_Blake’s Technical Methods--“Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of
Experience”--Life in Poland Street and in Lambeth--Mystical
Poetry and Art._
It was during his residence in Poland Street that Blake first appeared
in that mingled character of poet and painter which marks him off
so conspicuously from other painters and other poets. Painting has
often been made the handmaid of poetry; it was Blake’s idea, without
infringing upon this relationship, to make poetry no less the handmaid
of painting by employing his verse, engraved and beautified with
colour, to enhance the artistic value of his designs, as well as to
provide them with the needful basis of subject. The same principle
may probably be recognised in those Oriental scrolls where the
graceful labour of the scribe is as distinctly a work of art as the
illustration of the miniaturist; but of these Blake can have known
nothing. Necessity was with him the mother of invention. Since the
appearance of _Poetical Sketches_ he had written much that he desired
to publish--but how to pay for printing? So severely had he suffered by
his unfortunate commercial adventure that when at length, as he firmly
believed, the new process by which his song and his design could be
facsimiled together was revealed by his brother’s spirit in a dream, a
half-crown was the only coin his wife and he possessed between them in
the world. One shilling and tenpence of this was laid out in providing
the necessary materials.
The technical method to which Blake now resorted is thus described
by Mr. Gilchrist: “It was quite an original one. It consisted of a
species of engraving in relief, both words and designs. The verse was
written and the designs and marginal embellishments outlined on the
copper with an impervious liquid, probably the ordinary stopping-out
varnish of engravers. Then all the white parts or lights, the remainder
of the plate that is, were eaten away with aquafortis or other acid,
so that the outline of letter and design was left prominent, as in
stereotype. From these plates he printed off in any tint, yellow,
brown, blue, required to be the prevailing or ground colour in his
facsimiles; red he used for the letterpress. The page was then
coloured up by hand in imitation of the original drawing with more
or less variety of detail in the local hues. He ground and mixed his
water-colours himself on a piece of statuary marble, after a method of
his own, with common carpenter’s glue diluted. The colours he used were
few and simple: indigo, cobalt, gamboge, vermilion, Frankfort-black
freely, ultramarine rarely, chrome not at all. These he applied with
a camel’s-hair brush, not with a sable, which he disliked. He taught
Mrs. Blake to take off the impressions with care and delicacy, which
such plates signally needed; and also to help in tinting them from
his drawings with right artistic feeling; in all of which tasks she,
to her honour, much delighted. The size of the plates was small, for
the sake of economising copper, something under five inches by three.
The number of engraved pages in the _Songs of Innocence_ alone was
twenty-seven. They were done up in boards by Mrs. Blake’s hand, forming
a small octavo; so that the poet and his wife did everything in making
the book, writing, designing, printing, engraving,--everything except
manufacturing the paper; the very ink, or colour rather, they did make.
Never before, surely, was a man so literally the author of his own
book.”
[Illustration: The Lamb. Infant Joy. _From Blake’s “Songs of
Innocence.”_]
The total effect of this process is tersely expressed by Mr.
Rossetti, “The art is made to permeate the poetry.” It resulted in
the publication of _Songs of Innocence_ in 1789, two years after its
discovery or revelation. Other productions, of that weird and symbolic
character in which Blake came more and more to delight, followed
in quick succession. These will claim copious notice, but for the
present we may pass on to _Songs of Experience_, produced in 1794, so
much of a companion volume to _Songs of Innocence_ that the two are
usually found within the same cover. Neither attracted much attention
at the time. Charles Lamb says: “I have heard of his poems, but have
never seen them.” He is, however, acquainted with “Tiger, tiger,”
which he pronounces “glorious.” The price of the two sets when issued
together was from thirty shillings to two guineas--an illustration
of the material service which Art can render to Poetry when it is
considered that, published simply as poems, they would in that age
have found no purchasers at eighteenpence. This price was nevertheless
absurdly below their real value, and was enhanced even during the
artist’s lifetime. It came to be five guineas, and late in his life
friends, from the munificent Sir Thomas Lawrence downwards, would
commission sets tinted by himself at from ten to twenty guineas as a
veiled charity.
