The sentiment is akin to that of the _Songs of Innocence_,

and hardly more than a shadow of the mythology remains. It

sings or teaches the holiness and eternity of life in all things, the

equality of life in the flower, the cloud, the worm, and the

maternal clay of the grave; and it ends with the unanswered

question of death to life: why? why? In 1790 Blake engraved

in two forms, on six and ten infinitesimal plates, a tractate which

he called, _There is no Natural Religion._ They contain, the

one commenting on the other, a clear and concise statement of

many of Blake's fundamental beliefs; such as: 'That the poetic

Genius is the true Man, and that the Body or outward form of Man

is derived from the Poetic Genius.' 'As all men are alike in

outward form, so (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike

in the Poetic Genius.' 'Man's perceptions are not bounded by

organs of perception, he perceives more than sense (though ever

so acute) can discover.' Yet, since 'Man's desires are limited by his

perceptions, none can desire what he has not perceived.' 'Therefore

God becomes as we are, that we may become as he is.'

In the same year, probably, was engraved _The Marriage of

Heaven and Hell_, a prose fantasy full of splendid masculine

thought, and of a diabolical or infernal humour, in which Blake,

with extraordinary boldness, glorifies, parodies, and renounces at

once the gospel of his first master in mysticism, 'Swedenborg,

strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches,' as he was

to call him long afterwards, in _Milton._ Blake's attitude

towards Christianity might be roughly defined by calling him a

heretic of the heresy of Swedenborg. _The Marriage of Heaven

and Hell_ begins: 'As a new heaven is begun, and it is now

thirty-three years since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives. And

lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting on the tomb: his writings are the

linen clothes folded up.' Swedenborg himself, in a prophecy that

Blake must have heard in his childhood, had named 1757, the year

of Blake's birth, as the first of a new dispensation, the dispensation

of the spirit, and Blake's acceptance of the prophecy marks the date

of his escape from the too close influence of one of whom he said,

as late as 1825, 'Swedenborg was a divine teacher. Yet he was wrong

in endeavoring to explain to the rational faculty what reason cannot

comprehend.' And so we are warned, in _The Marriage of Heaven

and Hell_, against the 'confident insolence sprouting from

systematic reasoning. Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is

new, though it is only the contents or index of already published

books.' And again: 'Any man of mechanical talents may from the

writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen produce ten thousand

volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's, and from those of

Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number. But when he has done

this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he

only holds a candle in sunshine.' With Paracelsus it is doubtful if

Blake was ever more than slightly acquainted; the influence of

Behmen, whom he had certainly read in William Law's translation,

is difficult to define, and seems to have been of the most accidental or

partial kind, but Swedenborg had been a sort of second Bible to him

from childhood, and the influence even of his 'systematic reasoning'

remained with him as at least a sort of groundwork, or despised model;

'foundations for grand things,' as he says in the _Descriptive

Catalogue._ When Swedenborg says, 'Hell is divided into societies

in the same manner as heaven, and also into as many societies as

heaven; for every society in heaven has a society opposite to it in

hell, and this for the sake of equilibrium,' we see in this spirit of

meek order a matter-of-fact suggestion for Blake's 'enormous

wonders of the abysses,' in which heavens and hells change names

and alternate through mutual annihilations.

The last note which Blake wrote on the margins of Swedenborg's

_Wisdom of Angels_ is this: 'Heaven and Hell are born together.'

The edition which he annotated is that of 1788, and the marginalia,

which are printed in Mr. Ellis's _Real Blake_, will show how

attentive, as late as two years before the writing of the book which

that note seems to anticipate, Blake had been to every shade of

meaning in one whom he was to deny with such bitter mockery.

But, even in these notes, Blake is attentive to one thing only, he

is reaching after a confirmation of his own sense of a spiritual

language in which man can converse with paradise and render the

thoughts of angels. He comments on nothing else, he seems to read

only to confirm his conviction; he is equally indifferent to

Swedenborg's theology and to his concern with material things;

his hells and heavens, 'uses,' and 'spiritual suns,' concern him only

in so far as they help to make clearer and more precise his notion of

the powers and activities of the spirit in man. To Blake, as he shows

us in _Milton_, Swedenborg's worst error was not even that

of 'systematic reasoning,' but that of:

'Showing the Transgressors in Hell: the proud

Warriors in Heaven:

Heaven as a Punisher and Hell as one under

Punishment.'

It is for this more than for any other error that Swedenborgs

'memorable relations' are tossed back to him as 'memorable fancies,'

in a solemn parody of his own manner; that his mill and vault and

cave are taken from him and used against him; and that one once

conversant with his heaven, and now weary of it, 'walks among the

fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to

Angels look like torments and insanity.' Blake shows us the energy of

virtue breaking the Ten Commandments, and declares: 'Jesus was

all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.' Speaking through

'the voice of the Devil,' he proclaims that 'Energy is eternal delight,'

and that 'Everything that lives is holy.' And, in a last flaming paradox,

still mocking the manner of the analyst of heaven and hell, he bids us:

'Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend:

we often read the Bible together, in its infernal or diabolical sense,

which the world shall have if they behave well. I have also the Bible of

Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no.' The Bible

of Hell is no doubt the Bible of Blake's new gospel, in which contraries

are equally true. We may piece it together out of many fragments, of

which the first perhaps is the sentence standing by itself at the bottom

of the page: 'One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression.'

_The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ is loud with 'the clangor

of the Arrows of Intellect,' each of the 'Proverbs of Hell' is a jewel of

concentrated wisdom, the whole book is Blake's clearest and most

vital statement of his new, his reawakened belief; it contains, as I

have intimated, all Nietzsche; yet something restless, disturbed,

uncouth, has come violently into this mind and art, wrenching it

beyond all known limits, or setting alight in it an illuminating,

devouring, and unquenchable flame. In common with Swedenborg,

Blake is a mystic who enters into no tradition, such as that tradition

of the Catholic Church which has a liturgy awaiting dreams. For

Saint John of the Cross and for Saint Teresa the words of the vision

are already there, perfectly translating ecstasy into familiar speech;

they have but to look and to speak. But to Blake, as to Swedenborg,

no tradition is sufficiently a matter of literal belief to be at hand with

its forms; new forms have to be made, and something of the crudity of

Swedenborg comes over him in his rejection of the compromise of

mortal imagery.

_The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ may be called or not

called a Prophetic Book, in the strict sense; with _The Visions of the

Daughters of Albion_, engraved at Lambeth in 1793, the series

perhaps more literally begins. Here the fine masculine prose of _The

Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ has given place to a metre vaguer

than the metre of _The Book of Thel_, and to a substance from

which the savor has not yet gone of the _Songs of Innocence_,

in such lines as:

'The new washed lamb tinged with the village smoke,

and the bright swan

By the red earth of our immortal river.'

It is Blake's book of love, and it defends the honesty of the natural

passions with unslackenning ardor. There is no mythology in it, beyond

a name or two, easily explicable. Oothoon, the virgin joy, oppressed by

laws and cruelties of restraint and jealousy, vindicates her right to the

freedom of innocence and to the instincts of infancy.

'And trees and birds and beasts and men behold their

eternal joy.

Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant

joy:

Arise, and drink your bliss, for everything that lives

is holy!'

It is the gospel of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_,

and, as that proclaimed liberty for the mind, so this, with abundant

rhetoric, but with vehement conviction, proclaims liberty for the

body. In form it is still clear, its eloquence and imagery are partly

biblical, and have little suggestion of the manner of the later

Prophetic Books.

_America_, written in the same year, in the same measure

as the _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_, is the most

vehement, wild, and whirling of all Blake's prophecies. It is a

prophecy of revolution, and it takes the revolt of America against

England both literally and symbolically, with names of 'Washington,

Franklin, Paine and Warren, Gates, Hancock and Green,' side by side with

Orc and the Angel of Albion; it preaches every form of bodily and

spiritual liberty in the terms of contemporary events, Boston's

Angel, London's Guardian, and the like, in the midst of cataclysms

of all nature, fires and thunders temporal and eternal. The world

for a time is given into the power of Orc, unrestrained desire,

which is to bring freedom through revolution and the destroying

of the bonds of good and evil. He is called 'Antichrist, Hater of

Dignities, lover of wild rebellion, and transgressor of God's Law.'

He is the Satan of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, and

he also proclaims:

'For everything that lives is holy, life delights in

life;

Because the soul of sweet delight can never be

defil'd.'

As, in that book, Blake had seen 'the fiery limbs, the flaming

hair' of the son of fire 'spurning the clouds written with curses,

stamping the stony law to dust'; so, here, he hears the voice of

Orc proclaiming:

'The fierce joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,

What night he led the starry hosts through the wild

wilderness;

That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion

abroad

To the four winds as a torn book, and none shall

gather the leaves.'

