INTRODUCTION
I
When Blake spoke the first word of the nineteenth century there was
no one to hear it, and now that his message, the message of emancipation
from reality through the 'shaping spirit of imagination,' has penetrated
the world, and is slowly remaking it, few are conscious of the first
utterer, in modern times, of the message with which all are familiar.
Thought to-day, wherever it is most individual, owes either force or
direction to Nietzsche, and thus we see, on our topmost towers, the
Philistine armed and winged, and without the love or fear of God or
man in his heart, doing battle in Nietzsche's name against the ideas of
Nietzsche. No one can think, and escape Nietzsche; but Nietzsche has
come after Blake, and will pass before Blake passes.
_The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ anticipates Nietzsche
in his most significant paradoxes, and, before his time, exalts energy
above reason, and Evil, 'the active springing from energy' above Good,
'the passive that obeys reason.' Did not Blake astonish Crabb Robinson
by declaring that 'there was nothing in good and evil, the virtues and
vices'; that 'vices in the natural world were the highest sublimities in
the spiritual world'? 'Man must become better and wickeder,' says
Nietzsche in _Zarathustra_; and, elsewhere; 'Every man must
find his own virtue.' Sin, to Blake, is negation, is nothing; 'everything
is good in God's eyes'; it is the eating of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil that has brought sin into the world: education, that
is, by which we are taught to distinguish between things that do not
differ. When Nietzsche says: 'Let us rid the world of the notion of sin,
and banish with it the idea of punishment,' he expresses one of Blake's
central doctrines, and he realizes the corollary, which, however, he does
not add. 'The Christian's soul,' he says, 'which has freed itself from
sin is in most cases ruined by the hatred against sin. Look at the faces
of great Christians. They are the faces of great haters.' Blake sums up
all Christianity as forgiveness of sin:
'Mutual forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the gates of Paradise.'
The doctrine of the Atonement was to him a 'horrible doctrine,'
because it seemed to make God a hard creditor, from whom pity
could be bought for a price. 'Doth Jehovah forgive a debt only on
condition that it shall be paid? ... That debt is not forgiven!' he says
in _Jerusalem._ To Nietzsche, far as he goes on the same road,
pity is 'a weakness, which increases the world's suffering'; but to
Blake, in the spirit of the French proverb, forgiveness is understanding.
'This forgiveness,' says Mr. Yeats, 'was not the forgiveness of the
theologian who has received a commandment from afar off, but of
the poet and artist, who believes he has been taught, in a mystical
vision, "that the imagination is the man himself," and believes he
has discovered in the practice of his art that without a perfect
sympathy there is no perfect imagination, and therefore no perfect
life.' He trusted the passions, because they were alive; and, like
Nietzsche, hated asceticism, because:
'Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,
But desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there.'
'Put off holiness,' he said, 'and put on intellect,' And 'the fool
shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy.' Is not
this a heaven after the heart of Nietzsche?
Nietzsche is a Spinoza à _rebours._ The essence of the
individual, says Spinoza, 'is the effort by which it endeavors to
persevere in its own being.' 'Will and understanding are one and
the same.' 'By virtue and power I understand the same thing.'
'The effort to understand is the first and sole basis of virtue.' So
far it might be Nietzsche who is speaking. Only, in Spinoza, this
affirmation of will, persistent egoism, power, hard understanding,
leads to a conclusion which is far enough from the conclusion of
Nietzsche. 'The absolute virtue of the mind is to understand; its
highest virtue, therefore, to understand or know God.' That, to
Nietzsche, is one of 'the beautiful words by which the conscience
is lulled to sleep.' 'Virtue is power,' Spinoza leads us to think,
because it is virtue; 'power is virtue,' affirms Nietzsche, because
it is power. And in Spinoza's profound heroism of the mind, really
a great humility, 'he who loves God does not desire that God should
love him in return.' Nietzsche would find the material for a kind of
desperate heroism, made up wholly of pride and defiance.
To Blake, 'God-intoxicated' more than Spinoza, 'God only acts
and is, in existing beings and men,' as Spinoza might also have said;
to him, as to Spinoza, all moral virtue is identical with understanding,
and 'men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and
governed their passions, but because they have cultivated their
understandings.' Yet to Blake Spinoza's mathematical approach to
truth would have been a kind of negation. Even an argument from
reason seemed to him atheistical: to one who had truth, as he
was assured, within him, reason was only 'the bound or outward
circumference of energy,' but 'energy is the only life,' and, as to
Nietzsche, is 'eternal delight.'
Yet, to Nietzsche, with his strange, scientific distrust of the
imagination, of those who so 'suspiciously' say 'We see what others
do not see,' there comes distrust, hesitation, a kind of despair,
precisely at the point where Blake enters into his liberty. 'The habits
of our senses,' says Nietzsche, 'have plunged us into the lies and
deceptions of feeling.' 'Whoever believes in nature,' says Blake,
'disbelieves in God; for nature is the work of the Devil.' 'These
again,' Nietzsche goes on, 'are the foundations of all our judgments
and "knowledge," there is no escape whatever, no back-way or
by-way into the real world.' But the real world, to Blake, into which
he can escape at every moment, is the world of imagination, from
which messengers come to him, daily and nightly.
Blake said 'The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of
instruction,' and it is partly in what they helped to destroy that
Blake and Nietzsche are at one; but destruction, with Blake, was
the gesture of a hand which brushes aside needless hindrances,
while to Nietzsche it was 'an intellectual thing,' the outer militant
part of 'the silent, self-sufficient man in the midst of a general
enslavement, who practices self-defense against the outside world,
and is constantly living in a state of supreme fortitude.' Blake rejoins
Nietzsche as he had rejoined Spinoza, by a different road, having
fewer devils to cast out, and no difficulty at all in maintaining his
spiritual isolation, his mental liberty, under all circumstances.
And to Blake, to be 'myself alone, shut up in myself,' was to be in no
merely individual but in a universal world, that world of imagination
whose gates seemed to him to be open to every human being. No
less than Nietzsche he says to every man: Be yourself, nothing else
matters or exists; but to be myself, to him, was to enter by the
imagination into eternity.
The philosophy of Nietzsche was made out of his nerves and
was suffering, but to Blake it entered like sunlight into the eyes.
Nietzsche's mind is the most sleepless of minds; with him every
sensation turns instantly into the stuff of thought; he is terribly
alert, the more so because he never stops to systematize; he must
be for ever apprehending. He darts out feelers in every direction,
relentlessly touching the whole substance of the world. His apprehension
is minute rather than broad; he is content to seize one thing at a time,
and he is content if each separate thing remains separate; no theory ties
together or limits his individual intuitions. What we call his philosophy
is really no more than the aggregate of these intuitions coming to us
through the medium of a remarkable personality. His personality stands
to him in the place of a system. Speaking of Kant and Schopenhauer,
he says: 'Their thoughts do not constitute a passionate history of the
soul.' His thoughts are the passionate history of his soul. It is for this
reason that he is an artist among philosophers rather than a pure
philosopher. And remember that he is also not, in the absolute sense,
the poet, but the artist. He saw and dreaded the weaknesses of the
artist, his side-issues in the pursuit of truth. But in so doing he
dreaded one of his own weaknesses.
Blake, on the other hand, receives nothing through his sensations,
suffers nothing through his nerves. 'I know of no other Christianity,'
he says, 'and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and
mind to exercise the divine arts of Imagination: Imagination, the real
and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow,
and in which we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies, when
these vegetable mortal bodies are no more.' To Nietzsche the sense
of a divine haunting became too heavy a burden for his somewhat
inhuman solitude, the solitude of Alpine regions, with their steadfast
glitter, their thin, high, intoxicating air. 'Is this obtrusiveness of
heaven,' he cries, 'this inevitable superhuman neighbor, not enough
to drive one mad?' But Blake, when he says, 'I am under the direction
of messengers from heaven, daily and nightly,' speaks out of natural
joy, which is wholly humility, and it is only 'if we fear to do the
dictates of our angels, and tremble at the tasks set before us,' it is
only then that he dreads, as the one punishment, that 'every one in
eternity will leave him.'
II
'There are three powers in man of conversing with Paradise,'
said Blake, and he defined them as the three sons of Noah who
survived the flood, and who are Poetry, Painting, and Music. Through
all three powers, and to the last moments of his life on earth, Blake
conversed with Paradise. We are told that he used to sing his own
songs to his own music, and that, when he was dying, 'he composed
and uttered songs to his Maker,' and 'burst out into singing
of the things he saw in heaven.' And with almost the last strength
of his hands he had made a sketch of his wife before he 'made
the rafters ring,' as a bystander records, with the improvisation of
is last breath.
Throughout life his desire had been, as he said, 'to converse
with my friends in eternity, see visions, dream dreams, and prophesy
and speak parables unobserved.' He says again:
'I rest not from my great task
To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal
eyes
Of Man inwards into the worlds of thought, into
eternity,
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human
imagination.'
And, writing to the uncomprehending Hayley (who had called him
'gentle, visionary Blake'), he says again: 'I am really drunk with
intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.'
To the newspapers of his time, on the one or two occasions when they
mentioned his name, he was 'an unfortunate lunatic'; even to Lamb,
who looked upon him as 'one of the most extraordinary persons of
the age,' he was a man 'flown, whither I know not--to Hades or
a madhouse.' To the first editor of his collected poems there seemed
to be 'something in his mind not exactly sane'; and the critics of to-day
still discuss his sanity as a man and as a poet.