Of the poems and illustrations in _Songs of Innocence_ and _Songs of
Experience_ Gilchrist justly declares that their warp and woof are
formed in one texture, and that to treat of them separately is like
pulling up a daisy by the roots out of the green sward in which it
springs. One essential characteristic inspires them both, and may be
defined as childish fearlessness, the innocent courage of the infant
who puts his hand upon the serpent and the cockatrice. Any one but
Blake would have feared to publish designs and verses apparently so
verging upon the trivial, and which indeed would have been trivial--and
worse, affected--if the emanation of almost any other brain, or the
execution of almost any other hand. Being his, their sincerity is
beyond question, and they are a valuable psychological document as
establishing the possibility of a man of genius and passion reaching
thirty with the simplicity of a child. Hardly anything else in
literature or art, unless some thought in Shakespeare, so powerfully
conveys the impression of a pure elemental force, something absolutely
spontaneous, innocent of all contact with and all influence from the
refinements of culture. They certainly are not as a rule powerful,
and contrast forcibly with the lurid and gigantic conceptions which
if we did not remember that the same Dante depicted _The Tower of
Famine_ and _Matilda gathering Flowers_, we could scarcely believe
to have proceeded from the same mind. Their impressiveness proceeds
from a different source; their primitive innocence and simplicity, and
the rebuke which they seem to administer to artifice and refinement.
Even great artists and inspired poets, suddenly confronted with such
pure unassuming nature, may be supposed to feel as the disciples
must have felt when the Master set the little child among them. No
more characteristic examples could have been given than “The Lamb”
and “Infant Joy” from _Songs of Innocence_, and “The Fly” and “The
Tiger” from _Songs of Experience_ selected for reproduction here from
an uncoloured copy in the library of the British Museum. There is
frequently a great difference in the colouring of the copies. That in
the Museum Print Room is in full rich colour, while others are very
lightly and delicately tinted.
[Illustration: _From a coloured copy of the “Songs of Innocence and
Experience.” British Museum._]
It is of course much easier to convey an idea of the merits of
Blake’s verse than of his painting, for the former loses nothing by
transcription, and the latter everything. The merit of the latter,
too, is a variable quantity, depending much upon the execution of the
coloured plates. The uncoloured are but phantoms of Blake’s ideas. The
general characteristics of his art in these books may be described
as caressing tenderness and gentle grace, evinced in elegant human
figures, frequently drooping like willows or recumbent like river
deities, and in sinuous stems and delicate sprays, often as profuse as
delicate. The foliated ornament in “On Another’s Sorrow,” for instance,
seems like a living thing, and would almost speak without the aid of
the accompanying verse. The figures usually are too small to impress by
themselves, and rather seem subsidiary parts of the general design than
the dominant factors. They mingle with the inanimate nature portrayed,
as one note of a multitudinous concert blends with another. Yet “The
Little Girl Found” tells its story by itself powerfully enough; and
the innocent Bacchanalianism of the chorus in the “Laughing Song” is
conveyed with truly Lyæan spirit and energy.
The prevalent cheerfulness of the _Songs of Innocence_ is of course
modified in _Songs of Experience_. The keynote of the former is
admirably struck in the introductory poem:--
Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me.
“Pipe a song about a Lamb!”
So I piped with merry cheer.
“Piper, pipe that song again.”
So I piped; he wept to hear.
“Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer!”
So I sang the same again.
While he wept with joy to hear.
“Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read.”
So he vanished from my sight;
And I plucked a hollow reed.
And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.
[Illustration: _Frontispiece of Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Stories.”_]
This incarnate enigma among men could manifestly be as transparent as
crystal when he knew exactly what he wished to say--a remark which may
not be useless to the student of his mystical and prophetical writings.
The character of _Songs of Experience_, published in 1794, when he had
attained the age so often fatal to men of genius, is conveyed more
symbolically, yet intelligibly, in “The Angel”:--
I dreamt a dream! What can it mean?