Liberty comes in like a flood bursting all barriers:

'The doors of marriage are open, and the Priests in

rustling scales

Rush into reptile coverts, hiding from the fires of

Orc,

That play around the golden roofs in wreaths of fierce

desire,

Leaving the females naked and glowing with the lusts

of youth.

For the female spirits of the dead pining in bonds of

religion

Run from their fetters reddening, and in long-drawn

arches sitting,

They feel the nerves of youth renew, and desires of

ancient times,

Over their pale limbs as a vine when the tender grape

appears.'

The world, in this regeneration through revolution (which seemed to

Blake, no doubt, a thing close at hand, in those days when France and

America seemed to be breaking down the old tyrannies), is to be no longer

a world laid out by convention for the untrustworthy; and he asks:

'Who commanded this? what God? what Angel?

To keep the generous from experience till the

ungenerous

Are unrestrained performers of the energies of

nature,

Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science

That men get rich by.'

For twelve years, from the American to the French revolution,

'Angels and weak men' are to govern the strong, and then Europe

is to be overwhelmed by the fire that had broken out in the West,

though the ancient guardians of the five senses 'slow advance

to shut the five gates of their law-built houses.'

'But the gates were consumed, and their bolts and

hinges melted,

And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens, and

round the abode of men.'

Here the myth, though it is present throughout, is an undercurrent,

and the crying of the message is what is chiefly heard. In _Europe_

(1794), which is written in lines broken up into frequent but not

very significant irregularities, short lines alternating with long ones,

in the manner of an irregular ode, the mythology is like a net or spiders

web over the whole text. Names not used elsewhere, or not in the

same form, are found: Manatha-Varcyon, Thiralatha, who in _Europe_

is Diralada. The whole poem is an allegory of the sleep of Nature during

the eighteen hundred years of the Christian era, under bonds of narrow

religions and barren moralities and tyrannous laws, and of the awakening

to forgotten joy, when 'Nature felt through all her pores the enormous

revelry,' and the fiery spirit of Ore, beholding the morning in the east,

shot to the earth:

'And in the vineyards of red France appear'd the light

of his fury.'

It is another hymn of revolution, but this time an awakening

more wholly mental, with only occasional contemporary allusions

like that of the judge in Westminster whose wig grows to his scalp,

and who is seen 'groveling along Great George Street through the

Park gate.' 'Howlings and hissings, shrieks and groans, and voices of

despair,' are heard throughout; we see thought change the infinite

to a serpent:

'Then was the serpent temple formed, image of infinite

Shut up in finite revolutions, and man become an

angel;

Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown'd.'

The serpent temple shadows the whole island:

'Enitharmon laugh'd in her sleep to see (O woman's

triumph)

Every house a den, every man bound: the shadows

are filled

With spectres, and the windows wove over with curses

of iron:

Over the doors Thou shalt not: and over the chimneys

Fear is written:

With bands of iron round their necks fasten'd into the

walls

The citizens: in leaden gyves the inhabitants of

suburbs

Walk heavy: soft and bent are the bones of villagers.'

The whole book is a lament and protest, and it ends with

a call to spiritual battle. In a gay and naïve prologue, written

by Blake in a copy of _Europe_ in the possession of Mr.

Linnell, and quoted by Ellis and Yeats, Blake tells us that he

caught a fairy on a streaked tulip, and brought him home:

'As we went along

Wild flowers I gathered, and he show'd me each eternal

flower.

He laughed aloud to see them whimper because they

were pluck'd,

Then hover'd round me like a cloud of incense. When

I came

Into my parlour and sat down and took my pen to

write,

My fairy sat upon the table and dictated _Europe._

_The First Book of Urizen_ (1794) is a myth, shadowed in

dark symbols, of the creation of mortal life and its severing from

eternity; the birth of Time out of the void and self-contemplating

shadow' of unimaginative Reason; the creation of the senses, each

a limiting of eternity, and the closing of the tent of heavenly knowledge,

so that Time and the creatures of Time behold eternity no more.

We see the birth of Pity and of Desire, woman the shadow and

desire the child of man. Reason despairs as it realizes that life

lives upon death, and the cold pity of its despair forms into a

chill shadow, which follows it like a spider's web, and freezes into

the net of religion, or the restraint of the activities. Under this

net the senses shrink inwards, and that creation which is 'the

body of our death' and our stationing in time and space is finished:

'Six days they shrank up from existence,

And on the seventh they rested

And they bless'd the seventh day, in sick hope,

And forgot their eternal life.'

Then the children of reason, now 'sons and daughters of sorrow,'

'Wept and built

Tombs in the desolate places,

And form'd laws of prudence and call'd them

The eternal laws of God.'

But Fuzon, the spirit of fire, forsook the 'pendulous earth' with

those children of Urizen who would still follow him.

Here, crystallized in the form of a myth, we see many of Blake's

fundamental ideas. Some of them we have seen under other forms,

as statement rather than as image, in _The Marriage of Heaven

and Hell_ and _There is no Natural Religion._ We shall see

them again, developed, elaborated, branching out into infinite

side-issues, multiplying upon themselves, in the later Prophetic

Books, partly as myth, partly as statement; we shall see them in

many of the lyrical poems, transformed into song, but still never

varying in their message; and we shall see them, in the polemical

prose of all the remaining fragments, and in the private letters,

and in the annotations of Swedenborg, and in Crabb Robinson's

records of conversations. The _Book of Urizen_ is a sort of

nucleus, the germ of a system.

Next to the _Book of Urizen_, if we may judge from the

manner of its engraving, came _The Song of Los_ (1795),

written in a manner of vivid declamation, the lines now lengthening,

now shrinking, without fixed beat or measure. It is the song of Time,

'the Eternal Prophet,' and tells the course of inspiration as it passes

from east to west, 'abstract philosophy' in Brahma, 'forms of dark

delusion' to Moses on Mount Sinai, the mount of law; 'a gospel from

wretched Theotormon' (distressed human love and pity) to Jesus,

'a man of sorrows'; the 'loose Bible' of Mahomet, setting free the

senses,'Odin's 'code of war.'

'These were the Churches, Hospitals, Castles, Palaces,

Like nets and gins and traps to catch the joys of

Eternity,

And all the rest a desart:

Till like a dream Eternity was obliterated and erased.'

'The vast of Nature' shrinks up before the 'shrunken eyes'

of men, till it is finally enclosed in the 'philosophy of the five

senses,' the philosophy of Newton and Locke. 'The Kings of Asia,'

the cruelties of the heathen, the ancient powers of evil, call on

'famine from the heath, pestilence from the fen:'

'To turn man from his path,

To restrain the child from the womb,

To cut off the bread from the city,

That the remnant may learn to obey,

That the pride of the heart may fail,

That the lust of the eyes may be quench'd,

That the delicate ear in its infancy

May be dull'd, and the nostrils clos'd up:

To teach mortal worms the path

That leads from the gates of the grave.'

But, in the darkness of their 'ancient woven dens,' they are startled

by 'the thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of Orc'; and at their cry

Urizen comes forth to meet and challenge the liberating spirit; he

thunders against the pillar of fire that rises out of the darkness of

Europe; and at the clash of their mutual onset 'the Grave shrieks

aloud.' But 'Urizen wept,' the cold pity of reason which, as we have

seen in the book named after him, freezes into nets of religion,

'twisted like to the human brain.'

_The Book of Los_ (also dated 1795) is written in the short

lines of _Urizen_ and _Ahania_, a metre following a fixed, insistent

beat, as of Los's hammer on his anvil. It begins with the lament of

'Eno, aged Mother,' over the liberty of old times:

'O Times remote!

When Love and Joy were adoration,

And none impure were deem'd.

Not Eyeless Covet,

Nor Thin-lip'd Envy,

Nor Bristled Wrath,

Nor Curled Wantonness;'

None of these, that is, yet turned to evil, but still unfallen

energies. At this, flames of desire break out, 'living, intelligent,' and

Los, the spirit of Inspiration, divides the flames, freezes them into

solid darkness, and is imprisoned by them, and escapes, only in

terror, and falls through ages into the void ('Truth has bounds,

Error none'), until he has organized the void and brought into it

a light which makes visible the form of the void. He sees it as the

backbone of Urizen, the bony outlines of reason, and then begins,

for the first time in the Prophetic Books, that building of furnaces,

and wielding of hammer and anvil of which we are to hear so much

in _Jerusalem._ He forges the sun, and chains cold intellect

to vital heat, from whose torments:

'A twin

Was completed, a Human Illusion

In darkness and deep clouds involved.'

In _The Book of Los_ almost all relationship to poetry has

vanished; the myth is cloudier and more abstract. Scarcely less so is

_The Book of Ahania_ (1795), written in the same short lines,

hut in a manner occasionally more concrete and realizable. Like

_Urizen_, it is almost all myth. It follows Fuzon, 'son of

Urizen's silent burnings,' in his fiery revolt against:

'This cloudy God seated on waters,

Now seen, now obscured, king of Sorrows.'