It is true that Blake was abnormal; but what was abnormal in him
was his sanity. To one who believed that 'The ruins of Time build
mansions in eternity,' that 'imagination is eternity,' and that 'our
deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent
to our mortal part,' there could be none of that confusion at the edge
of mystery which makes a man mad because he is unconscious of the
gulf. No one was ever more conscious than Blake was of the limits of
that region which we call reality and of that other region which we call
imagination. It pleased him to reject the one and to dwell in the other,
and his choice was not the choice of most men, but of some of those
who have been the greatest saints and the greatest artists. And, like
the most authentic among them, he walked firmly among those realities
to which he cared to give no more than a side-glance from time to time;
he lived his own life quietly and rationally, doing always exactly what
he wanted to do, and with so fine a sense of the subtlety of mere worldly
manners, than when, at his one moment of worldly success, in 1793, he
refused the post of drawing-master to the royal family, he gave up all
his other pupils at the same time, lest the refusal should seem ungracious
on the part of one who had been the friend of revolutionaries. He saw
visions, but not as the spiritualists and the magicians have seen them.
These desire to quicken mortal sight until the soul limits itself again,
takes body, and returns to reality; but Blake, the inner mystic, desired
only to quicken that imagination which he knew to be more real than
the reality of nature. Why should he call up shadows when he could
talk in the spirit with spiritual realities? 'Then I asked,' he says in
_The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, 'does a firm persuasion
that a thing is so, make it so?' He replied, "All poets believe that it
does."
In the _Descriptive Catalogue_ to his exhibition of pictures
in 1809, Blake defines, more precisely than in any other place, what
vision was to him. He is speaking of his pictures, but it is a plea for
the raising of painting to the same 'sphere of invention and visionary
conception' as that which poetry and music inhabit. 'The Prophets,'
he says, 'describe what they saw in vision as real and existing men,
whom they saw with their imaginative and immortal organs; the
Apostles the same; the clearer the organ, the more distinct the
object. A spirit and a vision are not, as the modern philosophy
supposes, a cloudy vapor, or a nothing. They are organized and
minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature
can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments
and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can
see, does not imagine at all. The painter of this work asserts that all
his imaginations appear to him infinitely more perfect and more
minutely organized than anything seen by his mortal eye.' 'Inspiration
and vision,' he says in one of the marginal notes to Reynolds's
_Discourses_, 'was then, and now is, and I hope will always
remain, my element, my eternal dwelling-place.' And 'God forbid,'
he says also, 'that Truth should be confined to mathematical
demonstration. He who does not know Truth at sight is not worthy
of her notice.'
The mind of Blake lay open to eternity as a seed-plot lies open
to the sower. In 1802 he writes to Mr. Butts from Felpham: 'I
am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you what ought to be
told--that I am under the direction of messengers from heaven,
daily and nightly.' 'I have written this poem,' he says of the
_Jerusalem_, 'from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes
twenty or--thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even
against my will.' 'I may praise it,' he says in another letter, 'since
I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are
in eternity.' In these words, the most precise claim for direct
inspiration which Blake ever made, there is nothing different in kind,
only in degree, from what must be felt by every really creative artist
and by every profoundly and simply religious person. There can hardly
be a poet who is not conscious of how little his own highest powers are
under his own control. The creation of beauty is the end of art, but the
artist should rarely admit to himself that such is his purpose. A poem
is not written by the man who says: I will sit down and write a poem;
but rather by the man who, captured by rather than capturing an impulse,
hears a tune which he does not recognize, or sees a sight which he does
not remember, in some 'close corner of his brain,' and exerts the only
energy at his disposal in recording it faithfully, in the medium of his
particular art. And so in every creation of beauty, some obscure
desire stirred in the soul, not realized by the mind for what it was, and,
aiming at most other things in the world than pure beauty, produced it.
Now, to the critic this is not more important to remember than it is for
him to remember that the result, the end, must be judged, not by the
impulse which brought it into being, nor by the purpose which it sought
to serve, but by its success or failure in one thing: the creation of
beauty. To the artist himself this precise consciousness of what he
has done is not always given, any more than a precise consciousness
of what he is doing. Only in the greatest do we find vision and the
correction of vision equally powerful and equally constant.
To Blake, as to some artists and to most devout people, there was
nothing in vision to correct, nothing even to modify. His language in
all his letters and in much of his printed work is identical with the
language used by the followers of Wesley and Whitefield at the time
in which he was writing. In Wesley's journal you will find the same
simple and immediate consciousness of the communion of the soul
with the world of spiritual reality: not a vague longing, like Shelley's,
for a principle of intellectual beauty, nor an unattained desire after
holiness, like that of the conventionally religious person, but a literal
'power of conversing with Paradise,' as Blake called it, and as many
Methodists would have been equally content to call it. And in Blake,
as in those whom the people of that age called 'enthusiasts' (that word
of reproach in the eighteenth century and of honor in all other
centuries), there was no confusion (except in brains where 'true
superstition,' as Blake said, was 'ignorant honesty, and this is beloved
of God and man') between the realities of daylight and these other
realities from the other side of day. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats quote a
mysterious note written in Blake's handwriting, with a reference
to Spurzheim, page 154. I find that this means Spurzheim's _Observations
on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind, or Insanity_ (1817),
and the passage in the text is as follows: 'Religion is another fertile
cause of insanity. Mr. Haslam, though he declares it sinful to consider
religion as a cause of insanity, adds, however, that he would be
ungrateful, did he not avow his obligations to Methodism for its
supply of numerous cases. Hence the primitive feelings of religion may
be misled and produce insanity; that is what I would contend for,
and in that sense religion often leads to insanity.' Blake has written:
'Methodism, etc., p. 154. Cowper came to me and said: "Oh! that I
were insane, always. I will never rest. Can not you make me truly
insane? I will never rest till I am so. Oh! that in the bosom of God
I was hid. You retain health and yet are mad as any of us all-over
us all--mad as a refuge from unbelief--from Bacon, Newton, and
Locke."' What does this mean but that 'madness,' the madness of
belief in spiritual things, must be complete if it is to be effectual,
and that, once complete, there is no disturbance of bodily or mental
health, as in the doubting and distracted Cowper, who was driven mad,
not by the wildness of his belief, but by the hesitations of his doubt?
Attempts have been made to claim Blake for an adept of magic.
But whatever cabbalistical terms he may have added to the somewhat
composite and fortuitous naming of his mythology ('all but names of
persons and places,' he says, 'is invention, both in poetry and
painting'), his whole mental attitude was opposed to that of the
practicers of magic. We have no record of his ever having evoked a
vision, but only of his accepting or enduring visions. Blake was,
above all, spontaneous: the practiser of magic is a deliberate craftsman
in the art of the soul. I can no more imagine Blake sitting down to juggle
with symbols or to gaze into a pool of ink than I can imagine him
searching out words that would make the best effects in his lyrics,
or fishing for inspiration, pen in hand, in his own ink-pot. A man does
not beg at the gate of dreams when he is the master for whose entrance
the gate stands open.
Of the definite reality of Blake's visions there can be no question;
no question that, as he once wrote, 'nothing can withstand the fury
of my course among the stars of God, and in the abysses of the accuser.'
But imagination is not one, but manifold; and the metaphor, professing
to be no more than metaphor, of the poet, may be vision as essential as
the thing actually seen by the visionary. The difference between
imagination in Blake and in, say, Shakespeare, is that the one (himself
a painter) has a visual imagination and sees an image or metaphor as
a literal reality, while the other, seeing it not less vividly but in a
more purely mental way, adds a 'like' or an 'as,' and the image or
metaphor comes to you with its apology or attenuation, and takes you
less by surprise. But to Blake it was the universe that was a metaphor.
WILLIAM BLAKE
I
The origin of the family of William Blake has not yet been found;
and I can claim no more for the evidence that I have been able to gather
than that it settles us more firmly in our ignorance. But the names of his
brothers and sister, their dates and order of birth, and the date of his
wife's birth, have never, so far as I know, been correctly given. Even the
date of his own birth has been contested by Mr. Swinburne 'on good
MS. authority,' which we know to be that of Frederick Tatham, who
further asserts, wrongly, that James was younger than William, and
that John was 'the eldest son.' Gilchrist makes no reference to John,
but says, wrongly, that James was 'a year and a half William's senior,'
and that William had a sister 'nearly seven years younger than himself';
of whom, says Mr. Yeats, we hear little, and among that little not
even her name.' Most of these problems can be settled by the entries
in parish registers, and I have begun with the registers of the church
of St. James, Westminster.
I find by these entries that James Blake, the son of James and
Catherine Blake, was born July 10, and christened July 15, 1753; John
Blake ('son of John and Catherine,' says the register, by what is probably
a slip of the pen) was horn May 12, and christened June I, 1755; William
Blake was born November 28, and christened December 11, 1757; another
John Blake was born March 20, and christened March 30, 1760; Richard
Blake was born June 19, and christened July 11, 1762; and Catherine
Elizabeth Blake was born January 7, and christened January 28, 1764.
Here, where we find the daughter's name and the due order of births,
we find one perplexity in the name of Richard, whose date of birth fits
the date given by Gilchrist and others to Robert, William's favorite
brother, whose name he has engraved on a design of his 'spiritual form'
in _Milton_, whom he calls Robert in a letter to Butts, and whom
J. T. Smith recalls not only as Robert, but as 'Bob, as he was familiarly
called.' In the entry of 'John, son of John and Catherine Blake,' I can
easily imagine the clerk repeating by accident the name of the son
for the name of the father; and I am inclined to suppose that there
was a John who died before the age of five, and that his name was
given to the son next born. Precisely the same repetition of name is
found in the case of Lamb's two sisters christened Elizabeth, and
Shelley's two sisters christened Helen. 'My brother John, the evil one,'
would therefore be younger than William; but Tatham, in saying that
he was older, may have been misled by there having been two sons
christened John.
There are two theories as to the origin of Blake's family; but neither
of them has yet been confirmed by the slightest documentary evidence.
