
created this obvious resemblance accidentally. Everything is with him
significant.
Is it a dryad who lies outstretched on page 23 with the rising sap of her
vegetable life stirring within her fibrous extremities, and awakening her
to some dim half-painful consciousness. And below her, what hints of
strange buried gnomic life, of Titans convulsively heaving like volcanoes
in the dark earth, of creatures begotten of rocks and tree-roots, living
like the suckers of plants in the fissures and crannies of deep strata!
Again, on page 33 appears the beautiful weird fantasy that I have named a
dryad. The sun and the moon shine on her simultaneously, and her
rudimentary limbs appear now to be branches and again to be embryonic
wings. A sort of vampire bat is poised above her. At the top of the same
page a man with the world under his foot like a stool would seem to have
been saved fainting in the arms of an effulgent divine Being from some
threatening danger.
I pondered long over this design before finding the clue, which I now
believe is to be found in these words, on the previous page, in
"Jerusalem": "The reasoning spectre stands between man and his immortal
imagination."
On Plate 53 is represented a woman sitting enthroned on a sunflower, her
double wings form a sort of baldachino above her head. She has a triple
tiara from which flames arise in a pyramidal shape, and the sun, the moon,
and the stars are contained in her vast wings. The vegetative human has
blossomed in the sunflower of spiritual life. No longer "the starry
heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of Albion," but instead of
separation there is a large union. "In every bosom a universe expands,"
and "everything exists in the human imagination," are words which help to
explain this curious design.
[Illustration: PRINTED PLATE (UNCOLOURED), FROM "JERUSALEM, THE EMANATION
OF THE GIANT ALBION." 1804]
A coloured print of the same plate, very sumptuous and rich, was exhibited
in the Carfax Galleries in January, 1894.
A beautiful drawing on page 46 gives the meeting of Vala with Jerusalem
and her children, but as an artist's forms often contain more in them than
the obvious expression of a fact, so here one may permit oneself to see
another meaning underlying this, as the ancient text underlies the
palimpsest. Vala may also have an analogy with Death, who like a veiled
woman meets a mother with her children. As she lifts her veil, and looks
upon one among the group, the child takes flight and attempts to draw his
sister after him. Blake, who seldom made his faces characteristic, but was
satisfied with making them merely typical, has given this woman's face a
piteous expression of fear and entreaty.
A notable plate is that representing the Crucifixion, the motive of which,
when disengaged from the confused material of the book, is discovered to
be the bed-rock or foundation, the radical thought, at the base of
"Jerusalem" and the next work "Milton." Jesus the Saviour is Eternal
Imagination slain by men, who nail it to the "stems of generation," that
is, kill it through the opacity of the senses and the limitations of
sexual life. Just in the same way Orc, the deliverer, who is a type or
other aspect of Jesus, is Genius, and by man is nailed on to the rocks of
Mount Atlas.
Looking through the pages of "Jerusalem," vague memories of Norse sagas,
of dim carved stalls in old Gothic cathedrals, of the cold cellar-like air
that sighs through their aisles and chapels, come to one and cause a
delightful and yet fearful shudder. But the designs savour only in a
fleeting irrational way of these things, having a wholly unique character
of their own.
The "Prophetic Books" reproduced by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats are not taken
from the British Museum copies it may be as well to remark here, and the
variation in the disposition of the light and shade is great in the
various copies, though the outlines are always the same, being printed off
the same plate, of course. The finest known copy of "Jerusalem" was sold
at Messrs. Sotheby's among other Blake treasures belonging to Lord Crewe
for the sum of L83.
"Milton," the last of the published "Books of Prophecy," produced in 1804,
is a small quarto of forty-five printed pages, coloured by hand in the old
radiant manner. The preface, beautiful but sibylline, is an appeal to all
men to worship and exalt Imagination, which in ancient times in the
Christ-form, says Blake, "walked upon England's mountains green." "Would
to God that all the Lord's people were prophets"--that is "seers"--he
quotes with profound earnestness at the end.
The "poem" itself opens more intelligibly than most of the later books
with a mythic story concerning one Palamabron and the horses of the
plough; of Satan, who persuaded him to be allowed to drive the horses for
one day, and of the dire confusion, strife, and tragedy resulting from
Palamabron's consent.
The story bears a distant analogy to the Phaethon myth, for Palamabron
represents, according to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, the "imaginative
impulse," while Satan is the dark angel who erects the barriers of reason
limited by moral laws and senses around humanity. It was impossible for
one to do the work of the other.
The definite incidents with which "Milton" so hopefully opens are soon
lost sight of, and the loosely-fitted framework, ill-adjusted and weak,
contains a tangled woof of mysticism, from which the end of the thread is
so difficult of extraction, that I for one must plead that the trouble of
"winding a golden ball" seems hardly worth while, though it is no doubt
possible and profitable to the student of mysticism. Milton's part in the
book is perhaps the hardest to decipher. But we find him undertaking a
journey from heaven, through earth and hell. "Milton" seems specially dear
to Blake because he made Satan the supreme study of his greatest poem.
Blake, as we know, had very original thoughts concerning Satan, and
regarded him as the world's angel of light, a most respectable person
indeed, for he is the enforcer of the moral law as evolved by divided
generative humanity.
Milton like Blake recognized this highly respectable aspect of Satan,
whereas the world, says our poet in "The Everlasting Gospel," frequently
mistakes Satan for Christ:
The vision of Christ that thou dost see,
Is my vision's greatest enemy,
and it creates an abortive kind of hell-bat to take the _role_ of
Satan,--a very confused state of affairs, which leads to no little
deception and opacity in men's minds. The old themes of free-love for the
sake of the spirit, and the denunciation of "Nature's cruel holiness,"
occupy much of the book, in which the mythic personages, Leutha, Rintrah,
Ololon, and Enitharmon move up and down in dream-like procession. The ease
with which these shadowy beings enter each other's personalities, divide,
and separate again into manifold emanations and spectres, suggest the
multitudinous globes into which a drop of quicksilver may be divided,
uniting again on contact into several large ones, and finally forming the
unit from which they were first divided. Fascinating as is the experiment
with mercury, it becomes confusing and even tiresome when the appearing
and vanishing parties are persons with names and presumably characters.
One passage full of the old poetical loveliness of which Blake had been
past master must be quoted. It shows that the beauty of nature at Felpham,
with its distracting fascination, entered the soul of the poet, despite
all theories and philosophizings.
Thou hearest the nightingale begin the Song of Spring:
The lark sitting upon his earthy bed: just as the morn
Appears; listens silent: then springing from the waving cornfield, loud
He leads the choir of Day! trill, trill, trill, trill,
Mounting upon the wings of light into the great expanse:
Re-echoing against the lovely blue and shining shell.
His little throat labours with inspiration, every feather,
On throat and breast and wings vibrates with the effluence divine,
All Nature listens silent to him, and the awful sun
Stands still upon the mountains looking on this little bird,
With eyes of soft humility, and wonder, love and awe.
Then loud from their green covert all the birds begin their song.
The thrush, the linnet and the goldfinch, robin and the wren,
Awake the Sun from his sweet reverie upon the mountains.
The nightingale again assays his song and through the day
And through the night warbles luxuriant: every bird of song
Attending his loud harmony with admiration and love.
To this passage succeeds another of like beauty, a Flora's Feast of colour
and scent.
Thou perceivest the flowers put forth their precious odours:
And none can tell how from so small a centre comes such sweet,
Forgetting that within that centre Eternity expands
Its ever-during doors, that Og and Anak fiercely guard.
First ere the morning breaks, joy opens in the flowery bosoms,
Joy even to tears, which the Sun rising dries: first the wild thyme
And meadowsweet downy and soft, waving among the reeds,
Light springing in the air, lead the sweet dance: they wake
The honeysuckle sleeping on the oak: the flaunting beauty
Revels along the wind: the white-thorn, lovely may
Opens her many lovely eyes: listening, the rose still sleeps,
None dare to wake her: soon she bursts her crimson-curtained bed
And comes forth in the majesty of beauty; every flower,
The pink, the jessamine, the wall-flower, the carnation,
The jonquil, the mild lily opes her heavens: every tree
And herb and flower soon fill the ear with an innumerable dance,
Yet all in order sweet and lovely. Men are sick with love.
Oh! how gladly the ear and heart rest on passages such as these, after
toiling through the arid wilds of non-poetical occultism!