From the stricken and divided Urizen is born Ahania ('so name

his parted soul'), who is 'his invisible lust,' whom he loves, hides,

and calls Sin.

'She fell down, a faint shadow wandering,

In chaos, and circling dark Urizen,

As the moon anguished circles the earth,

Hopeless, abhorred, a death shadow,

Unseen, unbodied, unknown,

The mother of Pestilence.'

But Urizen, recovering his strength, seizes the bright son of fire, his

energy or passion, and nails him to the dark 'religious' 'Tree

of Mystery,' from under whose shade comes the voice of Ahania,

'weeping upon the void,' lamenting her lost joys of love, and

the days when:

'Swelled with ripeness and fat with fatness,

Bursting on winds my odours,

My ripe figs and rich pomegranates,

In infant joy at my feet,

O Urizen, sported and sang.'

In _The Four Zoas_ Ahania is called 'the feminine indolent

bliss, the indulgent self of weariness.' 'One final glimpse,' says Mr.

Swinburne, 'we may take of Ahania after her division--the love

of God, as it were, parted from God, impotent therefore and a shadow,

if not rather a plague and blight; mercy severed from justice, and thus

made a worse thing than useless.' And her lament ends in this despair:

'But now alone over rocks, mountains,

Cast out from thy lovely bosom

Cruel jealousy, selfish fear,

Self-destroying; how can delight

Renew in these chains of darkness

Where bones of beasts are strown

On the bleak and snowy mountains,

Where bones from the birth are buried

Before they see the light.'

The mythology, of which parts are developed in each of these

books, is thrown together, in something more approaching a whole,

hut without apparent cohesion or consistency, in _The Four Zoas_,

which probably dates from 1797 and which exists in seventy sheets of

manuscript, of uncertain order, almost certainly in an unfinished

state, perhaps never intended for publication, but rather as a storehouse

of ideas. This manuscript, much altered, arranged in a conjectural order,

and printed with extreme incorrectness, was published by Messrs. Ellis

and Yeats in the third volume of their book on Blake, under the first,

rejected, title of _Vala._[3] They describe it as being in itself a

sort of compound of all Blake's other books, except _Milton_ and

_Jerusalem_, which are enriched by scraps taken from _Vala_, but

are not summarized in it. In the uncertain state in which we have

it, it is impossible to take it as a wholly authentic text; but it

is both full of incidental beauty and of considerable assistance

in unravelling many of the mysteries in _Milton_ and _Jerusalem_,

the books written at Felpham, both dated 1804, in which we find

the final development of the myth, or as much of that final

development as has come to us in the absence of the manuscripts

destroyed or disposed of by Tatham. Those two books indeed seem

to presuppose in their readers an acquaintance with many matters

told or explained in this, from which passages are taken bodily,

but with little apparent method. As it stands, _Vala_ is much more

of a poem than either _Milton_ or _Jerusalem_; the cipher

comes in at times, but between there are broad spaces of cloudy but not

wholly unlighted imagery. Blake still remembers that he is writing a poem,

earthly beauty is still divine beauty to him, and the message is not yet

so stringent as to forbid all lingering by the way.

In some parts of the poem the manner is frankly biblical, and suggests

the book of Proverbs, as thus:

'What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for

a song,

Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought

with the price

Of all that a man hath--his wife, his house, his

children.

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none

comes to buy,

And in the withered fields where the farmer ploughs

for bread in vain.'

Nature is still an image accepted as an adequate symbol, and we

get reminiscences here and there of the simpler, early work of

_Thel_, for instance, in such lines as:

'And as the little seed waits eagerly watching for its

flower and fruit,

Anxious its little soul looks out into the clear

expanse

To see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible

array;

So man looks out in tree and herb, and fish and bird

and beast,

Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortal

body

Into the elemental forms of everything that grows.'

There are descriptions of feasts, of flames, of last judgments, of

the new Eden, which are full of color and splendor, passing without

warning into the 'material sublime' of Fuseli, as in the picture of Urizen

'stonied upon his throne' in the eighth 'Night.' In the passages which we

possess in the earlier and later version we see the myth of Blake

gradually crystallizing, the transposition of every intelligible symbol

into the secret cipher. Thus we find 'Mount Gilead' changed into

'Mount Snowdon,' 'Beth Peor' into 'Cosway Vale,' and a plain image

such as this:

'The Mountain called out to the Mountain, Awake,

oh brother Mountain,'

Is translated backwards into:

'Ephraim called out to Tiriel, Awake, oh brother

Mountain.'

Images everywhere are seen freezing into types; they stop half-way,

and have not yet abandoned the obscure poetry of the earlier Prophetic

Books for the harder algebra of _Milton_ and _Jerusalem._

VI

The first statement by Blake of his aims and principles in art is

to be found in some letters to George Cumberland and to Dr. Trusler,

contained in the Cumberland Papers in the British Museum. These

letters were first printed by Dr. Garnett in the _Hampstead

Annual_ of 1903, but with many mistakes and omissions.[4] I have

recopied from the originals the text of such letters as I quote.

It appears that in the year 1799 Blake undertook, at the suggestion

of Cumberland, to do some drawings for a book by Dr. Trusler,

a sort of quack writer and publisher, who may be perhaps sufficiently

defined by the quotation of the title of one of his books, which

is _The Way to be Rich and Respectable._ On August 16, Blake

writes to say: 'I find more and more that my Style of Designing

is a Species by itself, and in this which I send you have been

compelled by my Genius or Angel to follow where he led; if I

were to act otherwise it would not fulfill the purpose for which

alone I live, which is in conjunction with such men as my friend

Cumberland to renew the lost Art of the Greeks.' He tells him that he

has attempted to 'follow his Dictate' every morning for a fortnight, but

'it was out of my power!' He then describes what he has done, and says:

'If you approve of my manner, and it is agreeable to you, I would rather

Paint Pictures in oil of the same dimensions than make Drawings, and

on the same terms. By this means you will have a number of Cabinet

pictures, which I flatter myself will not be unworthy of a Scholar of

Rembrandt and Teniers, whom I have Studied no less than Rafael and

Michaelangelo.' The next letter, which I will give in full, for it is a

document of great importance, is dated a week later, and the nature

of the reply which it answers can be gathered from Blake's comment

on the matter to Cumberland, three days later still. 'I have made him,'

he says, 'a Drawing in my best manner: he has sent it back with a Letter

full of Criticisms, in which he says It accords not with his Intentions,

which are, to Reject all Fancy from his Work. How far he expects to

please, I cannot tell. But as I cannot paint Dirty rags and old Shoes

where I ought to place Naked Beauty or simple ornament, I despair of

ever pleasing one Class of Men.' 'I could not help smiling,' he says

later, 'at the difference between the doctrines of Dr. Trusler and those

of Christ.' Here, then, is the letter in which Blake accounts for himself

to the quack doctor (who has docketed it: 'Blake, Dimd with

superstition'), as if to posterity:--

REVD. SIR,

I really am sorry that you are fallen out with the Spiritual World,

Especially if I should have to answer for it. I feel very sorry that your

Ideas and Mine on Moral Painting differ so much as to have made you

angry with my method of study. If I am wrong I am wrong in good

company. I had hoped your plan comprehended All Species of this Art,

and Especially that you would not regret that Species which gives

Existence to Every other, namely, Visions of Eternity. You say that I

want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that

what is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be

made Explicit to the Ideot is not worth my care. The wisest of the

Ancients considered what is not too Explicit as the fittest for

Instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act. I name Moses,

Solomon, Esop, Homer, Plato.

But as you have favored me with your remarks on my Design,

permit me in return to defend it against a mistaken one, which is,

That I have supposed Malevolence without a Cause. Is not Merit in

one a Cause of Envy in another, and Serenity and Happiness and

Beauty a Cause of Malevolence? But Want of Money and the Distress

of a Thief can never be alleged as the Cause of his Thievery, for many

honest people endure greater hardships with Fortitude. We must therefore

seek the Cause elsewhere than in the want of Money, for that is the

Miser's passion, not the Thief's.

I have therefore proved your Reasonings I'll proportioned, which

you can never prove my figures to be. They are those of Michael Angelo,

Rafael and the Antique, and of the best living Models. I perceive that

your Eye is perverted by Caricature Prints, which ought not to abound

so much as they do. Fun I love, but too much Fun is of all things the

most loathsome. Mirth is better than Fun, and Happiness is better than

Mirth. I feel that a Man may be happy in This World, and I know that

This World is a World of Imagination and Vision. I see Everything I paint

In This World: but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a

Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with

the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled

with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes

of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature

all Ridicule and Deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my

proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of

the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a Man is,

so he sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly

Mistake when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found

in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy

or Imagination, and I feel Flattered when I am told so. What is it sets

Homer, Virgil, and Milton in so high a rank of Art? Why is the Bible

more Entertaining and Instructive than any other book? Is it not

because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual

Sensation, and but mediately to the Understanding or Reason?