Both of these theories were put forth in the same year, 1893, one by Mr.
Alfred T. Story in his _William Blake,_ the other by Messrs. Ellis
and Yeats in their _Works of William Blake_. According to Mr. Story,
Blake's family was connected with the Somerset family of the Admiral,
through a Wiltshire family of Blakes; but for this theory he gives merely
the report of 'two ladies, daughters of William John Blake, of
Southampton, who claim to be second cousins of William Blake,'
and in a private letter he tells me that he has not been able to procure
any documentary evidence of the statement. According to Messrs. Ellis
and Yeats, Blake's father was Irish, and was originally called O'Neil. His
father, John O'Neil, is supposed to have changed his name, on marrying
Ellen Blake, from O'Neil to Blake, and James O'Neil, his son by a previous
union, to have taken the same name, and to have settled in London,
while a younger son, the actual son of Ellen Blake, went to Malaga. This
statement rests entirely on the assertion of Dr. Carter Blake, who claimed
descent from the latter; and it has never been supported by documentary
evidence. In answer, to my inquiry, Mr. Martin J. Blake, the compiler of
two volumes of _Blake Family Records_ (first series, 1300-1600;
second series, 1600-1700), writes: 'Although I have made a special study
of the genealogies of the Blakes of Ireland, I have not come across any
Ellen Blake who married John O'Neil who afterwards (as is said by Messrs.
Ellis and Yeats) adopted the surname of Blake.'
Mr. Sampson points out that Blakes father was certainly a Protestant.
He is sometimes described as a Swedenborgian, always as a Dissenter,
and it is curious that about half of the Blakes recorded in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_ were also conspicuous as
Puritans or Dissenters. Mr. Sampson further points out that Blake
in one of his poems speaks of himself as 'English Blake.' It is true that
he is contrasting himself with the German Klopstock; yet I scarcely think
an Irishman would have used the expression even for contrast. Blake
is nowhere referred to as having been in any way Irish, and the only
apparent exception to this is one which I am obliged to set up with one
hand and knock down with the other. In the index to Crabb Robinson's
_Diary_ one of the references to Blake shows us Mr. Sheil speaking
at the Academical Society while 'Blake, his countryman, kept watching
him to keep him in order.' That this does not refer to William Blake I
have found by tracking through the unpublished portions of the
_Diary_ in the original manuscript the numerous references to
'a Mr. Blake' who was accustomed to speak at the meetings of the
Academical Society. He is described as 'a Mr. Blake who spoke with
good sense on the Irish side, and argued from the Irish History and
the circumstances which attended the passing of the bills.' He afterwards
speaks 'sharply and coarsely,' and answers Mr. Robinson's hour-long
contention that the House of Commons should, or should not, 'possess
the power of imprisoning for a breach of privilege,' by 'opposing the
facts of Lord Melville's prosecution, the Be version Bill, etc., etc., and
Burke's Reform Bill'; returning, in short, 'my civility by incivility.'
This was not the learning, nor were these the manners, of William
Blake.
I would again appeal to the evidence of the parish register. I find
Blakes in the parish of St. James, Westminster, from the beginning of
the eighteenth century, the first being a William Blake, the son of
Richard and Elizabeth, who was born March 19, 1700. Between the
years 1750 and 1767 (the time exactly parallel with the births of the
family of James and Catherine Blake) I find among the baptisms the
names of Frances, Daniel, Reuben, John Cartwright, and William
(another William) Blake; and I find among the marriages, between 1728
and 1747, a Robert, a Thomas, a James, and a Richard Blake. The wife
of James, who was married on April 15, 1738, is called Elizabeth, a name
which we have already found as the name of a Mrs. Blake, and which we
find again as the second name of Catherine Elizabeth Blake (the sister of
William Blake), who was born in 1764. I find two Williams, two Richards,
and a John among the early entries, at the beginning of the eighteenth
century. It is impossible to say positively that any of these families,
not less than nine in number, all bearing the name of Blake, all living
in the same parish, within a space of less than forty years, were related
to one another; but it is easier to suppose so than to suppose that one
only out of the number, and one which had assumed the name, should have
found itself accidentally in the midst of all the others, to which the
name may be supposed to have more definitely belonged.
All that we know with certainty of James Blake, the father, is that
he was a hosier ('of respectable trade and easy habits,' says Tatham;
'of fifty years' standing,' says Cunningham, at the time of his
death), that he was a Dissenter (a Swedenborgian, or inclined to
Swedenborgianism), and that he died in 1784 and was buried on July 4
in Bunhill Fields. The burial register says: 'July 4, 1784. Mr. James
Blake from Soho Square in a grave, 13/6.' Of his wife Catherine all
that we know is that she died in 1792, and was also buried in Bunhill
Fields. The register says: 'Sept. 9, 1792. Catherine Blake; age 70;
brought from St. James, Westminster. Grave 9 feet; E. & W. 16;
N. & S. 42-43. 19/-.' Tatham says that 'even when a child, his mother
beat him for running and saying that he saw the prophet Ezekiel
under a tree in the fields.' At eight or ten he comes home from Peckham
Rye saying that he has seen a tree filled with angels; and his father is
going to beat him for telling a lie; but his mother intercedes. It was the
father, Tatham says, who, noticing to what great anger he was moved
by a blow, decided not to send him to school.
The eldest son, James, Tatham tells us, 'having a saving,
somniferous mind, lived a yard and a half life, and pestered his brother
with timid sentences of bread and cheese advice.' On his father's death
in 1784 he carried on the business, and it was at his house that Blake
held his one exhibition of pictures in 1809. 'These paintings filled
several rooms of an ordinary dwelling-house,' says Crabb Robinson
in his _Reminiscences_; and, telling how he had bought four copies
of the catalogue, 'giving 10/-, I bargained that I should be at liberty
to go again. "Free! as long as you live!" said the brother, astonished
at such a liberality, which he had never experienced before nor I dare
say did afterwards.' Crabb Robinson had at first written 'as long as you
like,' and this he altered into 'as long as you live,' as if fancying, so
long afterwards as 1852, that he remembered the exact word; but
in the entry in the _Diary_, in 1810, we read 'Oh! as often as
you please!' so that we may doubt whether the 'honest, unpretending
shopkeeper,' who was looked upon by his neighbors, we are told, as
'a bit mad,' because he would 'talk Swedenborg,' can be credited with
all the enthusiasm of the later and more familiar reading. James and
William no longer spoke to one another when, after retiring from
business, James came to live in Cirencester Street, near Linnell. Tatham
tells us that 'he got together a little annuity, upon which he supported
his only sister, and vegetating to a moderate age, died about three years
before his brother William.'
Of John we know only that he was something of a scapegrace
and the favorite son of his parents. He was apprenticed, at some cost,
to a candle-maker, but ran away, and, after some help from William,
enlisted in the army, lived wildly, and died young. Robert, the favorite
of William, also died young, at the age of twenty-five. He lived with
William and Catherine from 1784 to the time of his death in 1787,
at 27 Broad Street, helping in the print-shop of 'Parker and Blake,'
and learning from his brother to draw and engrave. One of his original
sketches, a stiff drawing of long, rigid, bearded figures staring in
terror, quite in his brother's manner, is in the Print Room of the
British Museum. A story is told of him by Gilchrist which gives us
the whole man, indeed the whole household, in brief. There had
been a dispute between him and Mrs. Blake. Blake suddenly interposed,
and said to his wife: 'Kneel down and beg Robert's pardon directly,
or you will never see my face again.' She knelt down (thinking
it, as she said afterwards, 'very hard,' for she felt herself to be in the
right) and said: 'Robert, I beg your pardon; I am in the wrong.' 'Young
woman, you lie,' said Robert, 'I am in the wrong.'
Early in 1787 Robert fell ill, and during the last fortnight
William nursed him without taking rest by day or night, until, at
the moment of death, he saw his brother's soul rise through the
ceiling 'clapping its hands for joy'; whereupon he went to bed and
slept for three days and nights. Robert was buried in Bunhill Fields
on February 11. The register says: "Feb. 11, 1787. Mr. Robert Blake
from Golden Square in a grave, 13/6." But his spiritual presence was
never to leave the mind of William Blake, whom in 1800 we find
writing to Hayley: 'Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his
spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in
remembrance, in the regions of my imagination. I hear his advice,
and even now write from his dictate.' It was Robert whom he saw
in a dream, not long after his death, telling him the method by
which he was to engrave his poems and designs. The spiritual
forms of William and of Robert, in almost exact parallel, are
engraved on separate pages of the Prophetic Book of _Milton._
Of the sister, Catherine Elizabeth, we know only that she
lived with Blake and his wife at Felpham. He refers to her in
several letters, and in the poem sent to Butts on October 2, 1800,
he speaks of her as 'my sister and friend.' In another poem,
sent to Butts in a letter dated November 22, 1802, but written, he
explains, 'above a twelvemonth ago, while walking from Felpham
to Lavant to meet my sister,' he asks strangely:
'Must my wife live in my sister's bane,
Or my sister survive on my Love's pain?'
But from the context it is not clear whether this is meant
literally or figuratively. When Tatham was writing his life of Blake,
apparently in the year 1831, he refers to 'Miss Catherine' as still
living, 'having survived nearly all her relations.' Mrs. Gilchrist, in
a letter written to Mr. W. M. Rossetti in 1862, reports a rumour,
for which she gives no evidence, that 'she and Mrs. Blake got on
very ill together, and latterly never met at all,' and that she died
in extreme penury.