And that I was a maiden Queen
Guarded by an Angel mild:
Witless woe was ne’er beguiled!
And I wept both night and day,
And he wiped my tears away;
And I wept both day and night,
And hid from him my heart’s delight.
So he took his wings and fled;
Then the man blushed very red.
I dried my tears and armed my fears
With ten thousand shields and spears.
Soon my Angel came again;
I was armed, he came in vain;
For the time of youth was fled,
And gray hairs were on my head.
[Illustration: The Fly. The Tyger. _From Blake’s “Songs of
Experience.”_]
Generally speaking, the _Songs of Experience_ may be said to answer to
their title. They exhibit an awakening of thought and an occupation
with metaphysical problems alien to the _Songs of Innocence_. Such a
stanza as this shows that Blake’s mind had been busy:--
Nought loves another as itself
Nor venerates another so;
Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know.
These ideas, however, are always conveyed, as in the remainder of the
poem quoted, through the medium of a concrete fact represented by the
poet. Perhaps the finest example of this fusion of imagination and
thought is this stanza of the most striking and best known of all the
poems, “The Tiger”:--
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
An evident, though probably unconscious, reminiscence of “When the
morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy,”
and like it for that extreme closeness to the inmost essence of things
which the author of the Book of Job enjoyed in virtue of the primitive
simplicity of his age and environment, and Blake through a childlike
temperament little short of preternatural in an age like ours. It may
be added, that although the pieces in _Songs of Innocence_ and _Songs
of Experience_ are of very unequal degrees of poetical merit, none want
the infallible mark of inspired poetry--spontaneous, inimitable melody.
[Illustration: _Page of Young’s “Night Thoughts.” Illustrated by W.
Blake._]
Both the simplicity and the melody, however, are absent from the
remarkable works with which Blake had been occupying himself during the
interval between the publication of the two series of his songs, which,
with their successors, have given him a peculiar and unique reputation
in their own weird way, but could not by themselves have given him the
reputation of a poet. Blake’s plain prose, as we shall see, is much
more effective. In a strictly artistic point of view, nevertheless,
these compositions reveal higher capacities than would have been
inferred from the idyllic beauty of the pictorial accompaniments of
_Songs of Innocence and Experience_. Before discussing these it will
be convenient to relate the chief circumstances of Blake’s life during
the period of their production, and up to the remarkable episode
of his migration to Felpham. They were not memorable or striking,
but one of them had considerable influence upon his development. In
1791 he was employed by Johnson, the Liberal publisher of St. Paul’s
Churchyard, and as such a minor light of his time, to illustrate Mary
Wollstonecraft’s _Tales for Children_ with six plates, both designed
and engraved by him, one of which accompanies this essay. They are
much in the manner of Stothard. This commission brought Blake as a
guest to Johnson’s house, where he became acquainted with a republican
coterie--Mary Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Paine, Holcroft, Fuseli--with
whose political opinions he harmonised well, though totally dissimilar
in temperament from all of them, except Fuseli, who gave him several
tokens of interest and friendship. These acquaintanceships, and the
excitement of the times, led Blake to indite, and, which is more
extraordinary, Johnson to publish, the first of an intended series
of seven poetical books on the French Revolution. This, Gilchrist
tells us, was a thin quarto, without illustrations, published without
Blake’s name, and priced at a shilling. Gilchrist probably derived
this information from a catalogue, for he carefully avoids claiming to
have seen the book, which seems to have also escaped the researches of
all Blake’s other biographers. It must be feared that it is entirely
lost. Gilchrist must, however, have known something more of it if his
assertion that the other six books were actually written but not
printed, “events taking a different turn from the anticipated one,” is
based upon anything besides conjecture.
[Illustration: _9_ I want! I want! _10_ Help! Help!]
[Illustration: _11_ Aged Ignorance. _15_ Death’s Door.]
In 1793 Blake removed from Poland Street to Hercules Buildings,
Lambeth, then a row of suburban cottages with little gardens. Here he
engraved his friend Flaxman’s designs for the _Odyssey_, to replace
plates engraved by Piroli and lost in the voyage from Italy, whence
Flaxman had returned after seven years’ absence. In 1795 he designed
three illustrations for Stanley’s translation of Burger’s “Lenore,”
and in 1796 executed a much more important work, 537 drawings for an
edition of Young’s _Night Thoughts_ projected by a publisher named
Edwards. Forty-three were engraved and published in 1797, but the
undertaking was carried no further for want of encouragement, and the
designs, after remaining long in the publisher’s family, eventually
came into the hands of Mr. Bain of the Haymarket, who is still the
possessor. The most important are described by Mr. Frederic Shields
in the appendix to the second volume of Gilchrist’s biography. Mr.
Shields’ descriptions are so fascinating[3] that from them alone one
would be inclined to rate the drawings very high: but Mr. Gilchrist
thinks these ill adapted for the special purpose of book illustration
which they were destined to subserve, and reminds us that the absence
of colour is a grave loss. Blake is said to have been paid only a
guinea a plate for the forty-three engravings, on which he worked
for a year. The Lambeth period, however, seems not to have been an
unprosperous one, for he had many pupils. Several curious anecdotes of
it were related after his death on the alleged authority of Mrs. Blake,
but their truth seems doubtful. It is certain that during this period
he met with the most constant of his patrons, Mr. Thomas Butts, who for
nearly thirty years continued a steady buyer of his drawings, and but
for whom he would probably have fallen into absolute distress.
It is now time to speak of the literary works--“pictured poesy,”
like the woven poesy of _The Witch of Atlas_--produced during this
period. In 1789, the year of publication of the _Songs of Innocence_,
the series opens with _Thel_. In 1790 comes _The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell_; in 1793, _The Gates of Paradise_, _The Vision of the
Daughters of Albion_, and _America_; in 1794, _Europe_, _A Prophecy_,
and _Urizen_; in 1795, _The Song of Los_, and _The Book of Ahaniah_.
In 1797 Blake seems to have written, or to have begun to write, the
mystical poem ultimately entitled _Vala_, never published by him, and
more than fifty years after his death found in Linnell’s possession
in such a state of confusion that it took Messrs. Ellis and Yeats days
to arrange the MS., which they fondly deem to be now in proper order.
It is printed in the third volume of their work on Blake. _Tiriel_ is
undated, but would seem to be nearly contemporary with _Thel_.
_The Gates of Paradise_ constitutes an exception to the general spirit
of the works of this period, the accompanying text, though mystical
enough, being lyrical and not epical. The seventeen beautiful designs,
emblematical of the incidents necessarily associated with human nature,
are well described by Allan Cunningham as “a sort of devout dream,
equally wild and lovely.”
The merits of this remarkable series of works will always be a matter
of controversy. “Whether,” as Blake himself says, “whether this is
Jerusalem or Babylon, we know not.” It must be so, for they are
purely subjective, there is no objective criterion; they admit of
comparison with nothing, and can be tested by no recognised rules. In
the whole compass of human creation there is perhaps hardly anything
so distinctively an emanation of the mind that gave it birth. Visions
they undoubtedly are, and, as Messrs. Ellis and Yeats well say,
they are manifestly not the production of a pretender to visionary
powers. Whatever Blake has here put down, pictorially or poetically,
is evidently a record of something actually discerned by the inner
eye. This, however, leaves the question of their value still open.
To the pictorial part, indeed, almost all are agreed in attaching a
certain value, though the warmth of appreciation is widely graduated.
But literary estimation is not only discrepant but hostile; some
deem them revelation, others rhapsody. The one thing certain is the
general tendency towards Pantheism which Mr. Swinburne has made the
theme of an elaborate essay. To us they seem an exemplification of
the truth that no man can serve two masters. Blake had great gifts,
both as poet and artist, and he aspired not only to employ both, but
to combine both in the same work. At first this was practicable, but
soon the artistic faculty grew while the poetical dwindled. Not only
did the visible speech of painting become more important to him than
the viewless accents of verse, but his poetry became infected with the
artistic method. He allowed a latitude to his language which he ought
to have reserved for his form and colour, and became as hieroglyphic
in a speech where hieroglyphs are illegitimate as in one where they are
permissible. This is proved by the fact that the decline in the purity
of poetical form and in the perspicuity of poetical language proceed
_pari passu_. _Thel_, the earliest, is also both the most luminous and
the most musical of these pieces. Could Blake have schooled himself to
have written such blank verse as he had already produced in _Edward the
Third_ and _Samson_, _Thel_ would have been a very fine poem. Even as
it is its lax, rambling semi-prose is full of delicate modulations:
The daughters of the Seraphim led round their sunny flocks,
All but the youngest; she in paleness sought the secret air
To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day.
Down by the river of Adera her soft voice is heard,
And thus her gentle lamentation falls like morning dew.
In every succeeding production, however, there is less of metrical
beauty, and thought and expression grow continually more and more
amorphous. Blake may not improbably have been influenced by Ossian,
whose supposed poems were popular in his day, and from whom some of
his proper names, such as Usthona, seem to have been adopted. Many
then deemed that Ossian had demonstrated form to be a mere accident
of poetry instead of, as in truth it is, an indissoluble portion of
its essence. There is certainly a strong family resemblance between
Blake’s shadowy conceptions and Ossian’s misty sublimities. On the
other hand, he may be credited with having made a distinguished
disciple in Walt Whitman, who would not, we think, have written as he
did if Blake had never existed. What was pardonable in one so utterly
devoid of the sentiment of beautiful form as Whitman, was less so
in one so exquisitely gifted as Blake. Both derive some advantages
from their laxity, especially the poet of Democracy, but both suffer
from the inability of poetry, divorced from metrical form, to take a
serious hold upon the memory. One reads and admires, and by and by
the sensation is of the passage of a great procession of horsemen and
footmen and banners, but no distinct impression of a single countenance.
The general effect of these strange works upon the average mind is
correctly expressed by Gilchrist, when he says, speaking of _Europe_:
“It is hard to trace out any distinct subject, any plan or purpose,
or to determine whether it mainly relates to the past, the present,
or things to come. And yet its incoherence has a grandeur about it as
of the utterance of a man whose eyes are fixed on strange and awful
sights, invisible to bystanders.” What, then, did Blake suppose himself
to behold? Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have devoted an entire volume of
their three-volume work on Blake to the exposition of his visions.
Their comment is often highly suggestive, but it is seldom convincing.
When the right interpretation of a symbol has been found, it is usually
self-evident. Not so with their explanations, which appear neither
demonstrably wrong nor demonstrably right. Not that Blake talked
aimless nonsense; we are conscious of a general drift of thought in
some particular direction which seems to us to offer a general affinity
to the thought of the ancient Gnostics. It would be interesting if some
competent person would endeavour to determine whether the resemblance
goes any deeper than externals. Blake certainly knew nothing of the
Gnostics at first hand, nor is it probable that he could have gained
any knowledge of them from the mystical writers he did study, Behmen
and Swedenborg. But similar tendencies will frequently incarnate
themselves in individuals at widely remote periods of the world’s
history without evidence of direct filiation. Even so exceptional a
personage as Blake cannot be considered apart from his age, and his
age, among its other aspects, was one of mesmerism and illuminism. The
superficial resemblance of his writings to those of the Gnostics is
certainly remarkable. Both embody their imaginations in concrete forms;
both construct elaborate cosmogonies and obscure myths; both create
hierarchies of principalities and powers, and equip their spiritual
potentates with sonorous appellations; both disparage matter and its
Demiurgus. “I fear,” said Blake to Robinson, “that Wordsworth loves
nature, and nature is the work of the devil. The devil is in us as far
as we are nature.” The chief visible difference, that the Gnostics’
philosophy tends to asceticism, and Blake’s to enjoyment, may perhaps
be explained by the consideration that he was a poet, and that they
were philosophers and divines. Perhaps the best preparation for any
student of Blake who might wish to investigate this subject further
would be to read the article in the _Dictionary of Christian Biography_
upon the _Pistis Sophia_, the only Gnostic book that has come down
to us, and one which Blake would have delighted in illustrating. The
Gnostic belief in the all-importance of the transcendent knowledge
which comes of immediate perception (γνῶσις) reappears in him with
singular intensity. “Men are admitted into heaven,” he says, “not
because they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no
passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The
fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy.” Nothing in
Blake, perhaps, is so Gnostic as the strange poem, _The Everlasting
Gospel_, first published by Mr. Rossetti, though many things in it
would have shocked the Gnostics.