Such is True Painting, and such was alone valued by the Greeks and

the best modern Artists. Consider what Lord Bacon says--'Sense

sends over to Imagination before Reason have judged, and Reason

sends over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted.' See

_Advancement of Learning_, Part 2, P. 47, of first Edition.

But I am happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who

can Elucidate My Visions, and Particularly they have been Elucidated

by Children, who have taken a greater delight in contemplating

my Pictures than I even hoped. Neither Youth nor Childhood is Folly

or Incapacity. Some Children are Fools, and so are some old Men. But

There is a vast Majority on the side of Imagination or Spiritual

Sensation.

To Engrave after another Painter is infinitely more laborious

than to Engrave one's own Inventions. And of the size you require

my price has been Thirty Guineas, and I cannot afford to do it

for less. I had Twelve for the Head I sent you as a Specimen; but

after my own designs I could do at least Six times the quantity

of labour in the same time, which will account for the difference in

price, as also that Chalk Engraving is at least Six times as laborious

as Aqua tinta. I have no objection to Engraving after another Artist.

Engraving is the profession I was apprenticed to, and I should never

have attempted to live by any thing else If orders had not come in

for my Designs and Paintings, which I have the pleasure to tell you are

Increasing Every Day. Thus If I am a Painter it is not to be attributed

to Seeking after. But I am contented whether I live by Painting or

Engraving.

I am, Revd. Sir, your very obedient Servant,

WILLIAM BLAKE.

13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,

_August_ 23, 1799.

Blake tells Cumberland the whole story quite cheerfully, and

ends with these significant words, full of patience, courtesy, and

sad humour: 'As to Myself, about whom you are so kindly Interested,

I live by Miracle. I am Painting small Pictures from the Bible. For as

to Engraving, in which art I cannot reproach myself with any neglect,

yet I am laid by in a corner as if I did not exist, and since my Youngs

Night Thoughts have been published, even Johnson and Fuseli have

discarded my Graver. But as I know that He who works and has his

health cannot starve, I laugh at Fortune and Go on and on. I think

I foresee better Things than I have ever seen. My Work pleases my

employer, and I have an order for Fifty small Pictures at One Guinea

each, which is something better than mere copying after another

artist. But above all I feel myself happy and contented, let what

will come. Having passed now near twenty years in ups and downs,

I am used to them, and perhaps a little practice in them may turn

out to benefit. It is now exactly Twenty years since I was upon the

ocean of business, and tho I laugh at Fortune, I am persuaded that

She Alone is the Governor of Worldly Riches, and when it is Fit She

will call on me. Till then I wait with Patience, in hopes that She is

busied among my Friends.'

The employer is, no doubt, Mr. Butts, for whom Blake had

already begun to work: we know some of the 'frescoes' and color-prints

which belong to this time; among them, or only just after, the

incomparable 'Crucifixion,' in which the soldiers cast lots in the

foreground and the crosses are seen from the back, against a

stormy sky and lances like Tintoretto's. But it was also the time

of all but the latest Prophetic Books (or of all but the latest of those

left to us), and we may pause here for a moment to consider some

of the qualities that Blake was by this time fully displaying in his

linear and colored inventions and 'Visions of Eternity.'

It is by his energy and nobility of creation that Blake takes

rank among great artists, in a place apart from those who have

been content to study, to observe, and to copy. His invention of

living form is like nature's, unintermittent, but without the

measure and order of nature, and without complete command over

the material out of which it creates. In his youth he had sought after

prints of such inventive work as especially appealed to him, Michelangelo,

Raphael, Dürer; it is possible that, having had 'very early in life the

ordinary opportunities,' as Dr. Malkin puts it, 'of seeing pictures in

the houses of noblemen and gentlemen, and in the king's palaces,'

he had seen either pictures, or prints after pictures, of the Italian

Primitives, whose attitudes and composition he at times suggests;

and, to the end, he worked with Dürer's 'Melancholia' on his work-table

and Michelangelo's designs on his walls. It not infrequently happened

that a memory of form created by one of these great draughtsmen

presented itself as a sort of short cut to the statement of the form

which he was seeing or creating in his own imagination. A Devil's

Advocate has pointed out 'plagiarisms' in Blake's design, and would

dismiss in consequence his reputation for originality. Blake had not

sufficient mastery of technique to be always wholly original in design;

and it is to his dependence on a technique not as flexible as his

imagination was intense that we must attribute what is unsatisfying

in such remarkable inventions as 'The House of Death' (Milton's

lazar-house) in the Print Doom of the British Museum. Its appeal

to the imagination is partly in spite of what is 'organized and minutely

articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can

produce.' Death is a version of the Ancient of Days and of Urizen,

only his eyes are turned to blind terror and his beard to forked

flame; Despair, a statue of greenish bronze, is the Scofield of

_Jerusalem_; the limbs and faces rigid with agony are types

of strength and symbols of pain. Yet even here there is creation,

there is the energy of life, there is a spiritual awe. And wherever

Blake works freely, as in the regions of the Prophetic Books, wholly

outside time and space, appropriate form multiplies under his

creating hand, as it weaves a new creation of worlds and of spirits,

monstrous and angelical.

Blake distinguished, as all great imaginative artists have

distinguished, between allegory, which is but realism's excuse for

existence, and symbol, which is none of the 'daughters of Memory,'

but itself vision or inspiration. He wrote in the MS. book: 'Vision or

imagination is a representation of what actually exists, really and

unchangeably. Fable or allegory is formed by the daughters of

Memory.' And thus in the designs which accompany the text of his

Prophetic Books there is rarely the mere illustration of those pages.

He does not copy in line what he has said in words, or explain in

words what he has rendered in line; a creation probably contemporary

is going on, and words and lines render between them, the one to

the eyes, the other to the mind, the same image of spiritual things,

apprehended by different organs of perception.

And so in his pictures, what he gives us is not a picture after

a mental idea; it is the literal delineation of an imaginative

vision, of a conception of the imagination. He wrote: 'If you have

not nature before you for every touch, you cannot paint portrait;

and if you have nature before you at all, you cannot paint history.'

There is a water-color of Christ in the carpenter's shop: Christ, a

child, sets to the floor that compass which Blake saw more often

in the hands of God the Father, stooping out of heaven; his mother

and Joseph stand on each side of him, leaning towards him with

the stiff elegance of guardian angels on a tomb. That is how Blake

sees it, and not with the minute detail and the aim at local color with

which the Pre-Raphaelites have seen it; it is not Holman Hunt's

'Bethlehem' nor the little Italian town of Giotto; it is rendered

carefully after the visual imagination which the verses of the Bible

awakened in his brain. In one of those variations which he did on

the 'Flight into Egypt' (the 'Riposo,' as he called it), we have a

lovely and surprising invention of landscape, minute and impossible,

with a tree built up like a huge vegetable, and flowers growing out

of the bare rock, and a red and flattened sun going down behind

the hills; Joseph stands under the tree, nearly of the same

height, but grave and kindly, and the Mother and Child are mild

eighteenth-century types of innocence; the browsing donkey has

an engaging rough homeliness of hide and aspect. It is all as

unreal as you like, made up of elements not combined into any

faultless pattern; art has gone back further than Giotto, and is

careless of human individuality; but it is seen as it were with

faith, and it conveys to you precisely what the painter meant

to convey. So, in a lovely water-color of the creation of Eve, this

blue-haired doll of obviously rounded flesh has in her something

which is more as well as less than the appeal of bodily beauty,

some suggestion to the imagination which the actual technical

skill of Blake has put there. With less delicacy of color, and with

drawing in parts actually misleading, there is a strange intensity

of appeal, of realization not so much to the eyes as through them

to the imagination, in another water-color of the raising of Lazarus,

where the corpse swathed in grave-clothes floats sidelong upward

from the grave, the weight of mortality as if taken off, and an unearthly

lightness in its disimprisoned limbs, that have forgotten the laws

of mortal gravity.

Yet, even in these renderings of what is certainly not meant

for reality, how abundantly nature comes into the design: mere

bright parrot-like birds in the branches of the tree of knowledge

of good and evil, the donkey of the 'Riposo,' the sheep's heads

woven into the almost decorative border. Blake was constantly

on his guard against the deceits of nature, the temptation of a

'facsimile representation of merely mortal and perishing substances.'

His dread of nature was partly the recoil of his love; he feared to be

entangled in the 'veils of Vala,' the seductive sights of the world

of the senses; and his love of natural things is evident on every

page of even the latest of the Prophetic Books. It is the natural

world, the idols of Satan, that creep in at every corner and border,

setting flowers to grow, and birds to fly, and snakes to glide

harmlessly around the edges of these hard and impenetrable pages.