II
Of the childhood and youth of Blake we know little beyond
what Malkin and Smith have to tell us. From the age of ten to the
age of fourteen he studied at Pars' drawing-school in the Strand,
buying for himself prints after Raphael, Dürer, and Michelangelo
at the sale-rooms; at fourteen he was apprenticed to Basire, the
engraver, who lived at 31 Great Queen Street, and in his shop
Blake once saw Goldsmith. 'His love for art increasing,' says
Tatham, and the time of life having arrived when it was deemed
necessary to place him under some tutor, a painter of eminence was
proposed, and necessary applications were made; but from the huge
premium required, he requested, with his characteristic generosity,
that his father would not on any account spend so much money on
him, as he thought it would be an injustice to his brothers and
sisters. He therefore himself proposed engraving as being less
expensive, and sufficiently eligible for his future avocations.
Of Basire, therefore, for a premium of fifty guineas, he learnt the
art of engraving.' We are told that he was apprenticed, at his own
request, to Basire rather than to the more famous Ryland, the
engraver to the king, because, on being taken by his father to
Ryland's studio, he said: 'I do not like the man's face: it looks
as if he will live to be hanged.' Twelve years later Ryland was
hanged for forgery.
Blake was with Basire for seven years, and for the last five
years much of his time was spent in making drawings of Gothic
monuments, chiefly in Westminster Abbey, until he came, says
Malkin, to be 'himself almost a Gothic monument.' Tatham tells
us that the reason of his being 'sent out drawing,' as he fortunately
was, instead of being kept at engraving, was 'for the circumstance
of his having frequent quarrels with his fellow--apprentices
concerning matters of intellectual argument.'
It was in the Abbey that he had a vision of Christ and the
Apostles, and in the Abbey, too, that he flung an intrusive
Westminster schoolboy from the scaffolding, 'in the impetuosity
of his anger, worn out with interruption,' says Tatham, and then
laid a complaint before the Dean which has caused, to this day,
the exclusion of Westminster schoolboys from the precincts.
It was at this time that Blake must have written the larger
part of the poems contained in the _Poetical Sketches_, printed
(we cannot say published) in 1783, for in the 'Advertisement'
at the beginning of the book we are told that the 'following Sketches
were the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth,
and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year,' that
is to say, between the years 1768 and 1777. The earliest were written
while Goldsmith and Gray were still living, the latest (if we may believe
these dates) after Chatterton's death, but before his poems had been
published. Ossian had appeared in 1760, Percy's _Reliques_ in
1765. The _Reliques_ probably had their influence on Blake,
Ossian certainly, an influence which returns much later, curiously mingled
with the influence of Milton, in the form taken by the Prophetic Books.
It has been suggested that some of Blake's mystical names, and his
'fiend in a cloud,' came from Ossian; and Ossian is very evident in the
metrical prose of such pieces as 'Samson,' and even in some of the
imagery ('Their helmed youth and aged warriors in dust together lie,
and Desolation spreads his wings over the land of Palestine'). But the
influence of Chatterton seems not less evident, an influence which could
hardly have found its way to Blake before the year 1777. In the fifth
chapter of the fantastic _Island in the Moon_ (probably written
about 1784) there is a long discussion on Chatterton, while in the seventh
chapter he is again discussed in company with Homer, Shakespeare, and
Milton. As late as 1826 Blake wrote on the margin of Wordsworth's preface
to the _Lyrical Ballads_: 'I believe both Macpherson and Chatterton
that what they say is ancient is so,' and on another page, 'I own myself
an admirer of Ossian equally with any poet whatever, of Rowley and
Chatterton also.' Whether it be influence or affinity, it is hard to say,
but if the 'Mad Song' of Blake has the hint of any predecessor in our
literature, it is to be found in the abrupt energy and stormy masculine
splendor of the High Priest's song in 'Aella,' 'Ye who his yn mokie ayre';
and if, between the time of the Elizabethans and the time of 'My silks
and fine array' there had been any other song of similar technique and
similar imaginative temper, it was certainly the Minstrel's song in
'Aella,' 'O! synge untoe mie roundelaie.'
Of the direct and very evident influence of the Elizabethans we
are told by Malkin, with his quaint preciseness: 'Shakespeare's
_Venus and Adonis_, _Tarquin and Lucrece,_ and his _Sonnets_...
poems, now little read, were favorite studies of Mr. Blake's early
days. So were Jonson's _Underwoods_ and his _Miscellanies._'
'My silks and fine array' goes past Jonson, and reaches Fletcher, if
not Shakespeare himself. And the blank verse of 'King Edward the
Third' goes straight to Shakespeare for its cadence, and for something
of its manner of speech. And there is other blank verse which, among
much not even metrically correct, anticipates something of the richness
of Keats.
Some rags of his time did indeed cling about him, but only by
the edges; there is even a reflected ghost of the pseudo-Gothic
of Walpole in 'Fair Elenor,' who comes straight from the _Castle
of Otranto_, as 'Gwin, King of Norway,' takes after the Scandinavian
fashion of the day, and may have been inspired by 'The Fatal Sisters' or
'The Triumphs of Owen' of Gray. Blind-man's Buff,' too, is a piece of
eighteenth-century burlesque realism. But it is in the ode 'To the Muses'
that Blake for once accepts, and in so doing clarifies, the smooth
convention of eighteenth--century classicism, and, as he
reproaches it in its own speech, illuminates it suddenly with the light
it had rejected:
'How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoyed in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few!'
In those lines the eighteenth century dies to music, and from this
time forward we find in the rest of Blake's work only a proof of his own
assertion, that 'the ages are all equal; but genius is above the age.'
In 1778 Blake's apprenticeship to Basire came to an end, and for
a short time he studied in the Antique School at the newly founded
Royal Academy under Moser, the first keeper. In the Life of Reynolds
which prefaces the 1798 edition of the _Discourses_, Moser is
spoken of as one who 'might in every sense be called the Father of the
present race of Artists.' Blake has written against this in his copy: 'I
was once looking over the prints from Raphael and Michael Angelo
in the Library of the Royal Academy. Moser came to me and said,
"You should not study these old hard, stiff, and dry unfinished works
of art. Stay a little, and I will show you what you should study." He then
went and took down Le Brun's and Rubens' Galleries. How did I secretly
rage: I also spoke my mind. I said to Moser, "These things that you call
finished are not even begun: how can they then be finished? The man
who does not know the beginning never can know the end of art."'
Malkin tells us that Blake 'professed drawing from life always to have
been hateful to him; and speaks of it as looking more like death, or
smelling of mortality. Yet still he drew a good deal from life, both at
the Academy and at home.' A water-color drawing dating from this time,
'The Penance of Jane Shore,' was included by Blake in his exhibition of
1809. It is the last number in the catalogue, and has the note: 'This
Drawing was done above Thirty Years ago, and proves to the Author,
and he thinks will prove to any discerning eye, that the productions of
our youth and of our maturer age are equal in all essential respects.' He
also did engravings, during several years, for the booksellers, Harrison,
Johnson, and others, some of them after Stothard, who was then working
for the _Novelist's Magazine._ Blake met Stothard in 1780, and
Stothard introduced him to Flaxman, with whom he had himself just
become acquainted. In the same year Blake met Fuseli, who settled near
him in Broad Street, while Flaxman, on his marriage in 1781, came to
live near by, at 27 Wardour Street. Bartolozzi and John Yarley were
both, then or later, living in Broad Street, Angelica Kauffmann in Golden
Square. In 1780 (the year of the Gordon Biots, when Blake, carried along
by the crowd, saw the burning of Newgate) he had for the first time a
picture in the Royal Academy, the water-color of 'The Death of Earl
Godwin.'
It was at this time, in his twenty-fourth year, that he fell in
love with 'a lively little girl' called Polly Wood. Tatham calls her
'a young woman, who by his own account, and according to his
own knowledge, was no trifler. He wanted to marry her, but she
refused, and was as obstinate as she was unkind.' Gilchrist says
that on his complaining to her that she had 'kept company' with
others besides himself, she asked him if he was a fool. 'That cured
me of jealousy,' he said afterwards, but the cure, according to Tatham,
made him so ill that he was sent for change of air to 'Kew, near Richmond'
(really to Battersea), to the house of 'a market-gardener whose name
was Boutcher.' While there, says Tatham, 'he was relating to the daughter,
a girl named Catherine, the lamentable story of Polly Wood, his implacable
lass, upon which Catherine expressed her deep sympathy, it is supposed,
in such a tender and affectionate manner, that it quite won him. He
immediately said, with the suddenness peculiar to him, "Do you pity
me? Yes, indeed I do," answered she. "Then I love you," said he again.
Such was their courtship. He was impressed by her tenderness of mind,
and her answer indicated her previous feeling for him: for she has often
said that upon her mother's asking her who among her acquaintances
she could fancy for a husband, she replied that she had not yet seen
the man, and she has further been heard to say that when she first came
into the room in which Blake sat, she instantly recognized (like Britomart
in Merlin's wondrous glass) her future partner, and was so near fainting
that she left his presence until she recovered.' Tatham tells us that Blake
'returned to his lodgings and worked incessantly' for a whole year,
resolving that he would not see her until he had succeeded' in making
enough money to be able to marry her. The marriage took place at
Battersea in August 1762.
Gilchrist says that he has traced relatives of Blake to have been
living at Battersea at the time of his marriage. Of this he gives no
evidence; but I think I have found traces, in Blake's own parish, of
relatives of the Catherine Boucher whom he married at Battersea.
Tatham, as we have seen, says that she was the daughter of a
market-gardener at 'Kew, near Richmond,' called Boutcher, to whose
house Blake was sent for a change of air. Allan Cunningham says that
'she lived near his father's house.' I think I have found the reason for
Cunningham's mistake, and the probable occasion of Blake's visit to
the Bouchers at Battersea. I find by the birth register in St. Mary's,
Battersea, that Catherine Sophia, daughter of William and Ann Boucher,
was born April 25, and christened May 16, 1762. Four years after this,
another Catherine Boucher, daughter of Samuel and Betty, born March 28,
1766, was christened March 31, 1766, in the parish church of St. James,
Westminster; and in the same register I find the birth of Gabriel, son of
the same parents, born September 1, and christened September 20, 1767;
and of Ann, daughter of Thomas and Ann Boucher, born June 12, and
christened June 29, 1761. Is it not, therefore, probable that there were
Bouchers, related to one another, living in both parishes, and that
Blake's acquaintance with the family living near him led to his going
to stay with the family living at Battersea?