As usual the illustrations are turned to with keen delight. The iridescent
pages recall the charms of the "Songs of Innocence and Experience." Take
it all in all the colour in this last prophetic book combines a clarity
and brilliance of tone inferior to no other of Blake's. All is careful,
clear and precise, and there are no passages of heavy colouring or impasto
work.
Forms, elemental, electric, indicative of unknown forces and conditions of
consciousness start from the pages. As in "Jerusalem," every page of
writing is adorned, but the colour adds the necessary charm to the
forceful designs. Plate 15 represents a muscular male--Michael Angelesque
in its modelling--leaping upon a rock and seizing by the shoulders a
languid old man. The young man is Milton, starting on his journey "to
annihilate the selfhood of deceit and false forgiveness." The old man is
Albion seated on the Rock of Ages, his legs immersed in the sea of Time
and Space, his nerveless arms supported on the tables of the Law. Above
them both, on a semi-circular plane of light, the Eternals are seen,
passing in procession in a kind of ecstatic choric dance. Three play on
instruments of music, while two others toss balls of light in joyous
abandon. The rhythmic character of these dancers, their robes fetched out
like clouds upon the wind, and the colour translucent and vivid as that of
a border of April flowers, makes one think of the fair works with which
Luca della Robbia has set the dark old streets of Florence, of which, as
some one has poetically said, they would seem to be the "wall-flowers."
The two other specially noteworthy plates are full-page designs, entitled
respectively William and Robert. It is evident that they are the spiritual
likenesses of Blake and that younger brother with whom he always
maintained such close communion. A burning star emitting fountains of
light falls beside each brother, while their bodies thrown backwards, and
their faces skywards, seem to indicate the abandon of themselves to
spiritual influences. The senses are not the limits put upon their
perceptions. The Infinite spirit, the "Poetic Genius," thrills through
their entire beings as the sunshine through a dewdrop.
Let not the profane smile when they learn that the star is in reality
Milton! For it is written, "so Milton's shadow fell Precipitant loud
thundering into the sea of Time and Space."
Then first I saw him in the zenith as a falling star,
Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift,
And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enter'd there.
So there can be no doubt as to what the star symbolizes in the design. The
articulation, the tense nervous drawing of these two figures is
remarkable, even for Blake, and the light throbbing with rainbow hues, and
the intense darkness, against which it is contrasted, are boldly handled,
while the weird colouring of the dead Robert, whose skin has the tone and
lustre of gun metal, conduce to make these two designs of great
imaginative appeal. Space has only allowed me to call attention to the
most remarkable of the plates in this and the other "Prophetic Books," but
enough has been said to indicate the extraordinary range of their
expression.
[Illustration: COLOUR-PRINTED PLATE FROM "MILTON: A POEM IN TWO BOOKS."
1804]
To see Blake's work of this kind is to enjoy a new experience. Many of the
pictorial representations we have reviewed seem to be disregardful of
Nature, if one dare say it, _above_ Nature altogether! Yet so clearly are
they discriminated, so minutely are the parts made out, that we are
compelled to realize that they are copied from visions definitely seen
by Blake's inner eye, and energetically seized upon by him. And it is this
quality in them which so powerfully acts on the spectator, assuring him
that indeed "More things exist in heaven and earth than our philosophy
dreams of." But besides these tremendous imaginative creations, there
occur touching and beautiful transcripts from Nature, low-lying hills,
under a great sky, waving field grasses and delicate spiders' webs
accurately observed and represented, as far as they go, proving that Dame
Nature was not so utterly repudiated by Blake but that at times he saw and
loved her for her own sake, in spite of all his theories.
Still, the great word for him--the only word fit to bear the burden of his
tremendous thoughts--was always, as with Michael Angelo, the human form,
which, in its varieties of type and action, seemed to him alone suited to
express his deep meanings and spiritual ideas. As for the prophecies
themselves, they can never be largely read, nor in any sense popular,
though, to use Mr. W. M. Rossetti's words, "a reader susceptible to poetic
influence cannot make light of them; nor can one who has perused Mr.
Swinburne's essay" (or, we may add, Messrs. Ellis and Yeats' work) "affect
to consider that they lack meaning--positive and important, though not
definite and developed meaning." So now we take leave of these mystic
books of revelation, which, whatever our personal estimate of them may be,
stand alone in literature for intrinsic and unique qualities.