The minute life of this 'vegetable world' is awake and in subtle

motion in the midst of these cold abstractions. 'The Vegetable

World opens like a flower from the Earth's centre, in which

is Eternity,' and it is this outward flowering of eternity in the

delicate living forms of time that goes on incessantly, as if by the

mere accident of the creative impulse, as Blake or Los builds

Golgonooza or the City of God out of the 'abstract void' and the

'indefiniteness of unimaginative existence.' It is, on every page,

the visible outer part of what, in the words, can hut speak a

language not even meant to be the language of the 'natural man.'

In these symbolic notations of nature, or double language

of words and signs, these little figures of men and beasts that so

strangely and incalculably decorate so many of Blake's pages,

there is something Egyptian, which reminds me of those lovely

riddles on papyri and funeral tablets, where the images of real

things are used so decoratively, in the midst of a language itself all

pictures, with colours never seen in the things themselves, but given

to them for ornament. _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ is

filled with what seem like the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian tomb

or obelisk, little images which might well mean things as definite

as the images of Egyptian writing. They are still visible, sometimes

mere curves or twines, in the latest of the engraved work, and might

exist equally for some symbolic life which they contain, or for that

decorative life of design which makes them as expressive mosaics

of pattern as the hieroglyphics. I cannot hut think that it was partly

from what he had seen, in actual basalt, or in engravings after

ancient monuments which must have been about him at Basire the

engraver's, that Blake found the suggestion of his picture-writing

in the Prophetic Books. He believed that all Greek art was but a pale

copy of a lost art of Egypt, 'the greater works of the Asiatic

Patriarchs,' Apotheoses of Persian, Hindu, and Egyptian antiquity.'

In such pictures as 'The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth,'

he professed to be but 'applying to modern heroes, on a smaller

scale,' what he had seen in vision of these 'stupendous originals now

lost, or perhaps buried till some happier age.' Is it not likely therefore

that in his attempt to create the religious books of a new religion,

'the Everlasting Gospel' of 'the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord,' he

should have turned to the then unintelligible forms in which the

oldest of the religions had written itself down in a visible pictorial

message?

But, whatever suggestions may have come to him from elsewhere,

Blake's genius was essentially Gothic, and took form, I doubt

not, during those six years of youth when he drew the monuments

in Westminster Abbey, and in the old churches about London.

He might have learned much from the tombs in the Abbey, and

from the brasses, and from the carved angels in the chapels,

and from the naïve groups on the screen in the chapel of Edward

the Confessor, and from the draped figures round the sarcophagus

of Aymer de Valence. There is often, in Blake's figures, something of the

monumental stiffness of Gothic stone, as there is in the minute yet

formal characterization of the faces. His rendering of terrible and evil

things, the animal beings who typify the passions and fierce distortions

of the soul, have the same childlike detail, content to be ludicrous if

it can only be faithful to a distinct conception, of the carvers of

gargoyles and of Last Judgments. Blake has, too, the same love of

pattern for its own sake, the same exuberance of ornament, always

living and organic, growing out of the structure of the design or out of

the form of the page, not added to it from without. Gothic art taught

him his hatred of vacant space, his love of twining and trailing foliage

and flame and water; and his invention of ornament is as unlimited as

theirs. A page of one of his illuminated books is like the carving on a

Gothic capital. Lines uncoil from a hidden centre and spread like

branches or burst into vast vegetation, emanating from leaf to limb,

and growing upward into images of human and celestial existence.

The snake is in all his designs; whether, in _Jerusalem_, rolled

into chariot-wheels and into the harness of a chariot drawn by hoofed

lions, and into the curled horns of the lions, and into the pointing

fingers of the horns; or, in _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_,

a leviathan of the sea with open jaws, eyed and scaled with poisonous

jewels of purple and blood-red and corroded gold, swelling visibly

out of a dark sea that foams aside from its passage; or, curved above

the limbs and wound about the head of a falling figure in lovely

diminishing coils like a corkscrew which is a note of interrogation;

or, in mere unterrifying beauty, trailed like a branch of a bending

tree across the tops of pages; or, bitted and bridled and a thing of

blithe gaiety, ridden by little, naked, long-legged girls and boys in

the new paradise of an America of the future. The Gothic carvers

loved snakes, but hardly with the strange passion of Blake. They carved

the flames of hell and of earthly punishment with delight in the beauty

of their soaring and twisting lines; but no one has ever made of fire

such a plaything and ecstasy as Blake has made of it. In his paintings he

invents new colors to show forth the very soul of fire, a soul angrier

and more variable than opals; and in his drawings he shows us lines

and nooses of fire rushing upward out of the ground, and fire drifting

across the air like vapor, and fire consuming the world in the last chaos.

And everywhere there are gentle and caressing tongues and trails of fire,

hardly to be distinguished from branches of trees and blades of grass and

stems and petals of flowers. Water, which the Gothic carvers represented

in curving lines, as the Japanese do, is in Blake a not less frequent

method of decoration; wrapping frail human figures in wet caverns

under the depths of the sea, and destroying and creating worlds.

Blake's color is unearthly, and is used for the most part rather

as a symbol of emotion than as a representation of fact. It is at

one time prismatic, and radiates in broad bands of pure color; at

another, and more often, is as inextricable as the veins in mineral,

and seems more like a natural growth of the earth than the creation of a

painter. In the smaller Book of Designs in the Print Room of the British

Museum the colors have moldered away, and blotted themselves

together in a sort of putrefaction which seems to carry the suggestions

of poisonous decay further than Blake carried them. This will be seen

by a comparison of the minutely drawn leviathan of _The Marriage

of Heaven and Hell_, with the colored print in the Book of Designs, in

which the outline of the folds melts and crumbles into a mere chaos

of horror. Color in Blake is never shaded, or, as he would have said,

blotted and blurred; it is always pure energy. In the faint coloring of

the _Book of Thel_ there is the very essence of gentleness; the

color is a faultless interpretation of the faint and lovely monotony of

the verse, and of its exquisite detail. Several of the plates recur

in the Book of Designs, colored at a different and, no doubt, much

later time; and while every line is the same the whole atmosphere

and mood of the designs is changed. Bright rich color is built up in

all the vacant spaces; and with the color there comes a new intensity;

each design is seen over again, in a new way. Here, the mood is a

wholly different mood, and this seeing by contraries is easier to

understand than when, as in the splendid design on the fourth

page of _The Book of Urizen_, repeated in the Book of Designs,

we see a parallel, yet different, vision, a new, yet not contrary,

aspect. In the one, the colors of the open book are like corroded

iron or rusty minerals; in the other, sharp blues, like the wings

of strange butterflies, glitter stormily under the red flashes

of a sunset. The vision is the same, but every color of the thing

seen is different.

To Blake, color is the soul rather than the body of his figures,

and seems to clothe them like an emanation. What Behmen says

of the world itself might be said of Blake's rendering of the aspects

of the world and men. 'The whole outward visible World,' he tells

us, 'with all its Being is a Signature, or Figure of the inward spiritual

World; whatever is internally, and however its Operation is, so

likewise it has its Character externally; like as the Spirit of each

Creature sets forth and manifests the internal Form of its Birth,

by its Body, so does the Eternal Being also.' Just as he gives us a

naked Apollo for the 'spiritual form of Pitt' in the picture in the

National Gallery, where Pitt is seen guiding Behemoth, or the hosts

of evil, in a hell of glowing and obscure tumult, so he sees the

soul of a thing or being with no relation to its normal earthly color.

The colors of fire and of blood, an extra-lunar gold, putrescent

vegetable colors, and the stains in rocks and sunsets, he sees

everywhere, and renders with an ecstasy that no painter to whom

color was valuable for its own sake has ever attained. It is difficult not

to believe that he does not often use color with a definitely

musical sense of its harmonies, and that colour did not literally

sing to him, as it seems, at least in a permissible figure, to sing

to us out of his pages.

VII

At the end of September 1800 Blake left Lambeth, and took

a cottage at Felpham, near Bognor, at the suggestion of William

Hayley, the feeblest poet of his period, who imagined, with foolish

kindness, that he could become the patron of one whom he called

'my gentle visionary Blake.' Hayley was a rich man, and, as the author

of _The Triumphs of Temper_, was looked upon as a person of

literary importance. He did his best to give Blake opportunities of making

money, by doing engraving and by painting miniatures of the neighbors.

He read Greek with him and Klopstock. 'Blake is just become a Grecian,

and literally learning the language,' he says in one letter, and in

another: 'Read Klopstock into English to Blake.' The effect of Klopstock

on Blake is to be seen in a poem of ribald magnificence, which no one

has yet ventured to print in full. The effect of Blake on Hayley, and of

Hayley on Blake, can be realized from a few passages in the letters.