The entry of Blake's marriage, in the register of St. Mary's Battersea,
gives the name as Butcher, and also describes Blake as 'of the parish
of Battersea,' by a common enough error. It is as follows:--
1782.
Banns of Marriage.
No. 281 William Blake of the Parish of Battersea Batchelor and
Catherine Butcher of the same Parish Spinster were Married in this
Church by License this Eighteenth Day of August in the Year One
Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty two by me J. Gardnor Vicar.
This Marriage was solemnized between Us.
William Blake
The mark of X Catherine Butcher.
In the presence of Thomas Monger Butcher.
Jas. Blake
Robt. Munday Parish Clerk.
I imagine that Thomas Monger Butcher was probably Catherine's
brother; there are other Mongers not far off in the register, as if the
name were a family name. His handwriting is mean and untidy, James
Blake's vague but fluent; Catherine makes her mark somewhat faintly.
As the register lies open there are entries of seven marriages; out of
these, no fewer than three of the brides have signed by making their
mark. The name William Blake stands out from these 'blotted and
blurred' signatures; the ink is very black, as if he had pressed hard
on the pen; and the name has a 'firm and determinate outline.'
Gilchrist describes Catherine Boucher as 'a bright-eyed, dark-haired
brunette, with expressive features and a slim, graceful form.' This
seems to be merely a re-writing of Allan Cunningham's vague statement
that she 'was noticed by Blake for the whiteness of her hand, the
brightness of her eyes, and a slim and handsome shape, corresponding
with his own notions of sylphs and naiads.' But if a quaint and lovely
pencil sketch in the Rossetti MS., representing a man in bed and a
woman sitting on the side of the bed, beginning to dress, is really, as
it probably is, done from life, and meant for Mrs. Blake, we see at once
the model for his invariable type of woman, tall, slender, and with
unusually long legs. There is a drawing of her head by Blake in the
Rossetti MS. which, though apparently somewhat conventionalized,
shows a clear aquiline profile and very large eyes; still to be divined
in the rather painful head drawn by Tatham when she was an old woman,
a head in which there is still power and fixity. Crabb Robinson, who met
her in 1825, says that she had 'a good expression in her countenance,
and, with a dark eye, remains of beauty in her youth.'
No man of genius ever had a better wife. To the last she called
him 'Mr. Blake,' while he, we are told, frequently spoke of her as 'his
beloved.' The most beautiful reference to her which I find in his letters
is one in a letter of September 16, 1800, to Hayley, where he calls her
'my dear and too careful and over-joyous woman,' and says 'Eartham
will be my first temple and altar; my wife is like a flame of many colours
of precious jewels whenever she hears it named.' He taught her to
write, and the copy-book titles to some of his water-colors are probably
hers; to draw, so that after his death she finished some of his designs;
and to help him in the printing and coloring of his engravings. A story
is told, on the authority of Samuel Palmer, that they would both look
into the flames of burning coals, and draw grotesque figures which they
saw there, hers quite unlike his. 'It is quite certain,' says Crabb
Robinson, 'that she believed in all his visions'; and he shows her to
us reminding her husband, 'You know, dear, the first time you saw
God was when you were four years old, and he put his head to the
window, and set you a-screaming,' She would walk with him into the
country, whole summer days, says Tatham, and far into the night. And
when he rose in the night, to write down what was 'dictated' to him,
she would rise and sit by him, and hold his hand. 'She would get up
in the night,' says the unnamed friend quoted by Gilchrist, 'when he
was under his very fierce inspirations, which were as if they would
tear him asunder, while he was yielding himself to the Muse, or
whatever else it could be called, sketching and writing. And so terrible
a task did this seem to be, that she had to sit motionless and silent;
only to stay him mentally, without moving hand or foot; this for hours,
and night after night.' 'His wife being to him a very patient woman,'
says Tatham, who speaks of Mrs. Blake as 'an irradiated saint,' 'he
fancied that while she looked on him as he worked, her sitting quite
still by his side, doing nothing, soothed his impetuous mind; and he
has many a time, when a strong desire presented itself to overcome
any difficulty in his plates or drawings, in the middle of the night,
risen, and requested her to get up with him, and sit by his side, in
which she as cheerfully acquiesced.' 'Rigid, punctual, firm, precise,'
she has been described; a good housewife and a good cook; refusing
to have a servant not only because of the cost, but because no servant
could be scrupulous enough to satisfy her. 'Finding,' says Tatham '(as
Mrs. Blake declared, and as every one else knows), the more service
the more inconvenience, she... did all the work herself, kept the house
clean and herself tidy, besides printing all Blake's numerous engravings,
which was a task sufficient for any industrious woman.' He tells us in
another place: 'it is a fact known to the writer, that Mrs. Blake's
frugality always kept a guinea or sovereign for any emergency, of which
Blake never knew, even to the day of his death.'
Tatham says of Blake at the time of his marriage: 'Although not
handsome, he must have had a most noble countenance, full of
expression and animation; his hair was of a yellow brown, and curled
with the utmost crispness and luxuriance; his locks, instead of falling
down, stood up like a curling flame, and looked at a distance like
radiations, which with his fiery eye and expressive forehead, his
dignified and cheerful physiognomy, must have made his appearance
truly prepossessing.' In another place he says: 'William Blake in stature
was short [he was not quite five and a half feet in height], but well
made, and very well proportioned; so much so that West, the great
history painter, admired much the form of his limbs; he had a large
head and wide shoulders. Elasticity and promptitude of action were the
characteristics of his contour. His motions were rapid and energetic,
betokening a mind filled with elevated enthusiasm; his forehead was
very high and prominent over the frontals; his eye most unusually
large and glassy, with which he appeared to look into some other
world.' His eyes were prominent, 'large, dark, and expressive,' says
Allan Cunningham; the flashing of his eyes remained in the memory
of an old man who had seen him in court at Chichester in 1804. His
nose, though 'snubby,' as he himself describes it, had 'a little clenched
nostril, a nostril that opened as far as it could, but was tied down at
the end.' The mouth was large and sensitive; the forehead, larger
below than above, as he himself noted, was broad and high; and the
whole face, as one sees it in what is probably the best likeness we have,
Linnell's miniature of 1827, was full of irregular splendor, eager,
eloquent, ecstatic; eyes and mouth and nostrils all as if tense with a
continual suction, drinking up 'large draughts of intellectual day' with
impatient haste. 'Infinite impatience,' says Swinburne, 'as of a great
preacher or apostle--intense tremulous vitality, as of a great
orator--seem to me to give his face the look of one who can
do all things but hesitate.'
After his marriage in August 1782 (which has been said to have
displeased his father, though Tatham says it was 'with the approbation
and consent of his parents'), Blake took lodgings at 23 Green Street,
Leicester Fields (now pulled down), which was only the square's length
away from Sir Joshua Reynolds. Flaxman had married in 1781, and had
taken a house at 27 Wardour Street and it was probably he who, about
this time, introduced Blake to 'the accomplished Mrs. Matthew,' whose
drawing-room in Rathbone Place was frequented by literary and artistic
people. Mr. Matthew, a clergyman of taste, who is said to have 'read the
church service more beautifully than any other clergyman in London,'
had discovered Flaxman, when a little boy, learning Latin behind the
counter in his father's shop. 'From this incident,' says J. T. Smith in
his notice of Flaxman, 'Mr. Matthew continued to notice him, and, as
he grew up, became his first and best friend. Later on, he was introduced
to Mrs. Matthew, who was so kind as to read Homer to him, whilst he
made designs on the same table with her at the time she was reading.'
It was apparently at the Matthews' house that Smith heard Blake sing
his own songs to his own music, and it was through Mrs. Matthew's
good opinion of these songs that she 'requested the Rev. Henry Matthew,
her husband, to join Mr. Flaxman in his truly kind offer of defraying
the expense of printing them': to which we owe the '_Poetical
Sketches_, by W. B.'; printed in 1783, and given to Blake to dispose
of as he thought fit. There is no publisher's name on the book, and
there is no reason to suppose that it was ever offered for sale.
'With his usual urbanity,' Mr. Matthew had written a foolish
'Advertisement' to the book, saying that the author had 'been
deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets,
as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye,' 'his
talents having been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence
in his profession.' The book is by no means incorrectly printed, and it
is not probable that Blake would under any circumstances have given
his poems more 'revisal' than he did. He did at this time a good deal
of engraving, often after the designs of Stothard, whom he was afterwards
to accuse of stealing his ideas; and in 1784 he had two, and in 1785
four, watercolor drawings at the Royal Academy. Fuseli, Stothard, and
Flaxman[1] seem to have been his chief friends, and it is probable
that he also knew Cosway, who practiced magic, and Cosway may have
told him about Paracelsus, or lent him Law's translation of Behmen,
while Flaxman, who was a Swedenborgian, may have brought him still
more closely under the influence of Swedenborg.
In any case, he soon tired of the coterie of the Matthews, and we
are told that it soon ceased to relish his 'manly firmness of opinion.'