[Illustration: TITLE PAGE FROM THE BOOK OF THEL.]
The strictly literary criticism of Blake’s mystical books may be almost
confined to the _Book of Thel_, for this alone possesses sufficient
symmetry to allow a judgment to be formed upon it as a whole. The
others are like quagmires occasionally gay with brilliant flowers; but
_Thel_, though its purpose may be obscure, is at all events coherent,
with a beginning and an end. Thel, “youngest daughter of the Seraphim,”
roves through the lower world lamenting the mortality of beautiful
things, including her own. All things with which she discourses offer
her consolation, but to no purpose. At last she enters the realm of
Death himself.
The eternal gates’ terrific porter lifted the northern bar;
Thel entered in and saw the secrets of the land unknown.
She saw the couches of the dead, and where the fibrous root
Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists:
A land of sorrows and of tears, where never a smile was seen.
She wandered in the land of clouds, through valleys dark listening
Dolours and lamentations; waiting oft beside a dewy grave
She stood in silence, listening to the voices of the ground,
Till to her own grave-plot she came, and there she sat down,
And heard this voice of sorrow breathed from the hollow pit.
The effect of the voice of sorrow upon Thel is answerable to that of
the spider upon little Miss Muffet. This abrupt conclusion injures
the effect of a piece which otherwise may be compared to a strain
of soothing music, suggestive of many things, but giving definite
expression to none. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, however, have no
difficulty in assigning a meaning. Thel, according to them, is “the
pure spiritual essence,” her grief is the dread of incarnation, and her
ultimate flight is a return “to the land of pure unembodied innocence
from whence she came.” Yet her forsaking this land is represented
as her own act, and it is difficult to see how she could have “led
round her sunny flocks” in it if she had not been embodied while she
inhabited it. At the same time, if Messrs. Ellis and Yeats are right,
no interpretation of Blake can be disproved by any inconsistency that
it may seem to involve. “The surface,” they say, “is perpetually, as
it were, giving way before one, and revealing another surface below
it, and that again dissolves when we try to study it. The making of
religions melts into the making of the earth, and that fades away into
some allegory of the rising and the setting of the sun. It is all like
a great cloud full of stars and shapes, through which the eye seeks a
boundary in vain.”
[Illustration: _Design from the “Book of Urizen.” By W. Blake._]
Mr. Yeats, putting his interpretation of Blake’s symbolism more
tersely into the preface to his excellent edition of the Poetical
Works, describes it as shadowing forth the endless conflict between
the Imagination and the Reason, which, we may add, the Gnostics
would have expressed as the strife between the Supreme Deity and the
god of this world, the very phrase which Mr. Yeats himself uses in
describing Urizen, Blake’s Evil Genius, “the maker of dead law and
blind negation,” contrasted as the Gnostics would have contrasted him
with Los, the deity of the living world. Blake, therefore, has points
of contact with the representatives of the French Revolution on one
side, and with Coleridge on the other. Mr. Yeats’s interpretation is
in itself coherent and plausible, but the question whether it can be
fairly deduced from Blake himself is one on which few are entitled to
pronounce, and the causes of Blake’s obscurity are not so visible as
its consequences. To us, as already said, much of it appears to arise
from his imperfect discrimination between the provinces of speech and
of painting. His discourse frequently seems a hieroglyphic which would
have been more intelligible if it could have been expressed in the
manner proper to hieroglyphics by pictorial representation. As Mr.
Smetham says of some of the designs, “Thought cannot fathom the secret
of their power, and yet the power is there.” It seems evident that the
poem, when a complete lyric, generally preceded the picture in Blake’s
mind, and that the latter must usually be taken as a gloss, in which
he seeks to illustrate by means of visible representation what he was
conscious of having left obscure by verbal expression. The exquisite
song of the Sunflower, for example, certainly existed before the very
slight accompanying illustration.
Ah Sunflower, weary of time,
Who counted the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done.
Where the youth, pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire
Where my sunflower wishes to go.
The first of these stanzas is perfectly clear: the second requires
no interpretation to a poetical mind, but will not bear construing
strictly, and its comprehension is certainly assisted by the slight
fugitive design lightly traced around the border. Generally the
pictorial illustration of Blake’s thought is much more elaborate, but
in _Songs of Innocence and Experience_ it almost always seems to have
grown out of the poem. In the less inspired _Prophetical Books_, on the
other hand, the pictorial representation, even when present only to the
artist’s mind, seems to have frequently suggested or modified the text.
An example may be adduced from _The Book of Thel_.
Why an ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?
Blake had noted the external likeness of the convolutions of the ear to
the convolutions of a whirlpool; therefore the ear shall be described
as actually being what it superficially resembles, and because the
whirlpool sucks in ships, the ear shall suck in creations. It must also
be remembered that Blake’s belief that his works were given him by
inspiration prevented his revising them, and that they were stereotyped
by the method of their publication. No considerable productions of
the human mind, it is probable, so nearly approach the character of
absolutely extemporaneous utterances.
Before passing from the literary to the artistic expression of Blake’s
genius in these books, something must be said of the remarkable
appendix to _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ entitled _Proverbs of
Hell_. These are a number of aphoristic sayings, impregnated with
Blake’s peculiarities of thought and expression, but for the most part
so shrewd and pithy as to demonstrate the author’s sanity, at least at
this time of his life. The following are some of the more striking:--
Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of
the crow.
The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.
He who has suffered you to impose on him, knows you.
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
One law for the lion and ox is oppression.
The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.
These are not the scintillations of reason which may occasionally
illumine the chaos of a madman’s brain, but bespeak a core of good
sense quite inconsistent with general mental disturbance, though
sufficiently compatible with delusion on particular subjects. With
incomparable art, Shakespeare has imparted a touch of wildness to
Hamlet’s shrewdest sayings; but Blake speaks rather as Polonius would
have spoken if it had been possible for Polonius to speak in tropes.
[Illustration: FINAL PAGE FROM THE BOOK OF THEL.]
From the difficult subject of the interpretation of Blake’s mystical
designs we pass with satisfaction to the artistic qualities of the
designs themselves. On this point there is an approximation to
unanimity. To some the sublime, to others the grotesque, may seem to
preponderate, but all will allow them to be among the most remarkable
and original series of conceptions that ever emanated from a mortal
brain. To whatever exceptions they may be liable, it enlarges one’s
apprehension of the compass of human faculties to know that human
faculties have been adequate to their production. They may be ranked
with the most imaginative passages of _Paradise Lost_, and of Byron’s
_Cain_ as an endeavour of the mind to project itself beyond the visible
and tangible, and to create for itself new worlds of grandeur and of
gloom in height and abyss and interstellar space. Wonderful indeed is
the range of imagination displayed, even though we cannot shut our
eyes to some palpable repetitions. In the opinion, however, of even
so sympathetic a critic as Dr. Wilkinson, Blake deserves censure for
having degenerated into mere monstrosity. “Of the worst aspect of
Blake’s genius,” he says, “it is painful to speak. In his _Prophecies
of America_, his _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_, and a host of
unpublished drawings, earth-born might has banished the heavenlier
elements of art, and exists combined with all that is monstrous and
diabolical. The effect of these delineations is greatly heightened by
the antiquity which is engraven on the faces of those who do and suffer
in them. We have the impression that we are looking down into the hells
of the ancient people, the Anakim, the Nephilim, and the Rephaim. Their
human forms are gigantic petrifactions, from which the fires of lust
and intense selfish passion have long dissipated what was animal and
vital, leaving stony limbs and countenances expressive of despair and
stupid cruelty.” We, on the other hand, should rather criticise Blake
for having failed to be as appalling as he meant to be. His power, as
it seems to us, consisted rather in the vivid imagination than in the
actual rendering of scenes of awe and horror. Far inferior artists have
produced more thrilling effects of this sort with much simpler means.
It would be wrong to say that his visions appear unreal, but they do
appear at a remove from reality, a world seen through a glass darkly,
its phantasm rather than its portrait. This, however, only applies to
the inventions of Blake’s own brain, which, if we may judge by the
moderate development of the back head in Deville’s cast, lacked the
force of the animal propensities requisite for the portrayal of cruelty
and horror. He could render the conceptions of others with startling
force--witness the impressive delineation reproduced by us of the
Architect of the Universe at work with his compasses; and the simple
pencil outline of Nebuchadnezzar in Mr. Rossetti’s book, engraved by
Gilchrist, where the human quadruped creeps away with an expression of
overwhelming and horror-stricken dismay. This power of interpretation
was to find yet finer expression in the illustration of the Book of Job.
Blake’s technical defects are indicated by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats
as consisting mainly in imperfect treatment of the human form from
want of anatomical knowledge. He had always disliked that close study
of the life which alone could have made him an able draughtsman; it
“obliterated” him, he said, and had resolved to quarrel with almost
all the artists from whom he might have learned. It must be remembered
in his excuse that consummate colouring and consummate draughtsmanship
are seldom found associated. Those who may feel disappointed with the
reproductions of Blake’s mystical designs must also remember that
these are but shadows of the artist’s thought, which needed for its
full effect the application of colour by his own hand. “Much,” says
Dante Rossetti, “which seems unaccountably rugged and incomplete is
softened by the sweet, liquid, rainbow tints of the coloured copies
into mysterious brilliancy.” The effect thus obtained may perhaps be
best shown by Mr. Gilchrist’s eloquent description of the illuminated
drawings in Lord Crewe’s copy of _America_. “Turning over the leaves,
it is sometimes like an increase of daylight in the retina, so fair
and open is the effect of particular pages. The skies of sapphire,
or gold, rayed with hues of sunset, against which stand out leaf or
blossom, or pendent branch, gay with bright-plumaged birds; the strips
of emerald sward below, gemmed with flower and lizard, and enamelled
snake, refresh the eye continually. Some of the illustrations are of a
more sombre kind. There is one in which a little corpse, white as snow,
lies gleaming on the floor of a green over-arching cave, which close
inspection proves to be a field of wheat, whose slender interlacing
stalks, bowed by the full ear and by a gentle breeze, bend over the
dead infant. The delicate network of stalks, which is carried up
one side of the page, the main picture being at the bottom, and the
subdued yet vivid green light shed over the whole, produce a lovely
decorative effect. Decorative effect is, in fact, never lost sight of,
even where the motive of the design is ghastly or terrible.” Whatever
the imperfections of Blake’s peculiar sphere, it _was_ his sphere, and
probably the only department of art in which he could have obtained
greatness even if his technical accomplishment had been as complete
as it was the reverse. When painting on more orthodox lines he is
often surprisingly tame and conventional. How remote he was from the
inane when he could revel in his own conceptions may, notwithstanding
the tremendous disadvantages inherent in reproduction, be judged from
the illustrations to his mystical books selected for this monograph,
the frontispiece and Plate IV. of _Thel_, and the two subjects from
_America_.
[Illustration: _The Ancient of Days setting a Compass to the Earth.
From a water-colour drawing by W. Blake. British Museum._]