At first we read: 'Mr. Hayley acts like a prince.' Then: 'I find on all

hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery

of business, and intimations that, if I do not confine myself to this,

I shall not live.' Last: 'Mr. H. is as much averse to my poetry as he is

to a chapter in the Bible. He knows that I have writ it, for I have shown

it to him' (this is apparently the _Milton_ or the _Jerusalem_),

and he has read part by his own desire, and has looked with

sufficient contempt to enhance my opinion of it.... But Mr. H. approves

of my designs as little as he does of my poems, and I have been forced

to insist on his leaving me, in both, to my own self-will; for I am

determined to be no longer pestered with his genteel ignorance

and polite disapprobation. I know myself both poet and painter,

and it is not his affected contempt that can move to anything

but a more assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness

I have brought down his affected loftiness, and he begins to

think that I have some genius: as if genius and assurance were the

same thing! But his imbecile attempts to depress me only deserve

laughter.' What laughter they produced, while Blake was still suffering

under them, can be seen by any one who turns to the epigrams on

H. in the note-book. But the letter goes on, with indignant seriousness:

'But I was commanded by my spiritual friends to bear all and be silent,

and to go through all without murmuring, and, in fine, hope till my

three years shall be accomplished; at which time I was set at liberty

to remonstrate against former conduct, and to demand justice and

truth; which I have done in so effectual a manner that my antagonist

is silenced completely, and I have compelled what should have been

of freedom--my just right as an artist and as a man.'

In Blake's behavior towards Hayley, which has been criticized,

we can test his sincerity to himself under all circumstances: his

impeccable outward courtesy, his concessions, 'bearing insulting

benevolence' meekly, his careful kindness towards Hayley and hard

labour on his behalf, until the conviction was forced upon him from

within that 'corporeal friends were spiritual enemies,' and that Hayley

must be given up.

'Remembering the verses that Hayley sung

When my heart knocked against the roof of my tongue.'

Blake wrote down bitter epigrams, which were written down

for mere relief of mind, and certainly never intended for publication;

and I can see no contradiction between these inner revolts and an

outer politeness which had in it its due measure of gratitude. Both

were strictly true, and only in a weak and foolish nature can the

consciousness of kindness received distract or blot out the consciousness

of the intellectual imbecility which may lurk behind it. Blake said:

'I never made friends but by spiritual gifts,

By severe contentions of friendship and the burning

fire of thought.'

What least 'contention of friendship' would not have been too

much for the 'triumphs of temper' of 'Felpham's eldest son'? what

'fire of thought' could ever have enlightened his comfortable

darkness? And is it surprising that Blake should have written in

final desperation:

'Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache:

Do be my enemy--for friendship's sake'?

He quarreled with many of his friends, with those whom he had

cared for most, like Stothard and Flaxman; but the cause was

always some moral indignation, which, just or unjust, was believed,

and which, being believed, could not have been acted upon. With Blake

belief and action were simultaneous. 'Thought is Act,' as he wrote on

the margin of Bacon's essays.

I am inclined to attribute to this period the writing down of a

mysterious manuscript in the possession of Mr. Buxton Forman,

which has never been printed, but which, by his kind permission,

I have been allowed to read. This manuscript is headed in large

lettering: 'The Seven Days of the Created World,' above which is

written, as if by an afterthought, in smaller lettering: 'Genesis.'

It is written at the beginning of a blue-covered copy-book, of

which the paper is water-marked 1797. It consists of some two

hundred lines of blank verse, numbered by tens in the margin

up to one hundred and fifty, then follow over fifty more lines

without numberings, ending without a full stop or any apparent

reason for coming to an end. The handwriting is unmistakably

Blake's; on the first page or two it is large and careful; gradually

it gets smaller and seems more hurried or fatigued, as if it had

all been written at a single sitting. The earlier part goes on without

a break, but in the later part there are corrections; single words are

altered, sometimes as much as a line and a half is crossed out and

rewritten, the lines are sometimes corrected in the course of writing.

If it were not for these signs of correction I should find it difficult to

believe that Blake had actually composed anything so tamely regular

in metre or so destitute of imagination or symbol. It is an argument

or statement, written in the formal eighteenth-century manner, with

pious invocations, God being addressed as 'Sire,' and 'Wisdom

Supreme' as his daughter, epithets are inverted that they may fit the

better into a line, and geographical names heaped up in a scarcely

Miltonic manner, while Ixion strangely neighbors the 'press'd

African.' Nowhere is there any characteristic felicity, or any

recognizable sign of Blake.

When I saw first the manuscript it occurred to me that it might

have been a fragment of translation from Klopstock, done at Felpham

under the immediate dictation of Hayley. 'Read Klopstock into English

to Blake' we have seen Hayley noting down. But I can find no original

for it in Klopstock. That Blake could have written it out of his own

head at any date after 1797 is incredible, even as an experiment in that

'monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare and

all writers of English blank verse, derived from the modern bondage

of rhyming,' which he tells us in the preface to _Jerusalem_

he considered 'to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse,'

at the time 'when this verse was first dictated to me.' The only

resemblance which we find to it in Blake's published work is in an

occasional early fragment like that known as 'The Passions,' and

where it is so different from this or any of the early attempts at

blank verse is in the absolute regularity of the metre. All I can suggest

is that Blake may have written it at a very early age, and preserved

a rough draft, which Hayley may have induced him to make a clean

copy of, and that in the process of copying he may have touched up

the metre without altering the main substance. If this is so, I think

he stopped so abruptly because he would not, even to oblige Hayley,

go on any longer with so uncongenial a task.

Blake's three years at Felpham (September 1800 to September

1803) were described by him as 'my three years' slumber on the

banks of ocean,' and there is no doubt that, in spite of the neighborhood

and kindly antagonism of Hayley, that 'slumber' was, for Blake, in a

sense an awakening. It was the only period of his life lived out of

London, and with Felpham, as he said in a letter to Flaxman, 'begins

a new life, because another covering of earth is shaken off.' The cottage

at Felpham is only a little way in from a seashore which is one of the

loveliest and most changing shores of the English coast. Whistler has

painted it, and it is always as full of faint and wandering color as a

Whistler. It was on this coast that Rossetti first learned to care for the

sea. To Blake it must have been the realization of much that he had

already divined in his imagination. There, as he wrote to Flaxman,

'heaven opens on all sides her golden gates; her windows are not

obstructed by vapors; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly

heard and their forms more distinctly seen; and my cottage is also a

shadow of their houses.' He drew the cottage on one of the pages of

_Milton_, with a naked image of himself walking in the garden,

and the image of an angel about to alight on a tree. The cottage is

still, as he found it, 'a perfect model for cottages, and I think for

palaces of magnificence, only enlarging, not altering its proportions,

and adding ornaments and not principles'; and no man of imagination

could live there, under that thatched roof and with that marvelous sea

before him, and not find himself spiritually naked and within arm's

reach of the angels.

The sea has the properties of sleep and of awakening, and

there can be no doubt that the sea had both those influences on Blake,

surrounding him for once with an atmosphere like that of his own

dreams. 'O lovely Felpham,' he writes, after he had left it, 'to thee

I am eternally indebted for my three years' rest from perturbation

and the strength I now enjoy.' Felpham represents a vivid pause,

in which he had leisure to return upon himself; and in one of his

letters he says: 'One thing of real consequence I have accomplished

by coming into the country, which is to me consolation enough,

namely, I have recollected all my scattered thoughts on art, and

resumed my primitive and original ways of execution in both

painting and engraving, which in the confusion of London I had

very much obliterated from my mind.' It is to this period, no doubt

(a period mentally overcome in the quiet of Felpham, but awaiting,

as we shall see, the electric spark of that visit to the Truchsessian

Gallery in London), that Blake refers in the _Descriptive Catalogue_,

when he speaks of the 'experiment pictures' which 'were the result

of temptations and perturbations, laboring to destroy imaginative

power, by means of that infernal machine, called Chiaro Oscuro,

in the hands of Venetian and Flemish demons,' such as the 'outrageous

demon,' Rubens, the 'soft and effeminate and cruel demon,' Correggio,

and, above all, Titian. 'The spirit of Titian,' we are told, in what is

really a confession of Blake's consciousness of the power of those

painters whose influence he dreaded, 'was particularly active

in raising doubts concerning the possibility of executing without

a model; and, when once he had raised the doubt, it became easy

for him to snatch away the vision time after time; for when the

artist took his pencil, to execute his ideas, his power of imagination

weakened so much, and darkened, that memory of nature and of

pictures of the various schools possessed his mind, instead of

appropriate execution, resulting from the inventions.' It was thus

at Felpham that he returned to himself in art, and it was at Felpham

also that he had what seems to have been the culminating outburst of

'prophetic' inspiration, writing from immediate dictation, he said, 'and

even against my will.' Visions came readily to him out of the sea, and

he saw them walk on the shore, 'majestic shadows, grey but luminous,

and superior to the common height of men.'

It was at Felpham that Blake wrote the two last of the Prophetic

Books which remain to us, _Milton_ and _Jerusalem._ Both

bear the date of 1804 on the title-page, and this, no doubt, indicates

that the engraving was begun in that year. Yet it is not certain that the

engraved text of _Jerusalem_, at any rate, was formally published

till after 1809. Pages were certainly inserted between those two dates.