What he really thought of it we may know with some certainty from
the extravaganza, _An Island in the Moon_, which seems to
belong to 1784, and which is a light-hearted and incoherent satire,
derived, no doubt, from Sterne, and pointing, as Mr. Sampson justly
says, to Peacock. It is unfinished, and was not worth finishing, but it
contains the first version of several of the _Songs of Innocence_,
as well as the lovely song of Phoebe and Jellicoe. It has the further
interest of showing us Blake's first, wholly irresponsible attempt to
create imaginary worlds, and to invent grotesque and impossible
names. It shows us the first explosions of that inflammable part of
his nature, which was to burst through the quiet surface of his life
at many intervals, in righteous angers and irrational suspicions. It
betrays his deeply rooted dislike of science, and, here and there,
a literary preference, for Ossian or for Chatterton. The original MS.
is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and in this year, 1907, Mr.
Edwin J. Ellis has done Blake the unkindness of printing it for the first
time in full, in the pages of his _Real Blake._ Blake's satire is
only occasionally good, though occasionally it is supremely good; his
burlesque is almost always bad; and there is little probability that he
ever intended to publish any part of the prose and verse which he
threw off for the relief of personal irritations and spiritual
indignations.
In _An Island in the Moon_ we see Blake casting off the
dust of the drawing-rooms, finally, so far as any mental obstruction was
concerned; but he does not seem to have broken wholly with the Matthews,
who, no doubt, were people of genuinely good intentions; and it is
through their help that we find him, in 1784, on the death of his father,
setting up as a print-seller, with his former fellow-apprentice, James
Parker, at No. 27 Broad Street, next door to the house and shop which
had been his fathers, and which were now taken on by his brother James.
Smith says that he took a shop and a first-floor; and here his brother
Robert came to live with him as his pupil, and remained with him till his
death in February 1787.
III
After Robert's death Blake gave up the print-shop and moved out of
Broad Street to Poland Street, a street running between it and Oxford
Street. He took No. 28, a house only a few doors down from Oxford
Street, and lived there for five years. Here, in 1789, he issued the
_Songs of Innocence_, the first of his books to be produced
by the method of his invention which he described as 'illuminated
printing.' According to Smith, it was Robert who 'stood before him in
one of his visionary imaginations, and directed him in the way in which
he ought to proceed.' The process is thus described by Mr. Sampson:
'The text and surrounding design were written in reverse, in a medium
impervious to acid, upon small copper-plates, which were then etched
in a bath of aqua-fortis until the work stood in relief as in a
stereotype. From these plates, which to economize copper were in
many cases engraved upon both sides, impressions were printed,
in the ordinary manner, in tints made to harmonise with the color
scheme afterwards applied in water-colors by the artist.' Gilchrist
tells an improbable story about Mrs. Blake going out with the last
half-crown in the house, and spending 1s 10d of it in the purchase
of 'the simple materials necessary.' But we know from a MS. note
of John Linnell, referring to a somewhat later date: 'The copper-plates
which Blake engraved to illustrate Hayley's life of Cowper were, as he
told me, printed entirely by himself and his wife in his own press--a
very good one which cost him forty pounds.' These plates were engraved
in 1803, but it is not likely that Blake was ever able to buy more than
one press.
The problem of 'illuminated printing,' however definitely it may
have been solved by the dream in which Robert 'stood before him and
directed him,' was one which had certainly occupied the mind of Blake for
some years. A passage, unfortunately incomplete, in _An Island in the
Moon_, reads as follows: "Illuminating the Manuscript--Ay,"
said she, "that would be excellent. Then," said he, "I would have all
the writing engraved instead of printed, and at every other leaf a high
finished print, all in three volumes folio, and sell them a hundred pounds
a piece. They would print off two thousand. Then," said she, "whoever
will not have them, will be ignorant fools and will not deserve to live."'
This is evidently a foreshadowing of the process which is described and
defended, with not less confident enthusiasm, in an engraved prospectus
issued from Lambeth in 1793. I give it in full:--
_October_ 10, 1793.
TO THE PUBLIC.
The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been
proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault
of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such
works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and
Shakespeare could not publish their own works.
This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the following
productions now presented to the Public; who has invented a method
of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental,
uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works
at less than one-fourth of the expense.
If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet
is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds
in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward.
Mr. Blake's powers of invention very early engaged the attention of
many persons of eminence and fortune; by whose means he has been
regularly enabled to bring before the public works (he is not afraid to
say) of equal magnitude and consequence with the productions of any
age or country: among which are two large highly finished engravings
(and two more are nearly ready) which will commence a Series of subjects
from the Bible, and another from the History of England.
The following are the Subjects of the several Works now published
and on Sale at Mr. Blake's, No. 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth:--
1. Job, a Historical Engraving. Size 1 ft. 7 1/2 in. by 1 ft. 2 in.
Price 12s.
2. Edward and Elinor, a Historical Engraving. Size 1 ft. 6 1/2 in. by
1 ft. Price 10s. 6d.
3. America, a Prophecy, in Illuminated Printing. Folio, with 18
designs. Price 10s. 6d.
4. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, in Illuminated Printing. Folio,
with 8 designs. Price 7s. 6d.
5. The Book of Thel, a Poem in Illuminated Printing. Quarto, with 6
designs. Price 3s.
6. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Illuminated Printing. Quarto,
with fourteen designs. Price 7s. 6d.
7. Songs of Innocence, in Illuminated Printing. Octavo, with 25
designs. Price 5 s.
8. Songs of Experience, in Illuminated Printing. Octavo, with 25
designs. Price 5s.
9. The History of England, a small book of Engravings. Price 3 s.
10. The Gates of Paradise, a small book of Engravings. Price 3 s.
The Illuminated Books are Printed in Colors, and on the most beautiful
wove paper that could be procured.
No Subscriptions for the numerous great works now in hand are asked,
for none are wanted; but the Author will produce his works, and offer them
to sale at a fair price.
By this invention (which it is absurd to consider, as some have
considered it, a mere makeshift, to which he had been driven by
the refusal of publishers to issue his poems and engravings according
to the ordinary trade methods) Blake was the first, and remains the only,
poet who has in the complete sense made his own books with his own
hands: the words, the illustrations, the engraving, the printing, the
coloring, the very inks and colors, and the stitching of the sheets into
boards. With Blake, who was equally a poet and an artist, words and
designs came together and were inseparable; and to the power of inventing
words and designs was added the skill of engraving, and thus of
interpreting them, without any mechanical interference from the outside.
To do this must have been, at some time or another, the ideal of every
poet who is a true artist, and who has a sense of the equal importance of
every form of art, and of every detail in every form. Only Blake has
produced a book of poems vital alike in inner and outer form, and, had
it not been for his lack of a technical knowledge of music, had he but
been able to write down his inventions in that art also, he would have
left us the creation of something like an universal art. That universal
art he did, during his own lifetime, create; for he sang his songs to his
own music; and thus, while he lived, he was the complete realization of
the poet in all his faculties, and the only complete realization that has
ever been known.
To define the poetry of Blake one must find new definitions for
poetry; but, these definitions once found, he will seem to be the only
poet who is a poet in essence; the only poet who could, in his own words,
'enter into Noah's rainbow, and make a friend and companion of one of
these images of wonder, which always entreat him to leave mortal things.'
In this verse there is, if it is to be found in any verse, the 'lyrical
cry'; and yet, what voice is it that cries in this disembodied ecstasy?
The voice of desire is not in it, nor the voice of passion, nor the cry of
the heart, nor the cry of the sinner to God, nor of the lover of nature
to nature. It neither seeks nor aspires nor laments nor questions. It is
like the voice of wisdom in a child, who has not yet forgotten the world
out of which the soul came. It is as spontaneous as the note of a bird,
it is an affirmation of life; in its song, which seems mere music, it is
the mind which sings; it is lyric thought. What is it that transfixes one
in any couplet such as this:
'If the sun and moon should doubt
They'd immediately go out'?
It is no more than a nursery statement, there is not even an image
in it, and yet it sings to the brain, it cuts into the very flesh of the
mind, as if there were a great weight behind it. Is it that it is an
arrow, and that it comes from so far, and with an impetus gathered
from its speed out of the sky?
The lyric poet, every lyric poet but Blake, sings of love; but
Blake sings of forgiveness:
'Mutual forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the gates of Paradise.'
Poets sing of beauty, but Blake says:
'Soft deceit and idleness,
These are Beauty's sweetest dress.'
They sing of the brotherhood of men, but Blake points to the 'divine
image':
'Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secrecy the human dress.'
Their minds are touched by the sense of tears in human things, but
to Blake 'a tear is an intellectual thing.' They sing of 'a woman like a
dewdrop,' but Blake of 'the lineaments of gratified desire.' They shout
hymns to God over a field of battle or in the arrogance of material
empire; but Blake addresses the epilogue of his _Gates of Paradise_
'to the Accuser who is the God of this world':
'Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce,
And dost not know the garment from the man;
Every harlot was a virgin once,
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.
Though thou art worshipped by the names divine
Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still
The son of morn in weary night's decline,
The lost traveller's dream under the hill.'
Other poets find ecstasy in nature, but Blake only in imagination.
He addresses the Prophetic Book of _The Ghost of Abel_
'to Lord Byron in the wilderness,' and asks: 'What doest thou here,
Elijah? Can a poet doubt of the visions of Jehovah? Nature has no
outline, but Imagination has. Nature has no time, but Imagination has.
Nature has no supernatural, and dissolves. Imagination is eternity.' The
poetry of Blake is a poetry of the mind, abstract in substance, concrete
in form; its passion is the passion of the imagination, its emotion
is the emotion of thought, its beauty is the beauty of idea. When it is
simplest, its simplicity is that of some 'infant joy' too young to have
a name, or of some 'infant sorrow' brought aged out of eternity into
the 'dangerous world,' and there:
'Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.'
There are no men and women in the world of Blake's poetry, only
primal instincts and the energies of the imagination.
His work begins in the garden of Eden, or of the childhood of the
world, and there is something in it of the naïveté of beasts: the lines
gambol awkwardly, like young lambs. His utterance of the state of
innocence has in it something of the grotesqueness of babies, and
enchants the grown man, as they do. Humour exists unconscious of
itself, in a kind of awed and open-eyed solemnity. He stammers into
a speech of angels, as if just awakening out of Paradise. It is the
primal instincts that speak first, before riper years have added
wisdom to intuition. It is the supreme quality of this wisdom that
it has never let go of intuition. It is as if intuition itself ripened.
And so Blake goes through life with perfect mastery of the terms
of existence, as they present themselves to him: 'perfectly happy,
wanting nothing,' as he said, when he was old and poor; and able
in each stage of life to express in art the corresponding stage of
his own development. He is the only poet who has written the songs
of childhood, of youth, of mature years, and of old age; and he died
singing.
IV
Blake lived in Poland Street for five years, and issued from it the
_Songs of Innocence_ (1789), and, in the same year, _The Book
of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ in 1790, and, in 1791,
the first book of _The French Revolution: a Poem in Seven Books_,
which Gilchrist says was published anonymously, in ordinary type,
and without illustrations, by the bookseller Johnson. No copy of this
book is known to exist. At this time he was a fervent believer
in the new age which was to be brought about by the French Revolution,
and he was much in the company of revolutionaries and freethinkers,
and the only one among them who dared wear the 'bonnet rouge' in
the street. Some of these, Thomas Paine, Godwin, Holcroft, and others,
he met at Johnson's shop in St. Paul's Churchyard, where Fuseli and
Mary Wollstonecraft also came. It was at Johnson's, in 1792, that Blake
saved the life of Paine, by hurrying him off to France, with the warning,
'You must not go home, or you are a dead man,' at the very moment
when a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Johnson himself was in
1798 put into gaol for his republican sympathies, and continued to give
his weekly literary dinners in gaol.
Blake's back-windows at Poland Street looked out on the yard of
Astley's circus, and Tatham tells a story of Blake's wonder, indignation,
and prompt action on seeing a wretched youth chained by the foot to a
horse's hobble. The neighbor whom he regarded as 'hired to depress
art,' Sir Joshua Reynolds, died in 1792. A friend quoted by Gilchrist
tells us: 'When a very young man he had called on Reynolds to show him
some designs, and had been recommended to work with less extravagance
and more simplicity, and to correct his drawing. This Blake seemed to
regard as an affront never to be forgotten. He was very indignant when
he spoke of it.' There is also a story of a meeting between Blake and
Reynolds, when each, to his own surprise, seems to have found the
other very pleasant.
Blake's mother died in 1792, at the age of seventy, and was buried in
Bunhill Fields on September 9. In the following year he moved to 13
Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,[2] where, during the next seven years,
he did engraving, both of his own designs and of those of others, and
published the engraved book of designs called _The Gates of Paradise_
(1793), the poems and illustrations of the _Songs of Experience_
(1794), and the greater part of the Prophetic Books, besides writing,
apparently in 1797, the vast and never really finished MS. of _The
Four Zoas._ This period was that of which we have the largest and
most varied result, in written and engraved work, together with a large
number of designs, including five hundred and thirty-seven done on the
margin of Young's _Night Thoughts_, and the earliest of the
color-prints. It was Blake's one period of something like prosperity,
as we gather from several stories reported by Tatham, who says that
during the absence of Blake and his wife on one of their long country
walks, which would take up a whole day, thieves broke into the house,
and 'carried away plate to the value of £60 and clothes to the amount
of £40 more.' Another £40 was lent by Blake to 'a certain freethinking
speculator, the author of many elaborate philosophical treatises,' who
complained that 'his children had not a dinner.' A few days afterwards
the Blakes went to see the destitute family, and the wife 'had the
audacity to ask Mrs. Blake's opinion of a very gorgeous dress, purchased
the day following Blake's compassionate gift.' Yet another story is of a
young art-student who used to pass the house every day carrying a
portfolio under his arm, and whom Blake pitied for his poverty and sickly
looks, and taught for nothing and looked after till he died. Blake had
other pupils too, among 'families of high rank,' but being 'aghast' at
the prospect of 'an appointment to teach drawing to the Royal Family,'
he gave up all his pupils, with his invariably exquisite sense of
manners, on refusing the royal offer.
It was in 1799 that Blake found his first patron, and one of his
best friends, in Thomas Butts, 'that remarkable man--that
great patron of British genius,' as Samuel Palmer calls him, who, for
nearly thirty years, with but few intervals, continued to buy whatever
Blake liked to do for him, paying him a small but steady price, and
taking at times a drawing a week. A story which, as Palmer says, had
'grown in the memory,' connects him with Blake at this time, and may
be once more repeated, if only to be discredited. There was a
back-garden at the house in Hercules Buildings, and there were vines
in it, which Blake would never allow to be pruned, so that they grew
luxuriant in leaf and small and harsh in fruit. Mr. Butts, according to
Gilchrist, is supposed to have come one day into 'Blake's Arcadian
Arbour,' as Tatham calls it, and to have found Blake and his wife
sitting naked, reading out Milton's _Paradise Lost_ 'in character,'
and to have been greeted with: 'Come in, it is only Adam and Eve.'
John Linnell, in some notes written after reading Gilchrist, and quoted
in Story's _Life of Linnell_, writes with reason: 'I do not think
it possible. Blake was very unreserved in his narrations to me of all
his thoughts and actions, and I think if anything like this story had
been true, he would have told me of it. I am sure he would have
laughed heartily at it if it had been told of him or of anybody else,
for he was a hearty laugher at absurdities.' In such a matter, Linnell's
authority may well be final, if indeed any authority is required, beyond
a sense of humour, and the knowledge that Blake possessed it.
Another legend of the period, which has at least more significance,
whether true or not, is referred to by both Swinburne and Mr. W. M.
Rossetti, on what authority I cannot discover, and is thus stated by
Messrs. Ellis and Yeats: 'It is said that Blake wished to add a concubine
to his establishment in the Old Testament manner, but gave up the
project because it made Mrs. Blake cry.' 'The element of fable,' they
add, 'lies in the implication that the woman who was to have wrecked
this household had a bodily existence.... There is a possibility that he
entertained mentally some polygamous project, and justified it on some
patriarchal theory. A project and theory are one thing, however, and a
woman is another; and though there is abundant suggestion of the
project and theory, there is no evidence at all of the woman.' I have
found in the unpublished part of Crabb Robinson's _Diary_ and
_Reminiscences_ more than a 'possibility' or even 'abundant
suggestion' that Blake accepted the theory as a theory. Crabb
Robinson himself was so frightened by it that he had to confide it
to his _Diary_ in the disguise of German, though, when he
came to compile his _Reminiscences_ many years later he
ventured to put it down in plain English which no editor has yet
ventured to print. Both passages will be found in their place in the
verbatim reprint given later; but I will quote the second here:
'13_th June_ (1826).--I saw him again in June. He
was as wild as ever, says my journal, but he was led to-day to make
assertions more palpably mischievous and capable of influencing other
minds, and immoral, supposing them to express the will of a responsible
agent, than anything he had said before. As for instance, that he had
learned from the Bible that wives should be in common. And when I
objected that Marriage was a Divine institution he referred to the Bible,
"that from the beginning it was not so." He affirmed that he had committed
many murders, and repeated his doctrine, that reason is the only Sin, and
that careless, gay people are better than those who think, etc., etc.'
This passage leaves no doubt as to Blake's theoretical view of
marriage, but it brings us no nearer to any certainty as to his practical
action in the matter. With Blake, as with all wise men, a mental decision
in the abstract had no necessary influence on conduct. To have the
courage of your opinions is one thing, and Blake always had this; but
he was of all people least impelled to go and do a thing because he
considered the thing a permissible one to do. Throughout all his work
Blake affirms freedom as the first law of love; jealousy is to him the
great iniquity, the unforgivable selfishness. He has the frank courage
to praise in _The Visions of the Daughters of Albion_:
'Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy, nestling for delight
In laps of pleasure! Innocence, honest, open, seeking
The vigorous joys of morning light';
And of woman he asks, 'Who taught thee modesty, subtle modesty?'
In the same book, which is Blake's Book of Love, Oothoon offers 'girls
of mild silver or of furious gold' to her lover; in the paradisal state of
_Jerusalem_ 'every female delights to give her maiden to her
husband.' All these things are no doubt symbols, but they are symbols
which meet us on every page of Blake, and I no not doubt that to him
they represented an absolute truth. Therefore I think it perfectly
possible that some 'mentally polygamous project' was at one time or
another entertained by him, and 'justified on some patriarchal theory.'
What I am sure of, however, is that a tear of Mrs. Blake ('for a tear is
an intellectual thing') was enough to wipe out project if not theory,
and that one to whom love was pity more than it was desire would have
given no nearer cause for jealousy than some unmortal Oothoon.
It was in 1794 that Blake engraved the _Songs of Experience._
Four of the Prophetic Books had preceded it, but here Blake returns to
the clear and simple form of the _Songs of Innocence_, deepening it
with meaning and heightening it with ardor. Along with this fierier art
the symbolic contents of what, in the _Songs of Innocence_, had
been hardly more than a child's strayings in earthly or divine Edens,
becomes angelic, and speaks with more deliberately hid or doubled
meanings. Even 'The Tiger,' by which Lamb was to know that here was
'one of the most extraordinary persons of the age,' is not only a sublime
song about a flame-like beast, but contains some hint that 'the tigers
of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.' In this book, and in
the poems which shortly followed it, in that MS. book whose contents
have sometimes been labelled, after a rejected title of Blake's, _Ideas
of Good and Evil_, we see Blake more wholly and more evenly himself
than anywhere else in his work. From these central poems we can
distinguish the complete type of Blake as a poet.
Blake is the only poet who sees all temporal things under the
form of eternity. To him reality is merely a symbol, and he catches at
its terms, hastily and faultily, as he catches at the lines of the
drawing-master, to represent, as in a faint image, the clear and shining
outlines of what he sees with the imagination; through the eye, not with
it, as he says. Where other poets use reality as a spring-board into
space, he uses it as a foothold on his return from flight. Even Wordsworth
seemed to him a kind of atheist, who mistook the changing signs of
'vegetable nature' for the unchanging realities of the imagination.
'Natural objects,' he wrote in a copy of Wordsworth, 'always did and
now do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me. Wordsworth
must know that what he writes valuable is not to be found in nature.'
And so his poetry is the most abstract of all poetry, although in a sense
the most concrete. It is everywhere an affirmation, the register of
vision; never observation. To him observation was one of the daughters
of memory, and he had no use for her among his Muses, which were all
eternal, and the children of the imagination. 'Imagination,' he said, 'has
nothing to do with memory.' For the most part he is just conscious that
what he sees as 'an old man grey' is no more than a 'frowning thistle':
'For double the vision my eyes do see,
And a double vision is always with me.
With my inward eyes, 'tis an old man grey,
With my outward, a thistle across my way.'
In being so far conscious, he is only recognizing the symbol, not
admitting the reality.
In his earlier work, the symbol still interests him, he accepts it
without dispute; with, indeed, a kind of transfiguring love. Thus he
writes of the lamb and the tiger, of the joy and sorrow of infants, of
the fly and the lily, as no poet of mere observation has ever written of
them, going deeper into their essence than Wordsworth ever went into
the heart of daffodils, or Shelley into the nerves of the sensitive plant.
He takes only the simplest flowers or weeds, and the most innocent or
most destroying of animals, and he uses them as illustrations of the
divine attributes. From the same flower and beast he can read contrary
lessons without change of meaning, by the mere transposition of qualities,
as in the poem which now reads:
'The modest rose puts forth a thorn,
The humble sheep a threatening horn;
While the lily white shall in love delight,
Nor a thorn, nor a threat, stain her beauty bright.'
Mr. Sampson tells us in his notes: Beginning by writing:
"The rose puts envious ..."
He felt that "envious," did not express his full meaning, and deleted
the last three words, writing above them "lustful rose," and finishing the
line with the words "puts forth a thorn." He then went on:
"The coward sheep a threatening horn;
While the lily white shall in love delight,
And the lion increase freedom and peace;"
At which point he drew a line under the poem to show that it was
finished. On a subsequent reading he deleted the last line, substituting
for it:
'"The priest loves war, and the soldier peace;"
But here, perceiving that his rhyme had disappeared, he cancelled
this line also, and gave the poem an entirely different turn by changing
the word "lustful" to "modest," and "coward" to "humble," and completing
the quatrain (as in the engraved version) by a fourth line simply
explanatory of the first three.' This is not merely obeying the idle
impulse of a rhyme, but rather a bringing of the mind's impulses
into that land where 'contraries mutually exist.'
And when I say that he reads lessons, let it not be supposed
that Blake was ever consciously didactic. Conduct does not concern
him; not doing, but being. He held that education was the setting of
a veil between light and the soul. 'There is no good in education,' he
said. 'I hold it to be wrong. It is the great sin. It is eating of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was the fault of Plato.
He knew nothing but the virtues and vices, and good and evil. There
is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God's eyes.' And, as he
says with his excellent courage: 'When I tell the truth, it is not for
the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake
of defending those who do'; and, again, with still more excellent
and harder courage: 'When I am endeavoring to think rightly, I must
not regard my own any more than other people's weaknesses'; so,
in his poetry, there is no moral tendency, nothing that might not
be poison as well as antidote; nothing indeed but the absolute
affirmation of that energy which is eternal delight. He worshipped
energy as the wellhead or parent fire of life; and to him there was
no evil, only a weakness, a negation of energy, the ignominy of wings
that droop and are contented in the dust.
And so, like Nietzsche, but with a deeper innocence, he finds
himself 'beyond good and evil,' in a region where the soul is naked
and its own master. Most of his art is the unclothing of the soul,
and when at last it is naked and alone, in that 'thrilling' region
where the souls of other men have at times penetrated, only to
shudder back with terror from the brink of eternal loneliness, then
only is this soul exultant with the supreme happiness.
V
It is to the seven years at Lambeth that what may be called the first
period of the Prophetic Books largely belongs, though it does not indeed
begin there. The roots of it are strongly visible in _The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell_, which was written at Poland Street, and they may
be traced even further back. Everything else, until we come to the last
or Felpham period, which has a new quality of its own, belongs to
Lambeth.
In his earlier work Blake is satisfied with natural symbols, with
nature as symbol; in his later work, in the final message of the
Prophetic Books, he is no longer satisfied with what then seems to
him the relative truth of the symbols of reality. Dropping the tools
with which he has worked so well, he grasps with naked hands after
an absolute truth of statement, which is like his attempt in his
designs to render the outlines of vision literally, without translation
into the forms of human sight. He invents names harsh as triangles,
Enitharmon, Theotormon, Rintrah, for spiritual states and essences,
and he employs them as Wagner employed his leading motives, as a
kind of shorthand for the memory. His meaning is no longer apparent
in the ordinary meaning of the words he uses; we have to read him with
a key, and the key is not always in our hands; he forgets that he is
talking to men on the earth in some language which he has learnt in
heavenly places. He sees symbol within symbol, and as he tries to
make one clear to us, he does but translate it into another, perhaps
no easier, or more confusing. And it must be remembered, when
even interpreters like Mr. Ellis and Mr. Yeats falter, and confess 'There
is apparently some confusion among the symbols,' that after all we
have only a portion of Blake's later work, and that probably a far
larger portion was destroyed when the Peckham 'angel,' Mr. Tatham
(copartner in foolish wickedness with Warburton's cook), sat down
to burn the books which he did not understand. Blake's great system of
wheels within wheels remains no better than a ruin, and can but at
the best be pieced together tentatively by those who are able to trace
the connection of some of its parts. It is no longer even possible to
know how much consistency Blake was able to give to his symbols,
and how far he failed to make them visible in terms of mortal
understanding. As we have them, they evade us on every side, not
because they are meaningless, but because the secret of their meaning
is so closely kept. To Blake actual contemporary names meant even
more than they meant to Walt Whitman. 'All truths wait in all things,'
said Walt Whitman, and Blake has his own quite significant but
perplexing meaning when he writes:
'The corner of Broad Street weeps; Poland Street
languishes
To Great Queen Street and Lincoln's Inn: all is distress
and woe.'
He is concerned now only with his message, with the 'minutely
particular' statement of it; and as he has ceased to accept any mortal
medium, or to allow himself to be penetrated by the sunlight of earthly
beauty, he has lost the means of making that message visible to us.
It is a miscalculation of means, a contempt for possibilities; not, as
people were once hasty enough to assume, the irresponsible rapture
of madness. There is not even in these crabbed chronicles the wild
beauty of the madman's scattering brain; there is a concealed sanity,
a precise kind of truth, which, as Blake said of all truth, 'can never be
so told as to be understood, and not be believed.'
Blake's form, or apparent formlessness, in the Prophetic Books,
was no natural accident, or unconsidered utterance of inspiration.
Addressing the public on the first plate of _Jerusalem_ he
says: '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 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 have
therefore produced a variety in every line, both of cadences and
number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and
put into its fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific
parts, the mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, and the
prosaic for inferior parts; all are necessary to each other,' This desire
for variety at the expense of unity is illustrated in one of Blake's
marginal notes to Reynolds' _Discourses._ 'Such harmony
of coloring' (as that of Titian in the Bacchus and Ariadne) 'is
destructive of Art. One species of equal hue over all is the cursed
thing called harmony. It is the smile of a fool.' This is a carrying to
its extreme limit of the principle that 'there is no such thing as
softness in art, and that everything in art is definite and minute...
because vision is determinate and perfect'; and that 'coloring does
not depend on where the colors are put, but on where the lights and
darks are put, and all depends on form or outline, on where that is
put.' The whole aim of the Prophetic Books is to arrive at a style as
'determinate and perfect' as vision, unmodified by any of the
deceiving beauties of nature or of the distracting ornaments
of conventional form. What is further interesting in Blake's statement
is that he aimed, in the Prophetic Books, at producing the effect, not
of poetry but of oratory, and it is as oratory, the oratory of the
prophets, that the reader is doubtless meant to take them.
'Poetry fettered,' he adds, 'fetters the human race,' and I doubt
not that he imagined, as Walt Whitman and later _vers-libristes_
have imagined, that in casting off the form he had unfettered the spirit
of poetry. There seems never to have been a time when Blake did not
attempt to find for himself a freer expression than he thought verse
could give him, for among the least mature of the _Poetical Sketches_
are poems written in rhythmical prose, in imitation partly of Ossian,
partly of the Bible. An early MS. called _Tiriel_, probably
of hardly later date, still exists, written in a kind of metre of fourteen
syllables, only slightly irregular in beat, but rarely fine in cadence. It
already hints, in a cloudy way, at some obscure mythology, into which
there already come incoherent names, of an Eastern color, Ijim and
Mnetha. Tiriel appears again in _The Book of Urizen_ as Urizen's
first-born, Thiriel, 'like a man from a cloud born.' Har and Heva reappear
in _The Song of Los. The Book of Thel_, engraved in 1789,
the year of the _Songs of Innocence_, is in the same metre of
fourteen syllables, but written with a faint and lovely monotony of
cadence, strangely fluid and flexible in that age of strong caesuras,
as in:
'Come forth, worm of the silent valley, to thy pensive
queen.'