On p. 38 Blake says:

'I heard in Lambeth's shades:

In Felpham I heard and saw the Visions of Albion:

I write in South Molton Street, what I both see and

hear,

In regions of Humanity, in London's opening streets.'

That the main part was written in Felpham is evident from

more than one letter to Butts. In a letter dated April 25, 1803,

Blake says: 'But none can know the spiritual acts of my three

years' slumber on the banks of ocean, unless he has seen them

in the spirit, or unless he should read my long poem descriptive

of those acts; for I have in these years composed an immense

number of verses on one grand theme, similar to Homer's _Iliad_

or Milton's _Paradise Lost_; the persons and machinery entirely

new to the inhabitants of earth (some of the persons excepted). I have

written the poems from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes

twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even

against my will. The time it has taken in writing was thus rendered

non-existent, and an immense poem exists which seems to be the

labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study. I mention

this to show you what I think the grand reason of my being brought

down here.' The poem is evidently _Jerusalem_, for the address

'To the Public' on the first page begins: 'After my three years' slumber

on the banks of the Ocean, I again display my Giant forms to the Public.'

In the next letter, dated July 6, Blake again refers to the poem: 'Thus I

hope that all our three years' trouble ends in good-luck at last, and

shall be forgot by my affections, and only remembered by my

understanding, to be a memento in time to come, and to speak

to future generations by a sublime allegory, which is now perfectly

completed into a grand poem. I may praise it, since I dare not pretend

to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in eternity. I

consider it as the grandest poem that this world contains. Allegory

addressed to the intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden

from the corporeal understanding, is my definition of the most

sublime poetry. It is somewhat in the same manner defined by Plato.

This poem shall, by divine assistance, be progressively printed and

ornamented with prints, and given to the public.'

This I take to mean that before Blake's return to London in

1803 the letterpress of _Jerusalem_ was, as he imagined,

completely finished, but that the printing and illustration were not

yet begun. The fact of this delay, and the fact that pages written after

1803 were inserted here and there, must not lead us to think, as many

writers on Blake have thought, that there could be any allusion in

_Jerusalem_ to the attacks of the _Examiner_ of 1808 and

1809, or that 'Hand,' one of the wicked sons of Albion, could possibly

be, as Rossetti desperately conjectured, 'a hieroglyph for Leigh Hunt.'

The sons of Albion are referred to on quite a third of the pages of

_Jerusalem_, from the earliest to the latest, and must have been

part of the whole texture of the poem from the beginning. In a passage

of the 'Public Address,' contained in the Rossetti MS., Blake says: 'The

manner in which my character has been blasted these thirty years,

both as an artist and as a man, may be seen particularly in a Sunday paper

called the _Examiner_, published in Beaufort's Buildings; the

manner in which I have rooted out the nest of villains will be seen

in a poem concerning my three years' Herculean labours at Felpham,

which I shall soon publish.' Even if this is meant for _Jerusalem_,

as it may well be, Blake is far from saying that he has referred in the

poem to these particular attacks: 'the nest of villains' has undoubtedly

a much broader meaning, and groups together all the attacks of thirty

years, public or private, of which the _Examiner_ is but quoted

as a recent example.

The chief reason for supposing that _Jerusalem_ may not

have been published till after the exhibition of 1809, is to be found in a

passage in the _Descriptive Catalogue_ which seems to summarize

the main subject of the poem, though it is quite possible that it may

refer to some MS. now lost. The picture of the Ancient Britons, says

Blake, represents three men who 'were originally one man who was

fourfold. He was self-divided, and his real humanity slain on the

stems of generation, and the form of the fourth was like the Son of

God. How he became divided is a subject of great sublimity and pathos.

The Artist has written it, under inspiration, and will, if God please,

publish it. It is voluminous, and contains the ancient history of Britain,

and the world of Satan and Adam.' 'All these things,' he has just said,

'are written in Eden.' And he says further: 'The British Antiquities are

now in the Artist's hands; all his visionary contemplations relating

to his own country and its ancient glory, when it was, as it again

shall be, the source of learning and inspiration.' 'Adam was a

Druid, and Noah.' In the description of his picture of the 'Last

Judgment' Blake indicates 'Albion, our ancestor, patriarch of

the Atlantic Continent, whose history preceded that of the Hebrews,

and in whose sleep, or chaos, creation began. The good woman is

Britannia, the wife of Albion. Jerusalem is their daughter.'

We see here the symbols, partly Jewish and partly British,

into which Blake had gradually resolved his mythology. 'The

persons and machinery,' he said, were 'entirely new to the inhabitants

of earth (some of the persons excepted).' This has been usually,

but needlessly, supposed to mean that real people are introduced

under disguises. Does it not rather mean, what would be strictly

true, that the 'machinery' is here of a kind wholly new to the Prophetic

Books, while of the 'persons' some have already been met with, others

are now seen for the first time? It is all, in his own words, 'allegory

addressed to the intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden

from the corporeal understanding,' and the allegory becomes harder

to read as it becomes more and more naked, concentrated, and

unexplained. _Milton_ seems to have arisen out of a symbol

which came visibly before Blake's eyes on his first waking in the

cottage at Felpham. 'Work will go on here with Godspeed,' he writes

to Butts. 'A roller and two harrows lie before my window. I met a

plough on my first going out at my gate the first morning after

my arrival, and the ploughboy said to the ploughman, "Father,

the gate is open."' At the beginning of his poem Blake writes:

'The Plow goes forth in tempests and lightnings and

the Harrow cruel

In blights of the east; the heavy Roller follows in

howlings;'

And the imagery returns at intervals, in the vision of 'the Last

Vintage,' the 'Great Harvest and Vintage of the Nations.' The personal

element comes in the continual references to the cottage at Felpham;

'He set me down in Felpham's Vale and prepared a

beautiful

Cottage for me that in three years I might write all

these Visions

To display Nature's cruel holiness: the deceits of

Natural Religion;'

And it is in the cottage near the sea that he sees the vision of

Milton, when he:

'Descended down a Paved work of all kinds of precious

stones

Out from the eastern sky; descending down into my

Cottage

Garden; clothed in black, severe and silent he

descended.'

He awakes from the vision to find his wife by his side:

'My bones trembled. I fell outstretched upon the

path

A moment, and my Soul returned into its mortal state

To Resurrection and Judgment in the Vegetable Body,

And my sweet Shadow of delight stood trembling by

my side.'

In the prayer to be saved from his friends ('Corporeal Friends

are Spiritual Enemies'), in the defense of wrath ('Go to thy labours

at the Mills and leave me to my wrath'), in the outburst:

'The idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination

And from laughter proceeds to murder by undervaluing

calumny,'

It is difficult not to see some trace or transposition of the kind,

evil counsellor Hayley, a 'Satan' of mild falsehood in the sight of Blake.

But the main aim of the book is the assertion of the supremacy of the

imagination:

'The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human

Existence itself,'

And the putting off of the 'filthy garments,' of 'Rational

Demonstration,' of 'Memory,' of 'Bacon, Locke, and Newton,' the

clothing of oneself in imagination,

'To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not

Inspiration,

That it shall no longer dare to mock with the aspersion

of Madness.

Cast on the Inspired by the tame high finisher of

paltry Blots,

Indefinite or paltry Rhymes; or paltry harmonies.'

It is because 'Everything in Eternity shines by its own Internal

light,' and that jealousy and cruelty and hypocrisy are all darkenings

of that light, that Blake declares his purpose of:

'Opening to every eye

These wonders of Satan's holiness showing to the

Earth

The Idol Virtues of the Natural Heart, and Satan's

Seat

Explore in all its Selfish Natural Virtue, and put off

In Self-annihilation all that is not of God alone.'

Such meanings as these flare out from time to time with individual

splendors of phrase, like 'Time is the mercy of Eternity,' and the great

poetic epigram, 'O Swedenborg! strongest of men, the Samson shorn

by the Churches' (where, for a moment, a line falls into the regular

rhythm of poetry), and around them are deserts and jungles, fragments

of myth broken off and flung before us after this fashion:

'But Bahab and Tirzah pervert

Their mild influences, therefore the Seven Eyes of

God walk round

The Three Heavens of Ulro, where Tirzah and her

Sisters

Weave the black Woof of Death upon Entuthon

Benython

In the Vale of Surrey where Horeb terminates in

Rephaim.'

In _Jerusalem_, which was to have been 'the grandest poem

which the world contains,' there is less of the exquisite lyrical work

which still decorates many corners of _Milton_, but it is

Blake's most serious attempt to set his myth in order, and it contains

much of his deepest wisdom, with astonishing flashes of beauty. In

_Milton_ there was still a certain approximation to verse, most

of the lines had at least a beginning and an end, but in _Jerusalem_,

although he tells us that 'every word and every letter is studied and put

into its place,' I am by no means sure that Blake ever intended the

lines, as he wrote them, to be taken as metrical lines, or read very

differently from the prose of the English Bible, with its pause in the

sense at the end of each verse. A vague line, hesitating between six

and seven beats, does indeed seem from time to time to emerge from

chaos, and inversions are brought in at times to accentuate a cadence

certainly intended, as here:

'Why should Punishment Weave the Veil with Iron

Wheels of War,

When Forgiveness might it Weave with Wings of

Cherubim?'

But read the whole book as if it were prose, following the sense

for its own sake, and you will find that the prose, when it is not

a mere catalogue, has generally a fine biblical roll and swing in it,

a rhythm of fine oratory; while if you read each line as if it were meant

to be a metrical unit you will come upon such difficulties as this:

'Such is the Forgiveness of the Gods, the Moral Virtues

of the'

That is one line, and the next adds 'Heathen.' There may seem

to be small reason for such an arrangement of the lines if we read

_Jerusalem_ in the useful printed text of Mr. Russell and Mr.

Maclagan; but the reason will be seen if we turn to the original

engraved page, where we shall see that Blake had set down in the

margin a lovely little bird with outstretched wings, and that the tip

of the bird's wing almost touches the last letter of the 'the' and leaves

no room for another word. That such a line was meant to be metrical

is unthinkable, as unthinkable as that:

'Los stood and stamped the earth, then he threw down

his hammer in rage &

In fury'

Has any reason for existing in this form beyond the mere chance

of a hand that writes until all the space of a given line is filled.

Working as he did within those limits of his hand's space, he

would accustom himself to write for the most part, and and especially

when his imagination was most vitally awake, in lines that came

roughly within those limits. Thus it will often happen that the most

beautiful passages will have the nearest resemblance to a regular

metrical scheme, as in such lines as these:

In vain: he is hurried afar into an unknown Night.

He bleeds in torrents of blood, as he rolls thro'

heaven above,

He chokes up the paths of the sky: the Moon is

leprous as snow:

Trembling and descending down, seeking to rest on

high Mona:

Scattering her leprous snow in flakes of disease over

Albion.

The Stars flee remote: the heaven is iron, the earth

is sulphur,

And all the mountains and hills shrink up like a

withering gourd.'

Here the prophet is no longer speaking with the voice of the

orator, but with the old, almost forgotten voice of the poet, and with

something of the despised 'Monotonous Cadence.'

Blake lived for twenty-three years after the date on the

title-page of _Jerusalem_, but, with the exception of the

two plates called _The Ghost of Abel_, engraved in 1822,

this vast and obscure encyclopaedia of unknown regions remains

his last gospel. He thought it his most direct message. Throughout

the Prophetic Books Blake has to be translated out of the unfamiliar

language into which he has tried to translate spiritual realities,

literally, as he apprehended them. Just as, in the designs which his

hand drew as best it could, according to its limited and partly false

knowledge, from the visions which his imagination saw with perfect

clearness, he was often unable to translate that vision into its real

equivalent in design, so in his attempts to put these other mental

visions into words he was hampered by an equally false method,

and often by reminiscences of what passed for 'picturesque' writing in

the work of his contemporaries. He was, after all, of his time, though

he was above it, and just as he only knew Michelangelo through bad

reproductions, and could never get his own design wholly free, malleable,

and virgin to his 'shaping spirit of imagination,' so, in spite of all his

marvelous lyrical discoveries, made when his mind was less burdened

by the weight of a controlling message, he found himself, when he

attempted to make an intelligible system out of the 'improvisations

of the spirit,' and to express that system with literal accuracy, the

half-helpless captive of formal words, conventional rhythms, a

language not drawn direct from its source. Thus we find, in the

Prophetic Books, neither achieved poems nor an achieved philosophy.

The philosophy has reached us only in splendid fragments (the

glimmering of stars out of separate corners of a dark sky), and we

shall never know to what extent these fragments were once parts

of a whole. Had they been ever really fused, this would have been the

only system of philosophy made entirely out of the raw material of

poetry. As it has come to us unachieved, the world has still to wait

for a philosophy untouched by the materialism of the prose

intelligence.

In the Prophetic Books Blake labours at the creation of a myth,

which may be figured as the representation in space of a vast

spiritual tragedy. It is the tragedy of Man, a tragedy in which the first

act is creation. Milton was content to begin with 'Man's first

disobedience,' but Blake would track the human soul back into chaos,

and beyond. He knows, like Krishna, in the _Bhagavad Gita_,

that 'above this visible nature there exists another, unseen and

eternal, which, when all created things perish, does not perish';

and he sees the soul's birth in that 'inward spiritual world,' from

which it falls to mortal life and the body, as into a death. He sees

its new, temporal life, hung round with fears and ambushes, out

of which, by a new death, the death of that mortal self which

separates it from eternity, it may reawaken, even in this life,

into the eternal life of imagination. The persons of the drama

are the powers and passions of Man, and the spiritual forces

which surround him, and are the 'states' through which he

passes. Man is seen, as Blake saw all things, fourfold: Man's

Humanity, his Spectre, who is Reason, his Emanation, who is

Imagination, his Shadow, who is Desire. And the states through

which Man passes, friendly or hostile, energies of good or of

evil, are also four: the Four Zoas, who are the Four Living

Creatures of Ezekiel, and are called Urizen, Luvah, Tharmas,

and Urthona (or, to mortals, Los). Each Zoa has his Emanation:

Ahania, who is the emanation of Intellect, and is named 'eternal

delight'; Vala, the emanation of Emotion, who is lovely deceit,

and the visible beauty of Nature; Enion, who is the emanation

of the Senses, and typifies the maternal instinct; Enitharmon,

who is the emanation of Intuition, and personifies spiritual beauty.

The drama is the division, death, and resurrection, in an eternal circle,

of the powers of man and of the powers in whose midst he fights

and struggles. Of this incommensurable action we are told only in

broken hints, as of a chorus crying outside doors where deeds are

being done in darkness. Images pass before us, make their gesture,

and are gone; the words spoken are ambiguous, and seem to have

an under meaning which it is essential for us to apprehend. We see

motions of building and of destruction, higher than the topmost

towers of the world, and deeper than the abyss of the sea; souls pass

through furnaces, and are remade by Time's hammer on the anvil of

space; there are obscure crucifixions, and Last Judgments return and

are re-enacted.

To Blake, the Prophetic Books were to be the new religious books

of a religion which was not indeed new, for it was the Everlasting

Gospel' of Jesus, but, because it had been seen anew by Swedenborg

and by Wesley and by 'the gentle souls who guide the great wine-press

of Love,' among whom was Teresa, seemed to require a new interpretation

to the imagination. Blake wrote when the eighteenth century was

coming to an end; he announced the new dispensation which was to

come, Swedenborg had said, with the year (which was the year of Blake's

birth) 1757. He looked forward steadfastly to the time when 'Sexes must

vanish and cease to be,' when 'all their crimes, their punishments, their

accusations of sin, all their jealousies, revenges, murders, hidings

of cruelty in deceit, appear only on the outward spheres of visionary

Space and Time, in the shadows of possibility by mutual forgiveness

for evermore, and in the vision and the prophecy, that we may foresee

and avoid the terrors of Creation and Redemption and Judgment.' He

spoke to literalists, rationalists, materialists; to an age whose very

infidels doubted only facts, and whose deists affirmed no more than

that man was naturally religious. The rationalist's denial of everything

beyond the evidence of his senses seemed to him a criminal blindness;

and he has engraved a separate sheet with images and statements of

the affirmation: 'There is no Natural Religion.' To Blake the literal

meaning of things seemed to be of less than no importance. To

worship the 'Goddess Nature' was to worship the 'God of this World,'

and so to be an atheist, as even Wordsworth seemed to him to be.

Religion was asleep, with Art and Literature in its arms: Blake's was

the voice of the awakening angel. What he cried was that only eternal

and invisible things were true, and that visible temporal things were

a veil and a delusion. In this he knew himself to be on the side of

Wesley and Whitefield, and that Voltaire and Rousseau, the voices of

the passing age, were against him. He called them 'frozen sons of the

feminine Tabernacle of Bacon, Newton, and Locke.' Wesley and

Whitefield he calls the 'two servants' of God, his 'two witnesses.'

But it seemed to him that he could go deeper into the Bible

than they, in their practical eagerness, had gone. 'What are

the treasures of Heaven,' he asked, 'that we are to lay up for

ourselves--are they any other than Mental Studies and Performances?'

'Is the Holy Ghost,' he asked, 'any other than an intellectual Fountain?'

It seemed to him that he could harmonise many things once held

to be discordant, and adjust the many varying interpretations of the

Bible and the other books of ancient religions by a universal

application of what had been taken in too personal a way. Hence

many of the puzzling 'correspondences' of English cities and the

tribe of Judah, of 'the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord.'

There is an outcry in _Jerusalem_: