← catalogue

William Blake: A Critical Essay

by Algernon Charles Swinburne · English · Gutenberg #35995 · 626,299 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of William Blake: A Critical Essay
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: William Blake: A Critical Essay

Author: Algernon Charles Swinburne


        
Release date: May 2, 2011 [eBook #35995]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35995

Credits: E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM BLAKE: A CRITICAL ESSAY ***


E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by
Internet Archive/American Libraries
(http://www.archive.org/details/americana)



Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
      file which includes the original illustrations.
      See 35995-h.htm or 35995-h.zip:
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/35995/pg35995-images.html)
      or
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35995/35995-h.zip)


      Images of the original pages are available through
      Internet Archive/American Libraries. See
      http://www.archive.org/details/williamblakecrit00swinrich


Transcriber's note:

      Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

      Superscripted characters are enclosed by curly brackets
      ({superscript}).





[Illustration]


WILLIAM BLAKE.

A Critical Essay.

by

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.


[Illustration: "_Going to and fro in the Earth._"]


With Illustrations from Blake's Designs in Facsimile,
_Coloured and Plain_.







London:
John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly.
1868.
[_All rights reserved._]




[Illustration: _WILLIAM BLAKE. A CRITICAL ESSAY._]




DEDICATION.

To WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI.


There are many reasons which should make me glad to inscribe your name
upon the forefront of this book. To you, among other debts, I owe this
one--that it is not even more inadequate to the matter undertaken; and to
you I need not say that it is not designed to supplant or to compete with
the excellent biography of Blake already existing. Rather it was intended
to serve as complement or supplement to this. How it grew, idly and
gradually, out of a mere review into its present shape and volume, you
know. To me at least the subject before long seemed too expansive for an
article; and in the leisure of months, and in the intervals of my natural
work, the first slight study became little by little an elaborate essay. I
found so much unsaid, so much unseen, that a question soon rose before me
of simple alternatives: to do nothing, or to do much. I chose the latter;
and you, who have done more than I to serve and to exalt the memory of
Blake, must know better how much remains undone.

Friendship needs no cement of reciprocal praise; and this book, dedicated
to you from the first, and owing to your guidance as much as to my
goodwill whatever it may have of worth, wants no extraneous allusion to
explain why it should rather be inscribed with your name than with
another. Nevertheless, I will say that now of all times it gives me
pleasure to offer you such a token of friendship as I have at hand to
give. I can but bring you brass for the gold you send me; but between
equals and friends there can be no question of barter. Like Diomed, I take
what I am given and offer what I have. Such as it is, I know you will
accept it with more allowance than it deserves; but one thing you will not
overrate--the affectionate admiration, the grateful remembrance, which
needs no public expression on the part of your friend

A. C. SWINBURNE.

_November, 1866._




CONTENTS.


                                PAGE

    I.--LIFE AND DESIGNS           1

   II.--LYRICAL POEMS             85

  III.--THE PROPHETIC BOOKS      185




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

[In justice to the fac-similist who has so faithfully copied the following
designs from Blake's works, the publisher would state they were made under
somewhat difficult circumstances, the British Museum authorities not
permitting tracing from the copies in their possession. In every case the
exact peculiarities of the originals have been preserved. The colouring
has been done by hand from the designs, tinted by the artist, and the
three illustrations from "Jerusalem" have been reduced from the original
in folio to octavo. The paper on which the fac-similes are given has been
expressly made to resemble that used by Blake.]


FRONTISPIECE. Gateway with eclipse. A reduction of plate 70; from
"JERUSALEM."

TITLE-PAGE. A design of borders, selected from those in "JERUSALEM"
(plates 5, 19, &c.), with minor details from "MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND
HELL," and "BOOK OF THEL."

P. 200. Title from "THE BOOK OF THEL."

P. 204. Title from "MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL."

P. 208. Plate 8, from the SAME (selected to show the artist's peculiar
method of blending text with minute design).

P. 224. The Leviathan. From "MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL."

P. 258. From "MILTON." Male figures; one in flames.

P. 276. Female figures. A reduction of Plate 81 from "JERUSALEM."

P. 282. Design with bat-like figure. A reduction of Plate 33 from
"JERUSALEM."




LIST OF AUTHORITIES.


1. LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. By Alexander Gilchrist. 1863.

2. POETICAL SKETCHES. By W. B. 1783.

3. SONGS OF INNOCENCE. 1789.

4. THE BOOK OF THEL. 1789.

5. THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL. 1790.

6. VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION. 1793.

7. AMERICA: A PROPHECY. 1793.

8. SONGS OF EXPERIENCE. 1794.

9. EUROPE: A PROPHECY. 1794.

10. THE FIRST BOOK OF URIZEN. 1794.

11. THE BOOK OF AHANIA. 1795.

12. THE SONG OF LOS. 1795.

13. MILTON: A POEM IN TWO BOOKS. 1804.

14. JERUSALEM, AN EMANATION OF THE GIANT ALBION. 1804.

15. IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL. (MS.)

16. TIRIEL. (MS.)




WILLIAM BLAKE.

Tous les grands poetes deviennent naturellement, fatalement, critiques. Je
plains les poetes que guide le seul instinct; je les crois incomplets.
Dans la vie spirituelle des premiers, une crise se fait infailliblement,
ou ils veulent raisonner leur art, decouvrir les lois obscures en vertu
desquelles ils ont produit, et tirer de cette etude une serie de preceptes
dont le but divin est l'infaillibilite dans la production poetique. Il
serait prodigieux qu'un critique devint poete, et il est impossible qu'un
poete ne contienne pas un critique.--CHARLES BAUDELAIRE.


I.--LIFE AND DESIGNS.

In the year 1827, there died, after a long dim life of labour, a man as
worthy of remark and regret as any then famous. In his time he had little
enough of recognition or regard from the world; and now that here and
there one man and another begin to observe that after all this one was
perhaps better worth notice and honour than most, the justice comes as
usual somewhat late.

Between 1757 and 1827 the world, one might have thought, had time to grow
aware whether or not a man were worth something. For so long there lived
and laboured in more ways than one the single Englishman of supreme and
simple poetic genius born before the closing years of the eighteenth
century; the one man of that date fit on all accounts to rank with the old
great names. A man perfect in his way, and beautifully unfit for walking
in the way of any other man. We have now the means of seeing what he was
like as to face in the late years of his life: for his biography has at
the head of it a clearly faithful and valuable likeness. The face is
singular, one that strikes at a first sight and grows upon the observer; a
brilliant eager, old face, keen and gentle, with a preponderance of brow
and head; clear bird-like eyes, eloquent excitable mouth, with a look of
nervous and fluent power; the whole lighted through as it were from behind
with a strange and pure kind of smile, touched too with something of an
impatient prospective rapture. The words clear and sweet seem the best
made for it; it has something of fire in its composition, and something of
music. If there is a want of balance, there is abundance of melody in the
features; melody rather than harmony; for the mould of some is weaker and
the look of them vaguer than that of others. Thought and time have played
with it, and have nowhere pressed hard; it has the old devotion and desire
with which men set to their work at starting. It is not the face of a man
who could ever be cured of illusions; here all the medicines of reason and
experience must have been spent in pure waste. We know also what sort of
man he was at this time by the evidence of living friends. No one, artist
or poet, of whatever school, who had any insight or any love of things
noble and lovable, ever passed by this man without taking away some
pleasant and exalted memory of him. Those with whom he had nothing in
common but a clear kind nature and sense of what was sympathetic in men
and acceptable in things--those men whose work lay quite apart from
his--speak of him still with as ready affection and as full remembrance
of his sweet or great qualities as those nearest and likest him. There was
a noble attraction in him which came home to all people with any fervour
or candour of nature in themselves. One can see, by the roughest draught
or slightest glimpse of his face, the look and manner it must have put on
towards children. He was about the hardest worker of his time; must have
done in his day some horseloads of work. One might almost pity the poor
age and the poor men he came among for having such a fiery energy cast
unawares into the midst of their small customs and competitions. Unluckily
for them, their new prophet had not one point they could lay hold of, not
one organ or channel of expression by which to make himself comprehensible
to such as they were. Shelley in his time gave enough of perplexity and
offence; but even he, mysterious and rebellious as he seemed to most men,
was less made up of mist and fire than Blake.

He was born and baptized into the church of rebels; we can hardly imagine
a time or scheme of things in which he could have lived and worked without
some interval of revolt. All that was accepted for art, all that was taken
for poetry, he rejected as barren symbols, and would fain have broken up
as mendacious idols. What was best to other men, and in effect excellent
of its kind, was to him worst. Reynolds and Rubens were daubers and
devils. The complement or corollary of this habit of mind was that he
would accept and admire even small and imperfect men whose line of life
and action seemed to run on the same tramway as his own. Barry, Fuseli,
even such as Mortimer--these were men he would allow and approve of. The
devils had not entered into them; they worked, each to himself, on the
same ground as Michael Angelo. To such effect he would at times prophesy,
standing revealed for a brief glimpse on the cloudy and tottering height
of his theories, before the incurious eyes of a public which had no mind
to inhale such oracular vapour. It is hard to conjecture how his opinions,
as given forth in his _Catalogue_ or other notes on art, would have been
received--if indeed they had ever got hearing at all. This they naturally
never did; by no means to Blake's discouragement. He spoke with authority;
not in the least like the Scribes of his day.

So far one may at least see what he meant; although at sight of it many
would cover their eyes and turn away. But the main part of him was, and is
yet, simply inexplicable; much like some among his own designs, a maze of
cloudy colour and perverse form, without a clue for the hand or a feature
for the eye to lay hold of. What he meant, what he wanted, why he did this
thing or not that other, no man then alive could make out. Nevertheless it
was worth the trying. In a time of critical reason and definite division,
he was possessed by a fervour and fury of belief; among sane men who had
disproved most things and proved the rest, here was an evident madman who
believed a thing, one may say, only insomuch as it was incapable of proof.
He lived and worked out of all rule, and yet by law. He had a devil, and
its name was Faith. No materialist has such belief in bread and meat as
Blake had in the substance underlying appearance which he christened god
or spectre, devil or angel, as the fit took him; or rather as he saw it
from one or the other side. His faith was absolute and hard, like a pure
fanatic's; there was no speculation in him. What could be made of such a
man in a country fed and clothed with the teapot pieties of Cowper and the
tape-yard infidelities of Paine? Neither set would have to do with him;
was he not a believer? and was he not a blasphemer? His licence of thought
and talk was always of the maddest, or seemed so in the ears of his
generation. People remember at this day with horror and pity the
impression of his daring ways of speech, but excuse him still on the old
plea of madness. Now on his own ground no man was ever more sane or more
reverent. His outcries on various matters of art or morals were in effect
the mere expression, not of reasonable dissent, but of violent belief. No
artist of equal power had ever a keener and deeper regard for the meaning
and teaching--what one may call the moral--of art. He sang and painted as
men write or preach. Indifference was impossible to him. Thus every shred
of his work has some life, some blood, infused or woven into it. In such a
vast tumbling chaos of relics as he left behind to get in time
disentangled and cast into shape, there are naturally inequalities enough;
rough sides and loose sides, weak points and helpless knots, before which
all mere human patience or comprehension recoils and reels back. But in
all, at all times, there is the one invaluable quality of actual life.

Without study of a serious kind, it is hopeless for any man to get at the
kernel of Blake's life and work. Nothing can make the way clear and smooth
to those who are not at once drawn into it by a sincere instinct of
sympathy. This cannot be done; but what can be done has been thoroughly
and effectually well done in this present biography.[1] A trained skill,
an exquisite admiration, an almost incomparable capacity of research and
care in putting to use the results of such long and refined labour, no
reader can fail to appreciate as the chief gifts of the author: one who
evidently had at once the power of work and the sense of selection in
perfect order. The loss of so admirable a critic, so wise and altogether
competent a workman, is a loss to be regretted till it can be replaced--a
date we are not likely to see in our days. At least his work is in no
danger of following him. This good that he did is likely to live after
him; no part of it likely to be interred in his grave. For the book,
unfinished, was yet not incomplete, when the writer's work was broken
short off. All or nearly all the biographical part had been ably carried
through to a good end. It remained for other hands to do the editing; to
piece together the loose notes left, and to supply all that was requisite
or graceful in the way of remark or explanation. With what excellent care
and taste this has been done, no one can miss of seeing. Of the critical
and editorial part there will be time to speak further in its own place.
All, in effect, which could be done for a book thus left suddenly and
sadly to itself, has been done as well as possible; no tenderness of
labour grudged, no power and skill spared to supply or sustain it. So that
we now have it in a fair and sufficient form, and can look with reasonable
hope for this first critical Life of Blake and selected edition of his
Works to make its way and hold its place among the precious records and
possessions of Englishmen.

What has been once well done need not be tried at again and done worse. No
second writer need now recapitulate the less significant details of
Blake's life: space and skill wanting, we can but refer readers to the
complete biography. That the great poet and artist was a hosier's son,[2]
born near Golden Square, put to school in the Strand to learn drawing at
ten of one Pars, apprenticed at fourteen to learn engraving of one Basire;
that he lived "smoothly enough" for two years, and was then set to work on
abbey monuments, "to be out of harm's way," other apprentices being
"disorderly," "mutinous," and given to "wrangling;" these facts and more,
all of value and weight in their way, Mr. Gilchrist has given at full in
his second and third chapters, adding just enough critical comment to set
the facts off and give them their proper relief and significance. His
labours among Gothic monuments, and the especial style of his training as
an engraver, left their marks on the man afterwards. Two things here put
on record are worthy of recollection: that he began seeing visions at
"eight or ten;" and that he took objections to Ryland (a better known
engraver than Basire), when taken to be apprenticed to him, on a singular
ground: "the man's face looks as if he will live to be hanged:" which the
man was, ten years later. But the first real point in Blake's life worth
marking as of especial interest is the publication of his _Poetical
Sketches_; which come in date before any of his paintings or illustrative
work, and are quite as much matters of art as these. Though never printed
till 1783, the latest written appears to belong to 1777, or thereabouts.

Here, at a time when the very notion of poetry, as we now understand it,
and as it was understood in older times, had totally died and decayed out
of the minds of men; when we not only had no poetry, a thing which was
bearable, but had verse in plenty, a thing which was not in the least
bearable; a man, hardly twenty years old yet, turns up suddenly with work
in that line already done, not simply better than any man could do then;
better than all except the greatest have done since: better too than some
still ranked among the greatest ever managed to do. With such a poet to
bring forward it was needless to fall back upon Wordsworth for excuse or
Southey for patronage. The one man of genius alive during any part of
Blake's own life who has ever spoken of this poet with anything like a
rational admiration is Charles Lamb, the most supremely competent judge
and exquisite critic of lyrical and dramatic art that we have ever had.
All other extant notices down to our own day, even when well-meaning and
not offensive, are to the best of our knowledge and belief utterly futile,
incapable and valueless: burdened more or less with chatter about
"madness" and such-like, obscured in some degree by mere dullness and
pitiable assumption.

There is something too rough and hard, too faint and formless, in any
critical language yet devised, to pay tribute with the proper grace and
sufficiency to the best works of the lyrical art. One can say, indeed,
that some of these earliest songs of Blake's have the scent and sound of
Elizabethan times upon them; that the song of forsaken love--"My silks and
fine array"--is sweet enough to recall the lyrics of Beaumont and
Fletcher, and strong enough to hold its own even beside such as that one
of Aspatia--"Lay a garland on my hearse"--which was cut (so to speak) out
of the same yew; that Webster might have signed the "Mad Song," which
falls short only (as indeed do all other things of the sort) of the two
great Dirges in that poet's two chief plays; that certain verses among
those headed "To Spring," and "To the Evening Star," are worthy even of
Tennyson for tender supremacy of style and noble purity of perfection; but
when we have to drop comparison and cease looking back or forward for
verses to match with these, we shall hardly find words to suit our sense
of their beauty. We speak of the best among them only; for, small as the
pamphlet is (seventy pages long, with title-page and prefatory leaf), it
contains a good deal of chaff and bran besides the pure grain and sifted
honeymeal. But these best things are as wonderful as any work of Blake's.
They have a fragrance of sound, a melody of colour, in a time when the
best verses produced had merely the arid perfume of powder, the twang of
dry wood and adjusted strings; when here the painting was laid on in
patches, and there the music meted out by precedent; colour and sound
never mixed together into the perfect scheme of poetry. The texture of
these songs has the softness of flowers; the touch of them has nothing
metallic or mechanical, such as one feels in much excellent and elaborate
verse of this day as well as of that. The sound of many verses of Blake's
cleaves to the sense long after conscious thought of the meaning has
passed from one: a sound like running of water or ringing of bells in a
long lull of the wind. Like all very good lyrical verse, they grow in
pleasurable effect upon the memory the longer it holds them--increase in
relish the longer they dwell upon the taste. These, for example, sound
singularly plain, however sweet, on a first hearing; but in time, to a
reader fit to appreciate the peculiar properties and merits of a lyric,
they come to seem as perfect as well can be:

  "Thou the golden fruit dost bear,
  I am clad in flowers fair;
  Thy sweet boughs perfume the air,
  And the turtle buildeth there.
  There she sits and feeds her young:
  Sweet I hear her mournful song;
  And thy lovely leaves among,
  There is love, I hear his tongue."

The two songs "To Memory," and "To the Muses" are perhaps nearer being
faultless than any others in the book. This last especially should never
be omitted in any professedly complete selection of the best English
lyrics. So beautiful indeed is its structure and choice of language that
its author's earlier and later vagaries and erratic indulgences in the
most lax or bombastic habits of speech become hopelessly inexplicable.
These unlucky tendencies do however break out in the same book which
contains such excellent samples of poetical sense and taste; giving
terrible promise of faults that were afterwards to grow rank and run riot
over much of the poet's work. But even from his worst things here, not
reprinted in the present edition, one may gather such lines as these:

  "My lord was like a flower upon the brows
  Of lusty May: ah life as frail as flower!
  My lord was like a star in highest heaven,
  Drawn down to earth by spells and wickedness;
  My lord was like the opening eye of day;
  But he is darkened; like the summer moon
  Clouded; fall'n like the stately tree, cut down:
  The breath of heaven dwelt among his leaves."

Verses not to be despised, when one remembers that the boy who wrote them
(evidently in his earlier teens) was living in full eighteenth century.
But for the most part the blank verse in this small book is in a state of
incredible chaos, ominous in tone of the future "Prophetic Books," if
without promise of their singular and profound power or menace of their
impenetrable mistiness, the obscurity of confused wind and cloud. One is
thankful to see here some pains taken in righting these deformed limbs and
planing off those monstrous knots, by one not less qualified to decide on
such minor points of execution than on the gravest matters of art;
especially as some amongst these blank verse poems contain things of quite
original and incomparable grandeur. Nothing at once more noble and more
sweet in style was ever written, than part of this "To the Evening Star":

  "Smile on our loves; and while thou drawest round
  The sky's blue curtains, scatter silver dew
  On every flower that closes its sweet eyes
  In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on
  The lake: _speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
  And wash the dusk with silver_."

The two lines, or half lines, which make the glory of this extract
resemble perfectly, for vigorous grace and that subtle strength of
interpretation which transfigures the external nature it explains, the
living leader of English poets. Even he has hardly ever given a study of
landscape more large and delicate, an effect of verse more exquisite and
sonorous. Of the "Spring" we have already said something; but for that
poem nothing short of transcription would be adequate. The "Autumn," too,
should hardly have been rejected: it contains lines of perfect power and
great beauty, though not quite up to the mark of "Spring" or "Summer."
From another poem, certainly not worthier of the place it has been
refused, we have extracted two lines worth remembering for their terseness
and weight of scorn, recalling certain grave touches of satire in Blake's
later work:

  "For ignorance is folly's leasing nurse,
  And love of folly needs none other's curse."

All that is worth recollection in the little play of "Edward the Third"
has been here reproduced with a judicious care in adjusting and rejecting.
Blake had probably never seen the praiseworthy but somewhat verbose
historical drama on the same subject, generously bestowed upon Shakespeare
by critics of that German acuteness which can accept as poetry the most
meritorious powers of rhetoric. His own disjointed and stumbling fragment,
deficient as it is in shape or plan or local colour, has far more of the
sound and savour of Shakespeare's style in detached lines: more indeed
than has ever been caught up by any poet except one to whom his editor has
seized the chance of paying tribute in passing--the author of "Joseph and
his Brethren;" a poem which, for strength of manner and freshness of
treatment, may certainly recall Blake or any other obscurely original
reformer in art; although we may not admit the resemblance claimed for it
on spiritual grounds to the works of Blake, in whose eyes the views taken
by the later poet of the mysteries inherent in matters of faith or
morality, and generally of the spiritual side of things, would, to our
thinking, probably have appeared shallow and untrue by the side of his own
mystic personal creed. In dramatic passion, in dramatic character, and in
dramatic language, Mr. Wells' great play is no doubt far ahead, not of
Blake's work only, but of most other men's: in actual conception of things
that lie beyond these, it keeps within the range of common thought and
accepted theory; falling therefore far short, in its somewhat over
frequent passages of didactic and religious reflection, of much less
original thinkers than Blake.

One other thing we may observe of these "Sketches;" that they contain,
though only in the pieces rejected from our present collection, sad
indications of the inexplicable influence which an early reading of the
detestable pseudo-Ossian seems to have exercised on Blake. How or why such
lank and lamentable counterfeits of the poetical style did ever gain this
luckless influence--one, too, which in after years was to do far worse
harm than it has done here--it is not easy to guess. Contemporary vice of
taste, imperfect or on some points totally deficient education, may
explain much and more than might be supposed, even with regard to the
strongest untrained intellect; but on the other hand, the songs in this
same volume give evidence of so rare a gift of poetical judgment, such
exquisite natural sense and art, in a time which could not so much as
blunder except by precedent and machinery, that such depravity of error as
is implied by admiration and imitation of such an one as Macpherson
remains inconceivable. Similar puzzles will, however, recur to the student
of Blake's art; but will not, if he be in any way worthy of the study, be
permitted for a minute to impair his sense of its incomparable merits.
Incomparable, we say advisedly: for there is no case on record of a man's
being quite so far in advance of his time, in everything that belongs to
the imaginative side of art, as Blake was from the first in advance of
his.

In 1782 Blake married, it seems after a year or two of engaged life. His
wife Catherine Boucher deserves remembrance as about the most perfect wife
on record. In all things but affection, her husband must have been as hard
to live with as the most erratic artist or poet who ever mistook his way
into marriage. Over the stormy or slippery passages in their earlier life
Mr. Gilchrist has passed perhaps too lightly. No doubt Blake's aberrations
were mainly matters of speech or writing; it is however said, truly or
falsely, that once in a patriarchal mood he did propose to add a second
wife to their small and shifting household, and was much perplexed at
meeting on one hand with tears and on all hands with remonstrances. For
any clandestine excursions or furtive eccentricities he had probably too
much of childish candour and impulse; and this one hopeful and plausible
design he seems to have sacrificed with a good grace, on finding it
really objectionable to the run of erring men. As to the rest, Mrs.
Blake's belief in him was full and profound enough to endure some amount
of trial. Practically he was always, as far as we know, regular,
laborious, immaculate to an exception; and in their old age she worked
after him and for him, revered and helped and obeyed him, with an
exquisite goodness.

For the next eighteen years we have no continuous or available record
under Blake's own hand of his manner of life; and of course must not
expect as yet any help from those who can still, or could lately, remember
the man himself in later days. He laboured with passionate steadiness of
energy, at work sometimes valueless and sometimes invaluable; made,
retained, and lost friends of a varying quality. Even to the lamentable
taskwork of bad comic engravings for dead and putrescent "Wit's Magazines"
his biographer has tracked him and taken note of his doings. The one thing
he did get published--his poem, or apology for a poem, called "The French
Revolution" (the first of seven projected books)--is, as far as I know,
the only original work of its author worth little or even nothing;
consisting mainly of mere wind and splutter. The six other books, if
extant, ought nevertheless to be looked up, as they can hardly be without
some personal interest or empirical value, even if no better in
workmanship than this first book. During these years however he produced
much of his greatest work; among other things, the "Songs of Innocence and
Experience," and the prophetic books from "Thel" to "Ahania;" of all which
we shall have to speak in due time and order. The notes on Reynolds and
Lavater, from which we have here many extracts given, we must hope to see
some day printed in full. Their vivid and vigorous style is often a model
in its kind; and the matter, however violent and eccentric at times,
always clear, noble, and thoughtful; remarkable especially for the
eagerness of approbation lavished on the meanest of impulsive or fanciful
men, and the fervour of scorn excited by the best works and the best
intentions of others. The watery wisdom and the bland absurdity of
Lavater's axioms meet with singular tolerance from the future author of
the "Proverbs of Hell;" the considerate regulations and suggestions of
Reynolds' "Discourses" meet with no tolerance at all from the future
illustrator of Job and Dante. In all these rough notes, even we may say in
those on Bacon's Essays, there is always a bushel of good grain to an
ounce of chaff. What is erroneous or what seems perverse lies for the most
part only on the surface; what is falsely applied is often truly said;
what is unjustly worded is often justly conceived. A man insensible to the
perfect manner and noble matter of Bacon, while tolerant of the lisping
and slavering imbecilities of Lavater, seems at first sight past hope or
help; but subtract the names or alter the symbols given, and much of
Blake's commentary will seem, as it is, partially true and memorable even
in its actual form, wholly true and memorable in its implied meaning.
Again, partly through ingrained humour, partly through the rough shifts of
his imperfect and tentative education, Blake was much given to a certain
perverse and defiant habit of expression, meant rather to scare and offend
than to allure and attract the common run of readers or critics. In his
old age we hear that he would at times try the ironic method upon
objectionable reasoners; not, we should imagine, with much dexterity or
subtlety.

The small accidents and obscure fluctuations of luck during these eighteen
years of laborious town life, the changes of residence and acquaintance,
the method and result of the day's work done, have been traced with much
care and exhibited in a direct distinct manner by the biographer. Nothing
can be more clear and sufficient than the brief notices of Blake's
favourite brother and pupil, in character seemingly a weaker and somewhat
violent _replica_ of his elder, not without noble and amiable qualities;
of his relations with Fuseli and Flaxman, with Johnson the bookseller, and
others, whose names are now fished up from the quiet comfort of obscurity,
and made more or less memorable for good or evil through their connection
with one who was then himself among the obscurest of men. His alliance
with Paine and the ultra-democrats then working or talking in London is
the most curious episode of these years. His republican passion was like
Shelley's, a matter of fierce dogmatic faith and rapid assumption. Looking
at any sketch of his head and face one may see the truth of his assertion
that he was born a democrat of the imaginative type. The faith which
accepts and the passion which pursues an idea of justice not wholly
attainable looks out of the tender and restless eyes, moulds the eager
mobile-seeming lips. Infinite impatience, 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. We need
no evidence to bid us believe with what fervour of spirit and singleness
of emotion he loved the name and followed the likeness of freedom,
whatever new name or changed likeness men might put upon her. Liberty and
religion, taken in a large and subtle sense of the words, were alike
credible and adorable to him; and in nothing else could he find matter for
belief or worship. His forehead, largest (as he said) just over the eyes,
shows an eager steadiness of passionate expression. Shut off any single
feature, and it will seem singular how little the face changes or loses by
the exclusion. With all this, it is curious to read how the author of
"Urizen" and "Ahania" saved from probable hanging the author of the
"Rights of Man" and "Age of Reason." Blake had as perfect a gift of ready
and steady courage as any man: was not quicker to catch fire than he was
safe to stand his ground. The swift quiet resolution and fearless instant
sense of the right thing to do which he showed at all times of need are
worth notice in a man of such fine and nervous habit of mind and body.

In the year after Paine's escape from England, his deliverer published a
book which would probably have been something of a chokepear for the
_conventionnel_. This set of seventeen drawings was Blake's first series
of original designs, not meant to serve as merely illustrative work. Two
of the prophetic books, and the "Songs of Innocence," had already been
engraved; but there the designs were supplementary to the text; here such
text as there was served only to set out the designs; and even these
"Keys" to the "Gates of Paradise," somewhat of the rustiest as they are,
were not supplied in every copy. The book is itself not unavailable as a
key to much of Blake's fitful and tempestuous philosophy; and it would
have been better to re-engrave the series in full than to give random
selections twisted out of their places and made less intelligible than
they were at first by the headlong process of inversion and convulsion to
which they have here been subjected.

The frontispiece gives a symbol of man's birth into the fleshly and
mutable house of life, powerless and painless as yet, but encircled by the
likeness and oppressed by the mystery of material existence. The
pre-existent spirit here well-nigh disappears under stifling folds of
vegetable leaf and animal incrustation of overgrowing husk. It lies dumb
and dull, almost as a thing itself begotten of the perishable body,
conceived in bondage and brought forth with grief. The curled and clinging
caterpillar, emblem of motherhood, adheres and impends over it, as the
lapping leaves of flesh unclose and release the human fruit of corporeal
generation. With mysterious travail and anguish of mysterious division,
the child is born as a thing out of sleep; the original perfect manhood
being cast in effect into a heavy slumber, and the female or reflective
element called into creation. This tenet recurs constantly in the
turbulent and fluctuating evangel of Blake; that the feminine element
exists by itself for a time only, and as the shadow of the male; thus
Space is the wife of Time, and was created of him in the beginning that
the things of lower life might have air to breathe and a place to hide
their heads; her moral aspect is Pity. She suffers through the lapse of
obscure and painful centuries with the sufferings of her children; she is
oppressed with all their oppressions; she is plagued with all the plagues
of transient life and inevitable death. At sight of her so brought forth,
a wonder in heaven, all the most ancient gods or daemons of pre-material
life were terrified and amazed, touched with awe and softened with
passion; yet endured not to look upon her, a thing alien from the things
of their eternal life; for as space is impredicable of the divine world,
so is pity impredicable of the daemonic nature. (See the "First Book of
Urizen.") For of all the minor immortal and uncreated spirits Time only is
the friend of man; and for man's sake has given him Space to dwell in, as
under the shadow and within the arms of a great compassionate mother, who
has mercy upon all her children, tenderness for all good and evil things.
Only through his help and through her pity can flesh or spirit endure life
for a little, under the iron law of the maker and the oppressor of man.
Alone among the other co-equal and co-eternal daemons of his race, the
Creator is brought into contact and collision with Space and Time; against
him alone they struggle in Promethean agony of conflict to deliver the
children of men; and against them is the Creator compelled to fight, that
he may reach and oppress those whose weakness is defended by all the
warring hands of Time, sheltered by all the gracious wings of Space.

In the first plate of the "Gates of Paradise," the woman finds the child
under a tree, sprung of the earth like a mandrake, which he who plucks up
and hears groan must go mad or die; grown under the tree of physical life,
which is rooted in death, and the leaf of it is poisonous, and it bears
as fruit the wisdom of the serpent, moral reason or rational truth, which
invents the names of virtue and vice, and divides moral life into good and
evil. Out of earth is rent violently forth the child of dust and clay,
naked, wide-eyed, shrieking; the woman bends down to gather him as a
flower, half blind with fierce surprise and eagerness, half smiling with
foolish love and pitiful pleasure; with one hand she holds other children,
small and new-blown also as flowers, huddled in the lap of her garment;
with the other she plucks him up by the hair, regardless of his deadly
shriek and convulsed arms, heedless that this uprooting of the mandrake is
the seal of her own death also. Then follow symbols of the four created
elements from which the corporeal man is made; the water, blind and
mutable as doting age, emblem of ignorant doubt and moral jealousy; the
heavy melancholy earth, grievous to life, oppressive of the spirit, type
of all sorrows and tyrannies that are brought forth upon it, saddest of
all the elements, tightest as a curb and painfullest as a load upon the
soul: then the air wherein man is naked, the fire wherein man is blind;
ashamed and afraid of his own nature and its nakedness, surrounded with
similitudes of severance and strife: overhung by rocks, rained upon by all
the storms of heaven, lighted by unfriendly stars, with clouds spread
under him and over; "a dark hermaphrodite," enlightened by the light
within him, which is darkness--the light of reason and morality; evil and
good, who was neither good nor evil in the eternal life before this
generated existence; male and female, who from of old was neither female
nor male, but perfect man without division of flesh, until the setting of
sex against sex by the malignity of animal creation. Round the new-created
man revolves the flaming sword of Law, burning and dividing in the hand of
the angel, servant of the cruelty of God, who drives into exile and debars
from paradise the fallen spiritual man upon earth. Round the woman (a
double type perhaps at once of the female nature and the "rational truth"
or law of good and evil) roar and freeze the winds and snows of
prohibition, blinding, congealing, confusing; and in that tempest of
things spiritual the shell of material things hardens and thickens,
excluding all divine vision and obscuring all final truth with
solid-seeming walls of separation. But death in the end shall enlighten
all the deluded, shall deliver all the imprisoned; there, though the worm
weaves, the Saviour also watches; the new garments of male and female to
be there assumed by the spirit are so woven that they shall no longer be
as shrouds or swaddling-clothes to hamper the newly born or consume the
newly dead, but free raiment and fair symbol of the spirit. For the power
of the creative daemon, which began with birth, must end with death; upon
the perfect and eternal man he had not power till he had created the
earthly life to bring man into subjection; and shall not have power upon
him again any more when he is once resumed by death. Where the Creator's
power ends, there begins the Saviour's power; where oppression loses
strength to divide, mercy gains strength to reunite. For the Creator is at
most God of this world only, and belongs to the life which he creates; the
God of this world is a thing of this world, but the Saviour or perfect man
is of eternity, belonging to the spiritual life which was before birth
and shall be after death.

In these first six plates is the kernel of the book; round these the
subsequent symbols revolve, and toward these converge. The seventh we may
assume to be an emblem of desire as it is upon earth, blind and wild, glad
and sad, destroying the pleasures it catches hold of, losing those it lets
go. One Love, a moth-like spirit, lies crushed at the feet of the boy who
pursues another, flinging his cap towards it as though to trap a
butterfly; startled with the laugh of triumphant capture even at his lips,
as the wingless flying thing eludes him and soars beyond the enclosure of
summer leaves and stems toward upper air and cloud. To the original sketch
was appended this quotation from Spenser, Book 2, Canto 2, v. 2:

  "Ah luckless babe, born under cruel star,
  And in dead parents' baleful ashes bred;
  Full little weenest thou what sorrows are
  Left thee for portion of thy livelyhed."

Again, Youth, with the bow of battle lifted in his right hand, turns his
back upon Age, and leaves him lamenting in vain remonstrance and piteous
reclamation: the fruit of vain-glory and vain teaching, ending in
rebellion and division of spirit, when the beliefs and doctrines of a man
turn against him and he becomes at variance with himself and with his own
issue of body or of soul. In the ninth plate, men strive to set a ladder
against the moon and climb by it through the deepest darkness of night; a
white segment of narrow light just shows the sharp tongue of precipitous
land upon which they are gathered together in vain counsel and effort.
This was originally a satirical sketch of "amateurs and connoisseurs,"
emblematic merely of their way of studying art, analyzing all great things
done with ready rule and line, and scaling with ladders of logic the
heaven of invention; here it reappears enlarged and exalted into a general
type of blind belief and presumptuous reason, indicative also of the
helpless hunger after spiritual things ingrained in those made subject to
things material; the effusion and eluctation of spirits sitting in prison
towards the truth which should make them free. In the tenth plate, the
half-submerged face and outstretched arm of a man drowning in a trough of
tumbling sea show just above the foam, against the glaring and windy
clouds whose blown drift excludes the sky. Perhaps the noble study of sea
registered in the Catalogue as No. 128 of the second list was a sketch for
this design of man sinking under the waves of time. Of the two this sketch
is the finer; a greater effect of tempest was never given by the work of
any hand than in this weltering and savage space of sea, with the aimless
clash of its breakers and blind turbulence of water veined and wrinkled
with storm, enridged and cloven into drifting array of battle, with no
lesser life visible upon it of man or vessel, fish or gull: no land beyond
it conceivable, no heaven above it credible. This drawing, which has been
reproduced by photography, might have found a place here or later in the
book. In the eleventh plate, emblematic of religious restraint and the
severities of artificial holiness, an old man, spectacled and
strait-mouthed, clips with his shears the plumes of a winged boy, who
writhes vainly in a passionate attempt at self-release, his arm hiding
his face, his lithe slight limbs twisting with pain and fear, his curled
head bent upon the curve of his elbow, his hand straining the air with
empty violence of barren agony; a sun half risen lights up the expansion
of his half-shorn wings and the helpless labour of his slender body. The
twelfth plate continues this allegory under the type of father and sons,
the vital energy and its desires or passions, thrust down into
prison-houses of ice and snow. Next, man as he is upon earth attains for
once to the vision of that which he was and shall be; his eyes open upon
the sight of life beyond the mundane and mortal elements, and the chains
of reason and religion relax. In the evening he travels towards the grave;
a figure stepping out swiftly and steadily, staff in hand, over rough
country ground and beside low thick bushes and underwood, dressed as a man
of Blake's day; a touch of realism curious in the midst of such mystical
work. Next in extreme age he passes through the door of death to find the
worm at her work; and in the last plate of the series, she is seen
sitting, a worm-like woman, with hooded head and knees drawn up, the
adder-like husk or shell of death at her feet, and behind her head the
huge rotting roots and serpentine nether fibres of the tree of life and
death: shapes of strange corruption and conversion lie around her, and
between the hollow tree-roots the darkness grows deep and hard. "I have
said to corruption, thou art my father; to the worm, thou art my mother
and my sister." This is she who is nearest of kin to man from his birth to
his death:

  "Weaving to dreams the sexual strife,
  And weeping over the web of life."

I have given thus early a rough and tentative analysis of this set of
designs, rather than leave it to find a place among the poems or
prophecies, because it does in effect belong rather to art than poetry,
the verses being throughout subordinate to the engravings, and indeed
scarcely to be accounted of as more than inscriptions or appendages. It
may however be taken as being in a certain sense one of the prophetic or
evangelic series which was afterwards to stretch to such strange lengths.
In this engraved symbolic poem of life and death, most of Blake's chief
articles of faith are advanced or implied; noticeably, for example, that
tenet regarding the creative deity and his relations to time and to the
sons of men. Thus far he can see and no farther; for so long and no longer
he has power upon the actions and passions of created and transient life.
Him let no Christians worship, nor the law of his covenant; the written
law which its writer wept at and hid beneath his mercy-seat; but instead
let them write above the altars of their faith a law of infinite
forgiveness, annihilating in the measureless embrace of its mercy the
separate existences of good and evil. So speaks Blake in his prologue; and
in his epilogue thus:

_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 are 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.

Upon the life which is but as a vesture, and as a vesture shall be
changed, he who created it has power till the end; appearances and
relations he can alter, and turn a virgin to a harlot; but not change one
individual life to another, reverse or rescind the laws of personality.
Virtue and vice, chastity and unchastity, are changeable and perishable;
"they all shall wax old as doth a garment:" but the underlying individual
life is imperishable and intangible. All qualities proper to human nature
are inventions of the Accuser; not so the immortal prenatal nature, which
is the essence of every man severally from eternity. That lies beyond the
dominion of the God of this world; he is but the Son of Morning, that
having once risen, will set again; shining only in the darkness of
spiritual night; his light is but a light seen in dreams before the dawn
by men belated and misled, which shall pass away and be known no more at
the advent of the perfect day.

All these mystical heresies may seem turbid and chaotic; but the legend or
subject-matter of the present book is transparent as water, lucid as
flame, compared to much of Blake's subsequent work. The designs, even if
taken apart from their significance, are among his most inventive and
interesting. They were done "for children," because, in Blake's mind, the
wise innocence of children was likeliest to appreciate and accept the
message involved in them; "for the sexes," that they might be at once
enlightened to see beyond themselves, and enfranchised from the bondage of
pietism or materialism. Interpreted according to Blake's intention, the
book was a small leaf or chapter of the inspired gospel of deliverance
which he was charged to preach through the organs of his art; a gospel not
easily to be made acceptable or comprehensible.

Of the prophetic books produced about this time we shall not as yet speak;
nor have we much to say of the next set of designs, those illustrative of
"Young's Night Thoughts," which were done, as will be surmised, on
commission. Power, invention, and a certain share of beauty, these designs
of course have; but less, as it seems to me, of Blake's great qualities
and more of his faults or errors than usual. That the text which serves as
a peg to hang them on, or a finger-post to point them out, is itself a
thing dead and rotten, does not suffice to explain this; for Blake could
do admirable work by way of illustration to the verse of Hayley.

This name brings us to a new and singular division of our present task.
During the four important years of Blake's residence at Felpham we can
trace his doings and feelings with some fulness and with some confidence.
They were probably no busier than other years of his life; but by a happy
accident we hear more concerning the sort of labour done. In August 1800
Blake moved out of London for the first time; he returned "early in 1804."

Hayley's patronage of Blake is a piece of high comedy perfect in its way.
The first act or two were played out with sufficient liking on either
side. "Mr. Hayley acts like a prince" towards "his good Blake," not it
seems in the direct way of pecuniary gifts or loans, but in such smaller
attentions as he could easily show to the husband and wife on their first
arrival close at hand. It must be remarked and remembered that throughout
this curious and incongruous intercourse there is no question whatever of
obligation on Blake's part for any kindness shown beyond the equal offices
of friend to friend. It is for "Mr. Hayley's usual brotherly affection"
that he expresses such ready gratitude. That the poor man's goodwill was
genuine we need not hesitate to allow; but the fates never indulged in a
freak of stranger humour than when it seemed good to their supreme caprice
to couple in the same traces for even the shortest stage a man like Hayley
with a man like Blake, and bracket the "Triumphs of Temper" with the
"Marriage of Heaven and Hell."

England, with a deplorable ingratitude, has apparently forgotten by this
time what her Hayley was once like. It requires a certain strength of
imagination to realise the assured fact that he was once a "greatest
living poet;" retrospection collapses in the effort, and credulity loses
heart to believe. Such, however, was in effect his profession; he had the
witness of his age under hand and seal to the fact, that on the death of
his friend Cowper the supreme laurels of the age or day had fallen by
inheritance to that poet's accomplished and ingenious biographer. There is
something pathetic and almost piteous in his perfect complacency and his
perfect futility. A moral country should not have forgotten that to Mr.
Hayley, when at work on his chief poem, "it seemed to be a kind of duty
incumbent on those who devote themselves to poetry to render a powerful
and too often a perverted art as beneficial to life and manners as the
limits of composition and the character of modern times will allow."
Although the ages, he regretted to reflect, were past, in which poetry was
idolized for _miraculous effects_, yet a poem intended to promote the
cultivation of good humour, and designed to unite the special graces of
Ariosto, of Dante, and of Pope, might still be of service to society; or,
he added with a chaste and noble modesty, "if this may be thought too
chimerical and romantic by sober reason, it is at least one of those
pleasing and innocent illusions in which a poetical enthusiast may be
safely indulged;" who will deny it?

This was the patron to whom Flaxman introduced Blake as an available
engraver, and, on occasion, a commendable designer. Hayley was ready
enough to cage and exhibit among the flock of tame geese which composed
his troop of swans this bird of foreign feather; and until the eagle's
beak and claws came into play under sharp provocation, the Felpham coop
and farmyard were duly dignified by his presence and behaviour as a "tame
villatic fowl." The master bantam-cock of the hen-roost in person
fluttered and cackled round him with assiduous if perplexed patronage. But
of such alliances nothing could come in the end but that which did come.
"Mr. H.," writes Blake in July 1803 to Mr. Butts, his one purchaser (on
the scale of a guinea per picture), "approves of my designs as little as
he does of my poems. 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. His imbecile
attempts to depress me only deserve laughter." Let a compassionate amateur
of human poultry imagine what confusion must by this time have been
reigning in the poor hen-roost and dove-cote of Eartham! Things, however,
took some time in reaching the tragic pitch of these shrill discords. For
months or years they appear to have run through various scales of very
tolerable harmony. Blake, in the intervals of incessant engraving and
occasional designing, was led by his good Hayley into the greenest
pastures of literature and beside the stillest waters of verse; he was
solicited to help in softening and arranging for public inspection the
horrible and pitiful narrative of Cowper's life; he was prevailed upon to
listen while Hayley "read Klopstock into English to Blake," with what
result one may trust he never knew. For it was probably under the sting of
this infliction that Blake scratched down in pencil a brief lyrical satire
on the German Milton, which modern humanity would refuse to read in public
if transcribed; although or because it might be, for grotesque case and
ringing breadth of melodious extravagance, a scrap saved from some
tattered chorus of Aristophanes, or caught up by Rabelais as the fragment
of a litany at the shrine of the _Dive Bouteille_. Let any man judge, from
the ragged shred we can afford to show by way of sample, how a sight or
handling of the stuff would have affected Hayley;

  "The moon at that sight blushed scarlet red,
  The stars threw down their cups and fled,
  And all the devils that were in hell
  Answered with a ninefold yell.

  Klopstock felt the intripled turn,
  And all his bowels began to churn;
  And his bowels turned round three times three,
  And locked in his soul with a ninefold key;

         *       *       *       *       *

  Then again old Nobodaddy swore
  He never had seen such a thing before
  Since Noah was shut in the ark,
  Since Eve first chose her hell-fire spark,
  Since 'twas the fashion to go naked,
  Since the old Anything was created;
  And       *       *       *       "

Only in choice Attic or in archaic French could the rest be endured by
modern eyes; but Panurge could hardly have improved on the manner of
retribution devised for flaccid fluency and devout sentiment always
running at the mouth.

For the rest, when out of the shadow of Klopstock or Cowper, Blake had
enough serious work on hand. His designs for various ballads of Hayley's,
strays of sick verse long since decomposed, were admirable enough to
warrant a hope of general admiration. This they failed of; but Blake's
head and hands were full of other work. "Miniature," he writes to Mr.
Butts, "is become a goddess in my eyes." He did not serve her long; but
while his faith in her godhead lasted he seems to have officiated with
some ardour in the courts of her temple. He speaks of orders multiplying
upon him, of especial praise received for proficiency in this style of
work; not, we may suppose, from any who had much authority to praise or
dispraise. It is impossible to imagine that Hayley knew a really great
work of Blake's when he saw it; a clever comminution of great power must
have seemed to him the worthiest use of it; whereas the design and the
glory of Blake was to concentrate and elevate his talent: all he did and
all he touched with profit has an air and a savour of greatness. In
miniature and such things he must probably have worked with half his heart
and less than half his native skill or strength of eye and hand.

There is a certain pathos in the changes of tone which come one by one
over Blake's correspondence at this time. All at first is sunlit and
rose-coloured. "The villagers are not mere rustics; they are polite and
modest. Meat is cheaper than in London; but the sweet air and the voices
of winds, trees, and birds, and the odours of the happy ground, make it a
dwelling for immortals." This intense and eager pleasure in the freshness
of things, this sharp relish of beauty in all the senses, which must needs
run over and lapse into sudden musical expression, will recall the
passages in Shelley's letters where some delight of sound or sight
suddenly felt or remembered forces its way into speech, and makes music of
the subservient words. "Work will go on here with God-speed. A roller and
two harrows lie before my window." This passion for hints and types,
common to all men of highly toned nerves and rapid reflectiveness of
spirit, was not with Blake a matter of fugitive impulse or casual
occasion. In his quietest moods of mind, in his soberest tempers of fancy,
he was always at some such work. At this time, too, he was living at a
higher strain of the senses than usual. So sudden a change of air and
change of world as had come upon him filled his nerves and brain at every
entrance with keen influences of childlike and sensitive satisfaction.
Witness his first sweet and singular verses to Flaxman and to Butts--"such
as Felpham produces by me, though not such as she produces by her eldest
son," he remarks, with some reason; that eldest son and heir of every Muse
being her good Hayley. Witness too the simple and complete pleasure with
which he writes invitations and descriptions, transcribes visions and
experiences. Probably too in some measure, could we trace the perfect
relation of flesh with spirit and blood with brain, we should find that
this first daily communion with the sea wrought upon him at once within
and without; that the sharp sweetness of the salted air was not without
swift and pungent effect; that the hourly physical delight lavished upon
every sense by all tunes and odours and changes and colours of the
sea--the delight of every breath or sound or shadow or whisper passing
upon it--may have served at first to satiate as well as to stimulate,
before the pressure of enjoyment grew too intense and the sting of
enjoyment too keen. Upon Blake, of all men, one may conjecture that these
influences of spirit and sense would act with exquisite force. It is
observable that now, and not before, we hear of visions making manifest to
him the spiritual likeness of dead men: that the scene of every such
apocalypse was a sea-beach; the shore of a new Patmos, prolific as was the
first of splendid and enormous fancies, of dreams begotten and brought
forth in a like atmosphere and habit of mind.[3] Now too the illimitable
book of divine or daemonic revelation called "Jerusalem" was dictated by
inspiration of its authors, who "are in eternity:" Blake "dares not
pretend to be any other than the secretary." Human readers, if such indeed
exist beyond the singular or the dual number, will wish that the authors
had put themselves through a previous course of surgical or any other
training which might have cured a certain superhuman impediment of speech,
very perplexing to the mundane ear; a habit of huge breathless stuttering,
as it were a Titanic stammer, intolerable to organs of flesh. "Allegory,"
the too obedient secretary writes to his friend, "addressed to the
intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal
understanding, is my definition of the most sublime poetry." A better
perhaps could not be given; as far that is as relates to the "spirit of
sense" which is to be clothed in the beautiful body of verse; but when
once we have granted the power of conception, the claims of form are to be
first thought of. It is of small moment how the work thus done may strike
the heavy ear of vulgarity or affect the torpid palate of prurience;
against mere indolence or mere misconstruction it is waste of time to
contrive precautions or rear defences; but the laws and the dues of art it
is never permissible to forget. It is in fact only by innate and
irrational perception that we can apprehend and enjoy the supreme works of
verse and colour; these, as Blake indicates with a noble accuracy, are not
things of the understanding; otherwise, we may add, the whole human world
would appreciate them alike or nearly alike, and the high and subtle
luxuries of exceptional temperaments would be made the daily bread of the
poor and hungry; the _vinum daemonum_ which now the few only can digest
safely and relish ardently would be found medicinal instead of poisonous,
palatable instead of loathsome, by the run of eaters and drinkers; all
specialties of spiritual office would be abolished, and the whole
congregation would communicate in both kinds. All the more, meantime,
because this "bread of sweet thought and wine of delight" is not broken or
shed for all, but for a few only--because the sacramental elements of art
and poetry are in no wise given for the sustenance or the salvation of men
in general, but reserved mainly for the sublime profit and intense
pleasure of an elect body or church--all the more on that account should
the ministering official be careful that the paten and chalice be found
wanting in no one possible grace of work or perfection of material.

That too much of Blake's written work while at Felpham is wanting in
executive quality, and even in decent coherence of verbal dress, is
undeniable. The Pythoness who delivers these stormy and sonorous oracles
is at once exposed and hampered as it were by her loose and heavy raiment;
the prophetic robe here slips or gapes, there muffles and impedes; is now
a tatter that hardly hides the contorted limbs, and now an encumbrance
that catches or trips up the reeling feet. Everything now written in the
fitful impatient intervals of the day's work bears the stamp of an
overheated brain and of nerves too intensely strung. Everything may well
appear to confirm the suggestion that, as high latitudes and climates of
rarefied air affect the physical structure of inhabitants or travellers,
so in this case did the sudden country life, the taste and savour of the
sea, touch sharply and irritate deliciously the more susceptible and
intricate organs of mind and nature. How far such passive capacity of
excitement differs from insanity; how in effect a temperament so sensuous,
so receptive, and so passionate, is further off from any risk of turning
unsound than hardier natures carrying heavier weight and tougher in the
nerves; need scarcely be indicated. For the rest, our concern at present
shall still be mainly with the letters of this date; and by their light we
may be enabled to see light shed upon many things hitherto hopelessly
dark. As no other samples of Blake's correspondence worth mention have
been allowed us by the jealousy of fate and divine parsimony, we must be
duly grateful and careful in dealing with all we have; gathering the
fragments into commodious baskets, and piecing the shreds into available
patchwork.

These letters bear upon them the common stamp of all Blake's doings and
writings; the fiery and lyrical tone of mind and speech, the passionate
singleness of aim, the heat and flame of faith in himself, the violence of
mere words, the lust of paradox, the loud and angry habits of expression
which abound in his critical or didactic work, are not here missing;
neither are clear indications wanting of his noblest qualities; the great
love of great things, the great scorn of small men, the strong tenderness
of heart, the tender strength of spirit, which won for him honour from all
that were honourable. Ready even in a too fervent manner to accept, to
praise, to believe in worth and return thanks for it, he will have no man
or thing impede or divert him, either for love's sake or hate's. Small
friends with feeble counsels to suggest must learn to suppress their
small feelings and graceful regrets, or be cleared out of his way with all
their powers to help or hinder; lucky if they get off without some label
of epigram on the forehead or sting of epigram in the flesh. Upon Hayley,
as we may see by collation of Blake's note-book with his letters, the lash
fell at last, after long toleration of things intolerable, after "great
objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery of business," (as
for instance engraving illustrations to Hayley's poems designed by
Flaxman's sister--not by his wife, as stated at p. 171 of the "Life" by
some momentary slip of a most careful pen), "and intimations that if I do
not confine myself to this I shall not live. This," adds Blake, "has
always pursued me. You will understand by this the source of all my
uneasiness. This from Johnson and Fuseli brought me down here, and this
from Mr. H. will bring me back again." In a sharper mood than this, he
appended to the decent skirts of Mr. Hayley one of the best burlesque
epigrams in the language:--

  "Of Hayley's birth this was the happy lot:
  His mother on his father him begot."

With this couplet tied to his tail, the ghost of Hayley may perhaps run
further than his own strength of wind or speed of foot would naturally
have carried him: with this hook in his nose, he may be led by "his good
Blake" some way towards the temple of memory.

What is most to be regretted in these letters is the wonderful tone of
assertion respecting the writer's own pictures and those of the great
Italian schools. This it would be difficult enough to explain, dishonest
to overlook, easy to ridicule, and unprofitable to rebuke. All that need
be said of this singular habit of Blake's has been said with admirable
clearness and fairness in the prefatory note to the prose selections in
Vol. II. Higher authority than the writer's of that note no man can have
or can require. And as Blake's artistic heresies are in fact mere
accidents--the illegitimate growth of chance and circumstance--we may be
content to leave them wholly to the practical judgment and the wise
charity of such artists as are qualified to pass sentence upon the
achievements and the shortcomings of this great artist. Their praise can
alone be thoroughly worth having; their blame can alone be of any
significance: and in no other hands than theirs may we safely leave the
memory and the glory of a fellow-labourer so illustrious as Blake.

Other points and shades of character not less singular it is essential
here to take notice of. These are not matters of accident, like the errors
of opinion or perversities of expression which may distort or disfigure
the notes and studies on purely artistic matters; they compose the vital
element and working condition of Blake's talent. From the fifth to the
tenth letter especially, it becomes evident that the writer was passing
through strange struggles of spirit and passionate stages of faith. As
early as the fourth letter, dated almost exactly a year later than the
first written on his arrival at Felpham, Blake refers in a tone of regret
and perplexity to the "abstract folly" which makes him incapable of direct
practical work, though not of earnest and continuous labour. This action
of the nerves or of the mind he was plainly unable to regulate or modify.
It hurries him while yet at work into "lands of abstraction;" he "takes
the world with him in his flight." Distress he knows would make the world
heavier to him, which seems now "lighter than a ball of wool rolled by the
wind;" and this distress material philosophies or methodical regulations
would "prescribe as a medicinal potion" for a mind impaired or diseased
merely by the animal superflux of spirits and childlike excess of
spiritual health. But this medicine the strange and strong faculty of
faith innate in the man precludes him from taking. Physical distress "is
his mock and scorn; mental no man can give; and if Heaven inflicts it, all
such distress is a mercy." It is not easy, but it is requisite, to realise
the perpetual freshness and fulness of belief, the inalterable vigour and
fervour of spirit with which Blake, heretic and mystic as he may have
been, worshipped and worked; by which he was throughout life possessed and
pursued. Above all gods or daemons of creation and division, he beheld by
faith in a perfect man a supreme God. "Though I have been very unhappy, I
am so no longer. I am again emerged into the light of day; I still (and
shall to eternity) embrace Christianity, and adore Him who is the express
image of God." In the light of his especial faith all visible things were
fused into the intense heat and sharpened into the keen outline of vision.
He walked and laboured under other heavens, on another earth, than the
earth and the heaven of material life:

  "With a blue sky spread over with wings,
  And a mild sun that mounts and sings;
  With trees and fields full of fairy elves
  And little devils who fight for themselves;
  With angels planted in hawthorn bowers,
  And God Himself in the passing hours."

All this was not a mere matter of creed or opinion, much less of
decoration or ornament to his work. It was, as we said, his element of
life, inhaled at every breath with the common air, mixed into his veins
with their natural blood. It was an element almost painfully tangible and
actual; an absolute medium or state of existence, inevitable,
inexplicable, insuperable. To him the veil of outer things seemed always
to tremble with some breath behind it: seemed at times to be rent in
sunder with clamour and sudden lightning. All the void of earth and air
seemed to quiver with the passage of sentient wings and palpitate under
the pressure of conscious feet. Flowers and weeds, stars and stones, spoke
with articulate lips and gazed with living eyes. Hands were stretched
towards him from beyond the darkness of material nature, to tempt or to
support, to guide or to restrain. His hardest facts were the vaguest
allegories of other men. To him all symbolic things were literal, all
literal things symbolic. About his path and about his bed, around his ears
and under his eyes, an infinite play of spiritual life seethed and swarmed
or shone and sang. Spirits imprisoned in the husk and shell of earth
consoled or menaced him. Every leaf bore a growth of angels; the pulse of
every minute sounded as the falling foot of God; under the rank raiment of
weeds, in the drifting down of thistles, strange faces frowned and white
hair fluttered; tempters and allies, wraiths of the living and phantoms of
the dead, crowded and made populous the winds that blew about him, the
fields and hills over which he gazed. Even upon earth his vision was
"twofold always;" singleness of vision he scorned and feared as the sign
of mechanical intellect, of talent that walks while the soul sleeps, with
the mere activity of a blind somnambulism. It was fourfold in the
intervals of keenest inspiration and subtlest rapture; threefold in the
paradise of dreams lying between earth and heaven, lulled by lighter airs
and lit by fainter stars; a land of night and moonlight, spectral and
serene. These strange divisions of spirit and world according to some dim
and mythologic hierarchy were with Blake matters at once serious and
commonplace. The worlds of Beulah and Jerusalem, the existence of Los god
of Time and Enitharmon goddess of Space, the fallen manhood of Theotormon,
the imprisoned womanhood of Oothoon, were more to him even than
significant names; to the reader they must needs seem less. This monstrous
nomenclature, this jargon of miscreated things in chaos, rose as by nature
to his lips, flowed from them as by instinct. Time, an incarnate spirit
clothed with fire, stands before him in the sun's likeness; he is
threatened with poverty, tempted to make himself friends of this world;
and makes answer as though to a human tempter:

  "My hands are laboured day and night
  And rest comes never in my sight;
  My wife has no indulgence given
  Except what comes to her from heaven;
  We eat little, we drink less;
  This earth breeds not our happiness."

He beheld, he says, Time and Space as they were eternally, not as they are
seen upon earth; he saw nothing as man sees: his hopes and fears were
alien from all men's; and upon him and his the light of prosperous days
and the terrors of troubled time had no power.

  "When I had my defiance given
  The sun stood trembling in heaven;
  The moon, that glowed remote below,
  Became leprous and white as snow;
  And every soul of man on the earth
  Felt affliction and sorrow and sickness and dearth."

In all this we may see on one side the reflection and refraction of outer
things, on the other side the projection of his own mind, the effusion of
his individual nature, throughout the hardest and remotest alien matter.
Strangely severed from other men, he was, or he conceived himself, more
strangely interwoven with them. The light of his spiritual weapons, the
sound of his spiritual warfare, was seen, he believed, and was heard in
faint resonance and far reverberation among men who knew not what such
sights and sounds might mean. If, worsted in this "mental fight," he
should let "his sword sleep in his hand," or "refuse to do spiritual acts
because of natural fears and natural desires," the world would be the
poorer for his defection, and himself "called the base Judas who betrays
his friend." Fear of this rebuke shook and wasted him day and night; he
was rent in sunder with pangs of terror and travail. Heaven was full of
the dead, coming to witness against him with blood-shedding and with
shedding of tears:

                                     "The sun was hot
  With the bows of my mind and with arrows of thought."

In this spirit he wrought at his day's work, seeing everywhere the image
of his own mood, the presence of foes and friends. Nothing to him was
neutral; nothing without significance. The labour and strife of soul in
which he lived was a thing as earnest as any bodily warfare. Such
struggles of spirit in poets or artists have been too often made the
subject of public study; nay, too often the theme of chaotic versifiers. A
theme more utterly improper it is of course impossible to devise. It is
just that a workman should see all sides of his work, and labour with all
his might of mind and dexterity of hand to make it great and perfect; but
to use up the details of the process as crude material for cruder
verse--to invite spectators as to the opening of a temple, and show them
the unbaked bricks and untempered mortar--to expose with immodest violence
and impotent satisfaction the long revolting labours of mental
abortion--this no artist will ever attempt, no craftsman ever so perform
as to escape ridicule. It is useless for those who can carve no statue
worth the chiselling to exhibit instead six feet or nine feet of shapeless
plaster or fragmentary stucco, and bid us see what sculptors work with; no
man will accept that in lieu of the statue. Not less futile and not less
indecent is it for those who can give expression to no great poem to
disgorge masses of raw incoherent verse on the subject of verse-making: to
offer, in place of a poem ready wrought out, some chaotic and convulsive
story about the way in which a poet works, or does not work.

To Blake the whole thing was too grave for any such exposure of spiritual
nudity. In these letters he records the result of his "sore travail;" in
these verses he commemorates the manner of his work "under the direction
of messengers from heaven daily and nightly, not without trouble or care;"
but he writes in private and by pure instinct; he speaks only by the
impulse of confidence, in the ardour of faith. What he has to say is said
with the simple and abstract rapture of apostles or prophets; not with the
laborious impertinence and vain obtrusion of tortuous analysis. For such
heavy play with gossamer and straws his nature was too earnest and his
genius too exalted. This is the mood in which he looks over what work he
has done or has to do: and in his lips the strange scriptural language
used has the sincerity of pure fire. "I see the face of my Heavenly
Father; He lays His hand upon my head, and gives a blessing to all my
work. Why should I be troubled? why should my heart and flesh cry out? I
will go on in the strength of the Lord; through hell will I sing forth His
praises; that the dragons of the deep may praise Him, and that those who
dwell in darkness and in the sea-coasts may be gathered into His kingdom."
So did he esteem of art, which indeed is not a light thing; nor is it
wholly unimportant to men that they should have one capable artist more or
less among them. How it may fare with artisans (be they never so
pretentious) is a matter of sufficiently small moment. One blessing there
assuredly was upon all Blake's work; the infinite blessing of life; the
fervour of vital blood.

In spite however of all inspiration and of all support, sickness and
uncongenial company impeded his hours of labour and corroded his hours of
repose. A trial on the infamous charges of sedition and assault, brought
by a private soldier whose name of Scholfield was thus made shamefully
memorable, succeeded finally in making the country unendurable to him. It
must be said here of the hapless Hayley that he behaved well in this time
of vexation and danger: coming forward to bail "our friend Blake," and
working hard for the defence in a tumultuous and spluttering way: he
"would appear in public at the trial, living or dying," and did, with or
without leave of doctors, appear and speak up for the accused. Blake's
honourable acquittal does not make it less disgraceful that the charge
should at all have been entertained. His own courage, readiness of wit,
and sincerity of spirit are fully shown in the letter relating this short
and sharp episode in his quiet life. Some months later he returned to
London once for all, and once for all broke off relations with Felpham:
commending, it may be hoped, Hayley to the Muses and Scholfield to the
halberts.

Having read these letters, we are not lightly to judge of Blake as of
another man. Thoughts and creeds peculiar to his mind found expression in
ways and words peculiar to his lips. It was no vain or empty claim that he
put forward to especial insight and individual means of labour. If he
spoke strangely, he had great things to speak. If he acted strangely, he
had great things to do. "Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because
the Lord descended on it in fire." Let the tree be judged by its fruit. If
the man who wrote thus had nothing to do or to say worth the saying or the
doing, it may fairly be said that he was mad or foolish. The involving
smoke, here again, implied the latent fire. Where the particles of dust
are mere hardened mud, where the cloud is mere condensing fog hatched from
the stagnation of a swamp, one may justly complain of the obstruction and
the obscurity. There is here indeed too much of mist, but it is at least
clear; the air that breeds it is high, the moisture that feeds it is pure.
This man had never lived in the low places of thought. In the words of a
living poet,[4] whose noble verses are worthy to stand thus near Blake's
own--

  "He had seen the moon's eclipse
  By the fire from Etna's lips,
  With Orion had he spoken,
  His fast with honey-dew had broken."

His dialect was too much the dialect of a far country; but it was from a
far country that he came, from a lofty station that he spoke. To a poet
who has given us so much, to an artist who has done great things to such
great purpose, we may give at least some allowance and some toleration.
The distance is great which divides a fireside taper from the eclipsed
moon on Etna. Rules which are useful or necessary for household versifiers
may well be permitted to relax or even to dissolve when applied to one who
has attained to see with unblinded eyes and to speak with adequate words
of matters so far above them.

The next point noticeable by us in the story of Blake's life is his
single-handed duel with Cromek and Stothard; and of this we need not wish
to speak at much length. The engraver, swift and sharp in all his
dealings--never scrupulous, insolent sometimes, and always cunning--had
an easy game to play, and played it without shame; not even taking the
trouble to hide his marked cards or to load his dice in private. In spite
or in consequence of this rapacity and mendacity,[5] Cromek was evidently
of some use to Blake. And even for the exercise of these special talents
he is perhaps not to be blamed; the man did but work with such qualities
as he had; did but put out to use his natural gifts and capacities. But
that he should have done this at Blake's expense is and must remain
unpardonable: and therefore he must be left to hang with the head
downwards from the memorial gallows to which biography has nailed him; a
warning to all such others to choose their game more warily. A tradesman
who, by their own account, swindled Blake and robbed Scott can hardly
expect to be allowed safe harbourage under the compassionate shelter of
complete oblivion or behind the weather-tight screen of simple contempt.
It may be worth while to condense the evidence as to his dealings with
Blake and Stothard. One alone of these three comes out clear from the
involved network of suspicious double-dealing. In the matter of the
engravings to Blair, Cromek had entrapped and cheated Blake from the
first. In the matter of the drawing from Chaucer, he had gone a step
further down the steep slope of peculation. After the proposal to employ
Schiavonetti, Blake might at once have thrown him over as a self-detected
knave. He did not; and was accordingly plundered again in a less dexterous
and a more direct manner. It is fortunate that the shameful little history
has at last been tracked through all its scandalous windings by so keen an
eye and so sure a hand as Mr. Gilchrist's. Two questions arise at first
sight; did Cromek give Blake a commission for his design of the
"Pilgrims"? did Stothard, when Cromek proposed that he should take up the
same subject, know that the proposal was equivalent to the suggestion of a
theft? Both these questions Blake would have answered in the affirmative;
and in his dialect the affirmative mood was distinct and strong. Further
evidence on the first head can be wanted by no one of decent insight or of
decent candour. That Cromek, with more than professional impudence, denied
the charge, is an incident in the affair neither strange nor important.
The manner of his denial may be matched for effrontery with the tone of
his insolent letter to Blake on the subject of the designs to Blair. With
the vulgarities and audacities, the shifts and the doubles of this
shuffling man of prey, no one need again be troubled. That a visitor
caught with the spoons in his pocket should bluster, stammer, and grin as
he pleads innocence or affects amazement, is natural and desirable; for
every word and gesture, humble or shameless, incoherent or intrepid,
serves to convict him twice over. Undoubtedly he saw Blake's sketch, tried
to conjure it into his pocket, and failed; undoubtedly, finding that the
artist would not again give up his work to be engraved by other hands, he
made such approach to an honest offer as was compatible with his
character; undoubtedly also he then made money in his uncleanly way out of
the failure by tossing the subject to another painter as a bait. No man
has a right to express wonder that Blake refused to hold Stothard
blameless. It is nothing whatever to the purpose that, while Cromek's
somewhat villainous share in the speculation was as yet under cover, Blake
may have bestowed on Stothard's unfinished design his friendly counsel and
his frank applause. After the dealer's perfidy had been again bared and
exposed by his own act, it was, and it is yet, a stretch of charity to
suppose that his associate was not likewise his accomplice. And the manner
of Stothard's retort upon Blake, when taxed by him with unfair dealing,
was not of a sort qualified to disperse or to allay suspicion. He charged,
and he permitted Cromek to charge, the plundered man with the act of
plunder. Even though we, who can now read the whole account without
admixture of personal feeling, may acquit Stothard of active or actual
treachery, as all must gladly do who remember how large a debt is due from
all to an artist of such exquisite and pleasurable talent, it is hopeless
to make out for him a thoroughly sufficient case. The fellowship of such
an one as Cromek leaves upon all who take his part at least the suspicion
of a stain. All should hope that Stothard on coming out of the matter
could have shown clean hands; none can doubt that Blake did. That on
Stothard's part irritation should have succeeded to surprise, and rancour
to irritation, is not wonderful. If he was indeed injured by the fault of
Cromek and the misfortune of Blake, it would doubtless have been admirably
generous to have controlled the irritation and overcome the rancour; but
in that case the worst that should be said of him is that he did not adopt
the noblest course of action possible to him. Admitting this, he is not
blameable for choosing to throw in his lot with Cromek; but we must then
suppose not merely that Cromek had abstained from any avowal of his
original treachery, but that Stothard was unhappily able to accept in good
faith the bare assertion of Cromek in preference to the bare assertion of
Blake. If we believe this, we are bound to admit no harsher feeling than
regret that Cromek should so have duped and blinded his betters; but in
common fairness we are also bound to restrict the question within these
limits. For Stothard a door of honourable escape stands open; and all must
desire rather to widen than to narrow the opening. No one can wish to
straiten his chance of acquittal, or to inquire too curiously whether
there be not a pretext for closing the door that now stands ajar. But for
the rest, it is simply necessary to choose between Blake's authority and
Cromek's; and to consider this alternative seriously for a moment would be
at once an act of condescension towards Cromek and of impertinence towards
Blake, equally unjustifiable on either side. It is possible that Blake was
not wronged by Stothard; it is undeniable that he was wronged through him.
It is probable that Stothard believed himself to be not in the wrong; it
is certain that Blake was in the right.[6]

About the close of this quarrel, and before the publication of Blake's
designs to Blair as engraved for Cromek by Schiavonetti, a book came out
which would have deserved more notice and repaid more interest than has
yet been shown it. The graceful design by Blake on its frontispiece is not
the only or even the chief attraction of Dr. Malkin's "Memoirs of his
Child." The writer indeed treads ponderously and speaks thickly; but there
is extant no picture at once so perfect and so quaint of a purely
childlike talent. Even supreme genius, which usually has a mind now and
then to try, has never given us the complete and vivid likeness which a
child has for once given of himself. Even Shakespeare, even Hugo, even
Blake, has not done this. The husky dialect of his father suffices to
express something; and the portrait is significant and pleasant,
reproducing as it does the solid grace and glad gravity proper to
children; a round and bright figure, with no look of over-training or
disease. But the child's own scraps and scrawls contain the kernel and
jewel of the book. His small drawings are certainly firmer, clearer, more
inventive than could have been looked for in a six-year-old artist. Any
slight imitative work in a child implies the energy which impels invention
in a man. His little histories and geographies are delightful for
illogical sequence of events and absurd coherence of fancy. Only a child
could have invented and combined such unimaginable eccentricities of
innocence. The language and system of proper names strongly recall
Blake's own habits of speech. The province of Malleb and the city of
Tumblebob are no unfit abodes for Hand and Hyle, Kwantok and Kotope. The
moral polity of Allestone is not unlike that which prevails among the
Emanations "who in the aggregate are called Jerusalem." The pamphlet,
condensed and compressed into a form more thoroughly readable, would be
worth republishing.

It seems probable that the verses following were written by Blake about
this time, as Mr. Gilchrist refers the design of the "Last Judgment,"
executed on commission for Lady Egremont, to the year 1807. They are
evidently meant to match the beautiful dedication of the designs to Blair,
which were not brought out till the next year. Less excellent in
workmanship, they are not less important by way of illustration. The
existence of some mythical or symbolic island of Atalantis, where the arts
were to be preserved as in paradise, now walled round or washed over by
the blind and bitter waters of time, was a favourite vision with Blake. At
a first reading some of these verses seemed to refer to the subsequent
series of designs from Dante; but there is no evidence of any such later
commission as we must in that case take for granted.

  "The caverns of the grave I've seen,
  And these I showed to England's queen;
  But now the caves of Hell I view,
  Who shall I dare to show them to?
  What mighty soul in beauty's form
  Shall dauntless view the infernal storm?
  Egremont's Countess can control
  The flames of hell that round me roll.
  If she refuse, I still go on,
  Till the heavens and earth are gone;
  Still admired by noble minds,
  Followed by Envy on the winds.
  Re-engraved time after time,
  Ever in their youthful prime,
  My designs unchanged remain;
  Time may rage, but rage in vain;
  For above Time's troubled fountains,
  On the great Atlantic mountains,
  In my golden house on high,
  There they shine eternally."

Blake was always looking westward for his islands of the blest. All
transatlantic things appear to have a singular hold upon his fancy.
America was a land of misty and stormy morning, struck by the fierce and
fugitive fires of intermittent war and nascent freedom. In a dim confused
manner, he seems to mix up the actual events of history with the formless
and labouring legends of his own mythology; or rather to cast
circumstances into the crucible of vision, and extract a strange amalgam
of metals unfit for mortal currency and difficult to bring to any test.

In 1808 the illustrations to "Blair's Grave" appeared, and found some
acceptance; a success on which the shameful soul of Cromek fed exultingly
and fattened scandalously. The ravenous gamester had packed his cards from
the first with all due care, and was able now to bluster without fear as
he had before swindled without shame. Twenty pounds of the profits fell to
the share of the designer for some of the most admirable works extant in
that line. The sweetness and vivid grace of these designs are as
noticeable as the energy and rapidity of imagination implied by them. Even
in Blake's lifetime their tender and lofty beauty drew down some
recognition; and incautious criticism, as it praised them, forgot that the
artist was not dead yet. The generous oversight was afterwards amply and
consistently redeemed. For the moment it was perhaps not wonderful that
even so much excellence should obtain something of mistrustful admiration.
The noble passion and exaltation of spirit here made visible burnt its way
into notice for a time; and Cromek was allowed to claim applause for his
invention of Blake. We will choose two designs only for reference. None
who have seen can well forget the glorious violence of reunion between
soul and body, meeting with fierce embraces, with glad agony and rage of
delight; with breasts yearning and eyes wide, with sweet madness of
laughter at their lips; the startled and half-arisen body not less divine
already than the descending soul, though the earth clings yet about his
knees and feet, and though she comes down as with a clamour of rushing
wind and prone impulse of falling water, fresh from the stars and the
highest air of heaven. But for perfect beauty nothing of Blake's can be
matched against the design of the soul departing; in this drawing the body
lies filled as it were and clothed with the supreme sleep of flesh, no man
watching by it; with limbs laid out and covered, with eyelids close; and
the soul, with tender poise of pausing feet, with painless face and sad
pure eyes, looks back as with a serene salutation full of pity, before
passing away into the clear air and light left at the end of sunset on
heaven and the hills; where outside the opened lattice a soft cold land of
rising fields and ridged moorland bears upon it the barren beauty of
shadow and sleep, the breath and not the breeze of evening. The sweet and
grave grace of this background, with a bright pallor in the sky and an
effect upon field and moor of open air without wind, brings with it a
sense as of music.

A year later Blake advertised and opened his exhibition; which he was
about as qualified to manage as little Malkin might have been. Between
anger, innocence, want of funds and sense of merit, he would assuredly
have ruined a better chance than he ever had. With the exception of his
_Canterbury Pilgrims_, the choice of pictures and designs for exhibition
seems to have been somewhat unhappy.[7] The admirable power and high
dramatic quality of that singular but noble picture, the latent or
superincumbent beauty which corrects and redeems its partial ugliness, the
strong imagination and the fanciful justice of the entire work, were
invisible to all but such spectators as Charles Lamb; if indeed there were
ever another capable of seeing them to such purpose. Whatever portion of
the like merit there may have been in the other works exhibited was still
more utterly lost upon the few who saw them at all; for of these we have
scarcely any record beyond Blake's own. One journal alone appears to have
noticed the exhibition. An angry allusion of Blake's to some assault of
the _Examiner_ newspaper upon his works and character has been hitherto
left unexplained, presumably through a not irrational contempt. That Blake
may be cleared from any charge of perversity, a brief account of the
quarrel is here appended. Contemptible as are both the journeyman writer
and his poor day's work, they have been found worth tracking down on
account of the game flown at.

In the thirtieth number of the _Examiner_ (August 7th, 1808) there is a
review (signed R. H.) of the _Blair's Grave_, sufficiently impudent in
manner and incapable in matter to have provoked a milder spirit than
Blake's. Fuseli's prefatory note is cited with a tone of dissentient
patronage not lightly to be endured; "none but such a visionary as Mr.
Blake or such a frantic (_sic_) as Mr. Fuseli could possibly fancy," and
so forth; then follows some chatter about the failures of great poets,
"utter impossibility of representing _Spirit_ to the eye" (except by means
of italic type), "insipid," "absurd," "all the wise men of the East would
not possibly divine," "_small_ assistance of the title" (italics again),
"how are we to find out?" (might not one reply with Thersites, "Make that
demand of thy Maker?"), "how absurd," "more serious censure," "most
heterogeneous and serio-fantastic," "most indecent," "appearance of
libidinousness," "much to admire, but more to censure," and all the
common-places of that pestilent old style which, propped on italics and
points of exclamation, halts at every sentence between a titter, a shrug,
and a snarl. Schiavonetti also "has done more than justice" to Blake, and
Blair and his engraver are finally bidden to divide the real palm. Who
this reviewer was, no man need either know or care; but all may now
understand the point of Blake's allusion. Next year however the real
batteries were opened. It is but loathsome labour to shovel out this
decomposed rubbish from the catacombs of liberal journalism; but if thus
only we can explain an apparently aimless or misplaced reference on the
great artist's part, it may be worth while to throw up a few spadefuls.

This second article bears date September 17th, 1809, No. 90 of the
_Examiner_, and is labelled "Mr. Blake's Exhibition." The contributor has
already lapsed from simple fatuity into fatuity compound with scurrility.
Blake here figures as "an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal
inoffensiveness secures him from confinement, and consequently of whom no
public notice would have been taken, if he was not" (the man's grammar
here goes mad on its own account, but what then?) "forced on the notice
and animadversion of the _Examiner_ in having been held up" (the case by
this time is fairly desperate) "to public admiration;" such is the
eccentricity of human error. The _Blair_ of last year "was a futile
endeavour _by_ bad drawings to represent immateriality _by_ bodily
personifications," and so forth; once again, "the tasteful hand of
Schiavonetti," one regrets to remember, was employed to bestow "an
exterior charm on deformity and nonsense. Thus encouraged, the poor man"
(to wit, Blake) "fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few
wretched pictures, some of which are"--any one may finish that for the
critic. The catalogue is "a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness
(_sic_), and egregious vanity." Stothard and the irrepressible
Schiavonetti are of course held up in contrast to the "distempered brain"
which produced Blake's _Pilgrims_. The picture of _The Ancient Britons_
"is a complete caricature; the colour of the flesh is exactly like hung
beef." Here we will pull the man up short and have done with him. He
shirks a signature this time; and whether or no he were the same as last
year's critic, those may find out who care.

"Arcadiae pecuaria rudere dicas;" would not one say that this mingling bray
and howl had issued through the throat and nostril of some one among the
roving or browsing cattle of our own daily or weekly literature, startled
at smelling some incongruous rose in his half-eaten thistle-heap? Such
feeders were always one in voice and one in palate: it were waste of wood
and iron to cudgel or to prod them. Even when their clamour becomes too
intolerably dissonant we may get out of hearing and solace our vexed ears
and spirits with reflection on that axiom of Blake's, which, though
savouring in such a case of excessive optimism, we will strive to hope is
true:

  "The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,
  Are waves that beat on Heaven's shore."

This was not Blake's only connexion or collision with the journals of his
day. An adverse notice of Fuseli had excited him to more direct reprisals
than the attack upon himself now did. The _Monthly Magazine_ for July 1st,
1806 (vol. xxi. pp. 520, 521), contains the following letter, which is now
first unearthed and seems worth saving. It is not without perversities;
neither is it wanting in vigour and fervour of thought.

     "TO THE EDITOR OF THE 'MONTHLY MAGAZINE.'

     "SIR,--My indignation was exceedingly moved at reading a criticism in
     _Bell's Weekly Messenger_ (25th May) on the picture of Count Ugolino,
     by Mr. Fuseli, in the Royal Academy Exhibition; and your magazine
     being as extensive in its circulation as that paper, and as it also
     must from its nature be more permanent, I take the advantageous
     opportunity to counteract the widely-diffused malice which has for
     many years, under the pretence of admiration of the arts, been
     assiduously sown and planted among the English public against true
     art, such as it existed in the days of Michael Angelo and Raphael.
     Under pretence of fair criticism and candour, the most wretched taste
     ever produced has been upheld for many, very many years; but now, I
     say, now its end has come. Such an artist as Fuseli is invulnerable,
     he needs not my defence; but I should be ashamed not to set my hand
     and shoulder, and whole strength, against those wretches who, under
     pretence of criticism, use the dagger and the poison.

     "My criticism on this picture is as follows: 'Mr. Fuseli's Count
     Ugolino is the father of sons of feeling and dignity, who would not
     sit looking in their parent's face in the moments of his agony, but
     would rather retire and die in secret while they suffer him to
     indulge his passionate and innocent grief, his innocent and venerable
     madness, and insanity, and fury, and whatever paltry cold-hearted
     critics cannot, because they dare not, look upon. Fuseli's Count
     Ugolino is a man of wonder and admiration, of resentment against man
     and devil, and of humiliation before God: prayer and parental
     affection fills the figure from head to foot. The child in his arms,
     whether boy or girl signifies not (but the critic must be a fool who
     has not read Dante, and who does not know a boy from a girl); I say,
     the child is as beautifully drawn as it is coloured--in both,
     inimitable; and the effect of the whole is truly sublime, on account
     of that very colouring which our critic calls black and heavy. The
     German-flute colour, which was used by the Flemings (they call it
     burnt bone), has [? so] possessed the eye of certain connoisseurs,
     that they cannot see appropriate colouring, and are blind to the
     gloom of a real terror.

     "The taste of English amateurs has been too much formed upon pictures
     imported from Flanders and Holland, consequently our countrymen are
     easily brow-beat on the subject of painting; and hence it is so
     common to hear a man say, 'I am no judge of pictures;' but, O
     Englishmen! know that every man ought to be a judge of pictures, and
     every man is so who has not been connoisseured out of his senses.

     "A gentleman who visited me the other day said, 'I am very much
     surprised at the dislike which some connoisseurs show on viewing the
     pictures of Mr. Fuseli; but the truth is, he is a hundred years
     beyond the present generation.' Though I am startled at such an
     assertion, I hope the contemporary taste will shorten the hundred
     years into as many hours; for I am sure that any person consulting
     his own eyes must prefer what is so supereminent; and I am as sure
     that any person consulting his own reputation, or the reputation of
     his country, will refrain from disgracing either by such ill-judged
     criticisms in future.

     "Yours, WM. BLAKE."

This ready championship, erratic and excessive as it may be, is not less
characteristic of the man than is that outspoken violence which helped to
make his audience often deaf and unfriendly. The letter, as we said, did
not happen to turn up in time for insertion in any niche of the _Life_ or
_Appendix_: it will not seem a valueless windfall if read by the light of
the Catalogue, the Address, and other notes on art embalmed in the second
volume.

No part of Blake's life was nobler in action or is yet worthier of study
than the period of neglected labour and unbroken poverty which followed.
Much of the work done is now, it appears, irretrievably lost. New friends
gathered about him as the old ones died out; for indeed all men capable of
seeing the beauty of greatness and goodness were drawn at once to such a
man as he was. Violent and petulant as he may have seemed on some rare
occasions of public protest, he endured all the secret slights and wants
of his latter life with a most high patience, and with serene if not
joyous acceptance of his fate. Without brute resignation, nay with keen
sense of neglect shown and wrong done, he yet laboured gladly and without
ceasing. Sick or well, he was at work; his utmost rest was mere change of
labour. To relax the intense nerve or deaden the travailing brain would
have been painful and grievous to him. Fervent incessant action was to him
as the breath of every moment, the bread of every day. His talk was eager
and eloquent; his habits of life were simple and noble, alike above
compassion and beyond regret. To all the poor about him--and among the
poor he had to live out all his latter days of life--he showed all the
supreme charities of courtesy. From one or two things narrated of him, we
may all see and be assured that a more perfect and gentle excellence of
manner, a more royal civility of spirit, was never found in any man.
Fearless, blameless, and laborious, he had also all tender and exquisite
qualities of breeding, all courteous and gracious instincts of kindness.
As there was nothing base in him, so was there nothing harsh or weak. This
old man, whose hand academicians would not take because he had to fetch
his own porter, had the habit and spirit of the highest training. He was
born a knight and king among men, and had the great and quiet way of such.
To say that he was not ashamed or afraid of his poverty seems an
expression actually libellous by dint of inadequacy. Fear and shame of any
base kind are inconceivable of him. The great and sleepless soul which
impelled him to work and to speak could take no taint and no rest in this
world. Conscious as he was of the glory of his gift and capacity, he was
apparently unconscious how noble a thing was his own life. The work which
he was able and compelled to perform he knew to be great; that his manner
of living should be what it was, he seems to have thought but simple.
"Few," his biographer has well said, "are so persistently brave." But his
was the supreme valour which ignorantly assumes and accepts itself. It was
natural to him not to cease from doing well or complain of faring ill, as
it is natural to a soldier not to turn tail. That he should do great
things for small wages was a condition of his life. Neither, with all his
just and distinct self-assertion, did he assume any special credit for
this. He did not ask for more of meat and drink, more of leisure or
praise; he demanded only such recognition as might have enabled him to do
more work and greater while strength and sight were left in him. That
neglect, and the necessities of mere handiwork involved by neglect, should
thus shorten his time and impair his capacity for higher labours, he did
at times complain, not without an audible undertone of scornful and
passionate rebuke. "Let not that nation," he says once, "where less than
nobility is the 'reward,' pretend that Art is encouraged by that nation."
There was no angry prurience for fame or gold underlying such complaints.

His famous drawings, burlesque or serious, of visionary heads are
interesting chiefly for the evidence they give of Blake's power upon his
own mind and nerves, and of the strong and subtle mixture of passion with
humour in his temperament. Faith, invention, and irony are here mingled in
a rare and curious manner. The narrow leer of stolid servile vigour, the
keen smirk of satisfied and brutish achievement, branded upon the
grotesque face of the "Man who built the Pyramids," implies a good satire
on workmen of base talent and mean success. Several others, such as "The
Accusers" and the celebrated "Ghost of a Flea," are grotesque almost to
grandeur, and full of strength and significance. More important than
hundreds of these are the beautiful designs to Virgil--or to Phillips.
Reproduced at page 271 of Vol. I. with the utmost care and skill, they
have of course lost something by the way; enough remains, and would remain
had less favour been shown them, to give great and keen pleasure. In the
first, the remote sweet curve of hill against a sky filled with evening,
seen far above the rows of folded sheep, may recall a splendid former
design in the "Blair." In the second, which perhaps has lost more than any
in course of transference, the distance of winding road and deepening
gorge, woods and downs and lighted windy sky, is among the noblest
inventions of imaginative landscape. Highest of all in poetical quality I
should class the third design. Upon the first two, symbolic as they are of
vision and of pilgrimage, the shadow of peace is cast like a garment; rest
lies upon them as a covering. In the third, a splendour of sweet and
turbulent moonlight falls across blown bowed hedgerows, over the gnarled
and labouring branches of a tough tortuous oak, upon soft ears of laid
corn like long low waves without ripple or roll; every bruised blade
distinct and patient, every leaf quivering and straightened out in the
hard wind. The stormy beauty of this design, the noble motion and passion
in all parts of it, are as noticeable as its tender sense of detail and
grace in effect of light. Not a star shows about the moon; and the dark
hollow half of her glimmering shell, emptied and eclipsed, is faint upon
the deep air. The fire in her crescent burns high across the drift of
wind. Blake's touch in this appears to me curiously just and perfect; the
moon does not seem to quail or flicker as a star would; but one may feel
and see, as it were, the wind passing beneath her; amid the fierce
fluctuation of heaven in the full breath of tempest, blown upon with all
the strength of the night, she stands firm in the race of winds, where no
lesser star can stand; she hangs high in clear space, pure of cloud; but
no likeness of the low-hung labouring moon, no blurred and blinking planet
with edges blotted and soiled in fitful vapour, would have given so
splendid a sense of storm as this white triumphal light seen above the
wind. Small and rough as these half-engraved designs may be, it is
difficult to express in words all that is latent, even all that is
evident, in the best of them. Poets and painters of Blake's kind can put
enough into the slightest and swiftest work they do to baffle critics and
irritate pretenders.

Friends, as we have said, were not wanting to Blake in his old age; to one
of them we owe, among other more direct obligations, an inestimable debt
for the "Illustrations to Job," executed on his commission. Another worthy
of notice here was, until our own day called forth a better, the best
English critic on art; himself, as far as we know, admirable alike as a
painter, a writer, and a murderer. In each pursuit, perhaps, there was a
certain want of solid worth and fervour, which at times impeded or
impaired the working of an excellent faculty; but in each it is evident
there was a noble sense of things fair and fit; a seemliness and
shapeliness of execution, a sensitive relish of excellence, an exquisite
aspiration after goodness of work, which cannot be overpraised. With pen,
with palette, or with poison, his hand was never a mere craftsman's. The
visible vulgarities and deficiencies of his style went hardly deeper than
the surface. Excess of colour and levity of handling have not unjustly
been charged against him; he does not seem to have always used the
material on hand, whether strychnine or mere ink, to the best purpose; his
work has a certain crudity and violence of tone; his articles and his
crimes are both too often wanting in the most delightful qualities of
which finished art is capable; qualities which a more earnest man of
lesser genius might have given them. The main object in both seems wrong,
or at best insufficient; in the one case he looked less to achievement
than to effect; in the other he aimed rather at money-getting than at
enjoyment; which is the more deplorable, as a man so greatly gifted must
have been in every way fitted to apprehend, to relish, and to realize all
noble and subtle pleasure in its more vigorous forms and in its more
delicate sense. What he has done however is excellent; and we need not
inquire with a captious ingratitude whether another could have done
better: that meaner men have since done worse, we know and lament. Too
often the murderer is not an artist; and the converse defect is no doubt
yet more unhappily frequent. On all accounts we may suppose that in days
perhaps not remote a philosophic posterity, mindful that the harvest of
art has few reapers worthy of their hire, and well aware that what is
exalted must also be exceptional, will inscribe with due honour upon the
list of men who have deserved well of mankind the name of Wainwright.
Those who would depreciate his performance as a simple author must
recollect that in accordance with the modern receipt he "lived his poems;"
that the age prefers deeds to songs; that to do great things is better
than to write; that action is of eternity, fiction of time; and that these
poems were doubtless the greater for being "inarticulate." Remembering
which things, the sternest critic will not deny that no kaiser or king
ever "polished his stanza" to better purpose with more strenuous will.

What concerns us at present is, that there grew up between Blake and
Wainwright an intimacy not unpleasing to commemorate. An artist in words,
in oils, and in drugs, Wainwright had an exquisite power of recognition,
and a really noble relish of all excellence. No good work came in his way
but he praised it with all his might. The mixture of keen insight with
frank pleasure, innate justice of eye with fresh effusion of enjoyment,
gives to his papers on art a special colour or savour which redeems the
offences of a tricked and tinselled style. Clearly too he did what he
could for Blake in the way of journalism; but a super-editorial thickness
of hide and head repelled the light sharp shafts loosed from a bow too
relaxed by too unsteady a hand. It is lamentable that the backstroke of a
recalcitrant hoof should have broken this bowman's arm when it might have
done good service. Help shown to Blake about this time, especially help of
the swift efficient nature that Wainwright would have given, might have
been infinitely important; it was no light thing to come so near and yet
fall short of. Exposition of the beloved "Song of Jerusalem," adequate at
least on the side of pure art, would assuredly have given the great old
man pleasure beyond words and beyond gold. This too he was not to have.
There are men set about the ways of life who seem made only to fulfil the
office of thorns; it is difficult for retrospection to observe that they
have done anything but hurt and hinder the feet of higher men. Doubtless
they have had their use and taken their pleasure. These have left no
trace; we can still see the scars they made on the hand and the fragments
they rent from the cloak of a great man as he passed by them. A little of
the honour which he has lately received would have been to Blake in his
life a great and pleasant thing to attain; praise of his work now leaves
an after-taste of bitterness on the lips which utter it. His work, not
done for wages, hardly repaid with thanks, we can touch and handle and
remark upon as ability is given us; "nothing can touch him further." Those
who might have done what we would give much to do left it undone. And even
to men who enjoy such power to do and such wisdom to choose greatly as
were the inheritance of Blake it is not a thing worth no regret to have
been allowed upon earth no comprehension and no applause. He had a better
part in life than the pleasure that comes of such things; but these also
he might have had. He would not come down to chaffer for them or stoop to
gather them up from unclean or unsafe ground; but they might have been
laid at his feet freely and with thanks; which they never were.

Foiled as he had been in his good purpose, the critic at least won full
gratitude from the gentle and great nature of his friend, who repaid him
in a kingly manner with praise worth gold. One may hope that a picture
painted by Wainwright and commended by Blake will yet be traced somewhere,
in spite of the singular fate which hung upon so much of their lives, and
which still obscures so much of their work. At least its subject and
quality should be sought out and remembered. But for the strange collision
with social laws which broke up his life and scattered his designs, it
might also be hoped that some other relics of Wainwright would be found
adrift in manuscript or otherwise, and a collection of his stray works be
completed and published, with an adequate notice of his life, well weeded
of superfluous lamentations, duly qualified to put an end to perversion
and foolish fancies, clear of deprecation or distortion, just, sufficient,
and close to the purpose. Few things would be better worth doing by a
competent editor.

Even of the "Inventions to the Book of Job," as far as I know, no especial
notice was taken. Upon these, the greatest of all Blake's designs, such
noble exposition has now at length been bestowed that further remark may
henceforward well be spared. This commentary has something of the stately
beauty and vigorous gravity of style which distinguish the work spoken of.
Blake himself, had he undertaken to write notes on his designs, must have
done them less justice than this. The perfect apprehension and the perfect
representation of the great qualities which all men, according to their
capacity, must here in some degree perceive, give to these notes a value
beyond that of mere eloquence or of mere sympathy. The words chosen do not
merely render the subject with fluency and fitness; they attain a
choiceness and exaltation of expression, which give to the writing much of
the character of the designs. Whether or not from any exceptional aptitude
in the material, these designs are more lucid and dramatic in effect than
perhaps any of Blake's works. His specialties of belief or sentiment
hardly show in this series at all; except perhaps in the passionate and
penitent character which seems here to supplant the traditional divine
look of patience and power. The whole work has in it a vibration as of
fire; even the full stars and serene lines of hill are set in frameworks
of fervent sky or throbbing flame. But for the most part those intense
qualities of sleepless invention which in many of Blake's other works
impel him into fierce aberration and blind ecstasy, through ways which few
can tread and mists which few can pierce, are now happily diverted and
kept at work upon the exquisite borders and appendages. In these there is
enough of fiery fancy and tender structure of symbol to employ the whole
wide and vivid imagination of the artist. And throughout the series there
is a largeness and a loftiness of manner which sustain the composition at
the height of the poem. In the highest flights of spiritual passion and
speculation, in the subtle contention with fate and imperious agony of
appeal against heaven, Blake has matched himself against his text, and
translated its sharp and profound harmonies into a music of design not
less adorable.

Those who have read with any care or comprehension the excellent chapters
on Blake's personal life will regret, not it may be without a keen
suppressed sense of vain vexation, that the author did not live to get
sight of the letters which have since been found and published. They will
at least observe with how much reason the editor of the _Life_ has desired
us to notice the close and complete confirmation given by that
correspondence to the accuracy of these chapters. No tribute more valuable
could be devised to the high sincerity, the clear sagacity, the vigorous
sense of truth and lucid power of proof, which have left us for the first
time an acceptable and endurable portrait of Blake. All earlier attempts
were mere masses of blot and scratch, evidently impossible and false on
the face of them, and even pitifully conscious that they could not be
true, not being human. The bewildered patronage, fear, contempt, goodwill
and despair which Blake had excited among those hapless biographers have
left in their forlorn failures a certain element of despicable pathos. We
have now, thanks to no happier chance, but solely to the strenuous ability
and fidelity of a man qualified to study and to speak upon the matter, a
trustworthy, perspicuous, and coherent summary of the actual facts of
Blake's life, of the manner in which he worked, and of the causes which
made his work what it was.

Among these late labours of Blake the "Dante" may take a place of some
prominence. The seven published plates, though quite surprisingly various
in merit, are worth more notice than has yet been spared them. Three at
least, for poetical power and nobility of imaginative detail, are up to
the artist's highest mark. Others have painted the episode of Francesca
with more or less of vigour and beauty; once above all an artist to whom
any reference here must be taken as especially apposite has given with the
tenderest perfection of power, first the beauty of beginning love in the
light and air of life on earth, then the passion of imperishable desire
under the dropping tongues of flame in hell. To the right the lovers are
drawn close, yearning one toward another with touch of tightened hands and
insatiable appeal of lips; behind them the bower lattice opens on deep
sunshine and luminous leaves; to the left, they drift before the wind of
hell, floated along the misty and straining air, fastened one upon another
among the fires, pale with perpetual division of pain; and between them
the witnesses stand sadly, as men that look before and after. Blake has
given nothing like this: of personal beauty and special tenderness his
design has none; it starts from other ground. Often as the lovers had been
painted, here first has any artist desired to paint the second circle
itself. To most illustrators, as to most readers, and (one might say) to
Dante himself, the rest are swallowed up in those two supreme martyrs.
Here we see, not one or two, but the very circle of the souls that sinned
by lust, as Dante saw it; and as Keats afterwards saw it in the dream
embalmed by his sonnet; the revolution of infinite sorrowing spirits
through the bitter air and grievous hurricane of hell. Through strange
immense implications of snake-shaped fold beyond fold, the involved chain
of figures that circle and return flickers in wan white outline upon the
dense dark. Under their feet is no stay as on earth; over their heads is
no light as in heaven. They have no rest, and no resting-place: they
revolve like circles of curling foam or fire. The two witnesses, who alone
among all the mobile mass have ground whereon to set foot, stand apart
upon a broken floor-work of roots and rocks, made rank with the slime and
sprawl of rotten weed and foul flag-leaves of Lethe. Detail of drawing or
other technical work is not the strong point of the design; but it does
incomparably well manage to render the sense of the matter in hand, the
endless measured motion, the painful and fruitless haste as of leaves or
smoke upon the wind, the grey discomforted air and dividing mist. Blake
has thoroughly understood and given back the physical symbols of this
first punishment in Dante; the whirling motion of his figures has however
more of blind violence and brute speed than the text seems to indicate:
they are dashed and dragged one upon another like weed or shingle torn up
in the drift of a breaking sea: overthrown or beaten down, haled or
crushed together, as if by inanimate strength of iron or steam: not moved
as we expect to see them, in sad rapidity of stately measure and even time
of speed. The flame-like impulse of idea natural to Blake cannot
absolutely match itself against Dante's divine justice and intense innate
forbearance in detail; nor so comprehend, as by dint of reproduction to
compete with, that supreme sense of inward and outward right which rules
and attunes every word of the _Commedia_.

Two other drawings in this series are worth remark and praise; the sixth
and seventh in order. In the sixth, Dante and Virgil, standing in a niche
of rifted rock faced by another cliff up and down which a reptile crowd
of spirits swarms and sinks, look down on the grovelling and swine-like
flocks of Malebolge; lying tumbled about the loathsome land in hateful
heaps of leprous flesh and dishevelled deformity, with limbs contorted,
clawing nails, and staring horror of hair and eyes: one figure thrown down
in a corner of the crowded cliff-side, her form and face drowned in an
overflow of ruined raining tresses. The pure grave folds of the two poets'
robes, long and cleanly carved as the straight drapery of a statue, gain
chastity of contrast from the swarming surge and monstrous mass of all
foulest forms beneath, against the reek of which both witnesses stop their
noses with their gowns. Behind and between, huge outlines of dark hill and
sharp curves of crag show like stiffened ridges of solid sea, amid heaving
and glaring motion of vapour and fire. Slight as the workmanship is of
this design also, alien as is perhaps its structure of precipice and
mountain from the Dantesque conception of descending circles and narrowing
sides, it has a fiery beauty of its own; the background especially, with
its climbing or crawling flames, the dark hard strength and sweep of its
sterile ridges, seen by fierce fits of reflected light, washed about with
surf and froth of tideless fire, and heavily laden with the lurid languor
of hell. In the seventh design we reach the circle of traitors; the foot
of the passenger strikes against one frost-bound face; others lie
straight, with crowned congealing hair and beard taken in the tightening
rivets of ice. To the right a swarm of huge and huddled figures seems
gathering with moan or menace behind a veil of frozen air, a mask of
hardening vapour; and from each side the bitter light of ice or steel
falls grey in cruel refraction. Into the other four designs we will not
enter; some indeed are too savagely reckless in their ugly and barren
violation of form or law, to be redeemed by even an intenser apprehension
of symbol and sense; and one at least, though with noble suggestions
dropped about it, is but half sketched in. In that of the valley of
serpents there is however a splendid excess of horror and prodigal agony;
the ravenous delight of the closing and laughing mouths, the folded
tension of every scale and ring, the horrible head caught and crushed with
the last shriek between its teeth and the last strain upon its eyelids, in
the serrated jaws of the erect serpent--all have the brand of Blake upon
them.

These works were the last he was to achieve; out of the whole Dantesque
series, seven designs alone have ever won their way into such notice as
engraving could earn for them. The latest chapters of Blake's life are
perhaps also the noblest. His poverty, if that word implies anything of a
destitute or sordid way of living, seems to have grown and swollen
somewhat beyond its actual size in the dim form of report. Stories have
come to hand of late, which, being seemingly accurate in the main, though
not as yet duly fixed in detail or date, remove any such ground of fear.
They do better; they bring proof once again of the noble charity, the
tender exaltation of mind, the swift bounty of hand, which would have made
memorable a man meaner in talent. Once, it is said, he lent L40 to some
friend in distress, which friend's wife, having laid out most of her
windfall in dress, thought Mrs. Blake might like to see _that_ by way of
change for her husband's money. Once too they received into their lodging
(into which does not yet seem certain) a young student of art, sick and
poor, who died some time after upon their hands. These things, and such as
these, we know dimly. One or two such deeds, seen through such dull vague
obstruction, in the midst of so many things forgotten, should be taken to
imply much. How few we know of, it is easy to say; how many there must
have been, it is not easy. This also may be remembered, that the man so
liberal when he had little might once have had much to give, and would not
take it at the price. It is recorded on the authority of a personal
friend, that some proposal had once been made to "engage Blake as teacher
of drawing to the royal family"; a proposal declined on his part from no
folly or vulgarity of prepossession, but from a simple and noble sense of
things reasonable and right. For once, it is also said, some samples of
his work were laid before the king, not then, unluckily, in his
strait-waistcoat; "Take them away!" spluttered the lunatic--not quite as
yet "blind, mad, despised, and dying," as when Byron and Shelley embalmed
him in corrosive rhymes; not all of these as yet. But as a great man then
alive and yet living[8] has well asked--"What mortal ever heard Any good
of George the Third?" Blake's MSS. contain an occasional allusion
expressive of no ardent reverence for the person or family of that insane
Dagon, so long left standing as the leaden rather than brazen idol of
hypocrites and dunces. As to the arts, it was well for Blake to keep clear
of the patron of West. All he ever got from government was the risk of
hanging, or such minor penalty as that equitable time might have
inflicted on seditious laxity of speech and thought.

In smaller personal matters, Blake was as fearless and impulsive as in his
conduct of these graver affairs. Seeing once, somewhere about St. Giles's,
a wife knocked about by some husband or other violent person, in the open
street, a bystander saw this also--that a small swift figure coming up in
full swing of passion fell with such counter violence of reckless and
raging rebuke upon the poor ruffian, that he recoiled and collapsed, with
ineffectual cudgel; persuaded, as the bystander was told on calling
afterwards, that the very devil himself had flown upon him in defence of
the woman; such Tartarean overflow of execration and objurgation had
issued from the mouth of her champion. It was the fluent tongue of Blake
which had proved too strong for this fellow's arm: the artist, doubtless,
not caring to remember the consequences, proverbial even before Moliere's
time, of such interference with conjugal casualties.

These things, whenever it was that they happened, were now of the past; as
were many labours of many days, to be followed by not many more. Among a
few good friends, and not without varieties of changed scene and company,
Blake drew daily nearer to death. Of all the records of these his latter
years, the most valuable perhaps are those furnished by Mr. Crabb
Robinson, whose cautious and vivid transcription of Blake's actual speech
is worth more than much vague remark, or than any commentary now possible
to give. A certain visible dislike and vexation excited by the mystic
violence of Blake's phrases, by the fierce simplicity of his mental
bearing, have not been allowed to impair the excellent justice of tone
and evident accuracy of report which give to these notes their singular
value. In his correspondence, in his conversation, and in his prophecies,
Blake was always at unity with himself; not, it seems to us, actually
inconsistent or even illogical in his fitful varieties of speech and
expression. His faith was large and his creed intricate; in the house of
his belief there were many mansions. In these notes, for instance, the
terms "atheism" and "education" are wrested to peculiar uses; education
must mean not exactly training, but moral tradition and the retailed
sophistries of artificial right and wrong; atheism, as applicable to
Dante, must mean adherence to the received "God of this world"--that
confusion of the Creator with the Saviour which was to Blake the main rock
of offence in all religious systems less mystic than his own; being
indeed, together with "Deism," the perpetual butt of his prophetic slings
and arrows. All this, however, we must leave now for time to enlighten in
due course as it best may; meanwhile some last word has to be said
concerning Blake's life and death.

To a life so gentle and great, so brave and stainless, there could be but
one manner of end, come when and how it might; a serene and divine death,
full of placid ardour and hope unspotted by fear. Having lived long
without a taint of shame upon his life, having long laboured without a
stain of falsehood upon his work, it was no hard task for him to set the
seal of a noble death upon that noble life and labour. He, it might be
said, whom the gods love well need not always die young; for this man died
old in years at least, having done work enough for three men's lives of
strenuous talent and spirit. After certain stages of pain and recovery and
relapse, the end came on the second Sunday in August 1827. A few days
before he had made a last drawing of his wife--faithful to him and loving
almost beyond all recorded faith and love. Forty-five years she had cloven
to him and served him all the days of her life with all the might of her
heart; for a space of four years and two months they were to be divided
now. He did not draw her like, it appears: that which "she had ever been
to him," no man could have drawn. Of her, out of just reverence and
gratitude that such goodness should have been, we will not say more. All
words are coarse and flat that men can use to praise one who has so
lived.[9] It has been told more than once in print--it can never be told
without a sense of some strange and sweet meaning--how, as Blake lay with
all the tides of his life setting towards the deep final sleep, he made
and sang new fragments of verse, the last oblations he was to bring who
had brought so many since his first conscience of the singular power and
passion within himself that impels a man to such work. Of these songs not
a line has been spared us; for us, it seems, they were not made. In
effect, they were not his, he said. At last, after many songs and hours,
still in the true and pure presence of his wife, his death came upon him
in the evening like a sleep.[10]

Only such men die so; though the worst have been known to die calmly and
the meanest bravely, this pure lyric rapture of spirit and perfect music
of sundering soul and body can only be given to these few. Knowing nothing
of whence and whither, the how and the when of a man's death we can at
least know, and put the knowledge to what uses we may. In this case, if we
will, it may help us to much in the way of insight and judgment; it may
show us many things that need not be wrought up into many words. For what
more is there now to say of the man? Of the work he did we must speak
gradually, if we are to speak adequately. Into his life and method of work
we have looked, not without care and veneration; and find little to
conclude with by way of comment. If to any reader it should not by this
time appear that he was great and good among the chief of good and great
men, it will not appear for any oration of ours. Most funeral speeches
also are cheap and inconclusive. Especially they must be so, or seem so,
when delivered over the body of a great man to whom his own generation
could not even grant a secure grave. In 1831 his wife was buried beside
him: where they are laid now no man can say: it seems certain only that
their graves were violated by hideous official custom, and their bones
cast out into some consecrated pit among other nameless relics of poor
men. It might not have hurt them even to foresee this; but nevertheless
the doers of such a thing had better not have done it. Having missed of a
durable grave, Blake need not perhaps look for the "weak witness" of any
late memorial. Such things in life were indifferent to him; and should be
more so now. To be buried among his nearest kin, and to have the English
burial service read over him, he did, we are told, express some wish; and
this was done. The world of men was less by one great man, and was none
the wiser; while he lived he was called mad and kept poor; after his death
much of his work was destroyed; and in course of time not so much as his
grave was left him. All which to him must matter little, but is yet worth
a recollection more fruitful than regret. The dead only, and not the
living, ought, while any trace of his doings remains, to forget what was
the work and what were the wages of William Blake.




II.--LYRICAL POEMS.


We must here be allowed space to interpolate a word of the briefest
possible comment on the practical side of Blake's character. No man ever
lived and laboured in hotter earnest; and the native energy in him had the
property of making all his atmosphere of work intense and keen as
fire--too sharp and rare in quality of heat to be a good working element
for any more temperate intellect. Into every conceivable channel or byway
of work he contrived to divert and infuse this overflowing fervour of
mind; the least bit of engraving, the poorest scrap or scratch of drawing
or writing traceable to his hands, has on it the mark of passionate labour
and enjoyment; but of all this devotion of laborious life, the only upshot
visible to most of us consists in a heap of tumbled and tangled relics,
verse and prose mainly inexplicable, paintings and engravings mainly
unacceptable if not unendurable. And if certain popular theories of the
just aims of life, duties of an earnest-minded man, and meritorious nature
of practical deeds and material services only, are absolutely correct--in
that case the work of this man's life is certainly a sample of deplorable
waste and failure. A religion which has for Walhalla some factory of the
Titans, some prison fitted with moral cranks and divine treadmills of all
the virtues, can have no place among its heroes for the most energetic of
mere artists. To him, as to others of his kind, all faith, all virtue, all
moral duty or religious necessity, was not so much abrogated or superseded
as summed up, included and involved, by the one matter of art. To him, as
to other such workmen, it seemed better to do this well and let all the
rest drift than to do incomparably well in all other things and dispense
with this one. For this was the thing he had to do; and this once well
done, he had the assurance of a certain faith that other things could not
be wrong with him. As long as two such parties exist among men who think
and act, it must always be some pleasure to deal with a man of either
party who has no faith or hope in compromise. These middle-men, with some
admirable self-sufficient theory of reconciliation between two directly
opposite aims and forces, are fit for no great work on either side. If it
be in the interest of facts really desirable that "the poor Fine Arts
should take themselves away," let it be fairly avowed and preached in a
distinct manner. That thesis, so delivered, is comprehensible, and
deserves respect. One may add that if art can be destroyed it by all means
ought to be. If for example the art of verse is not indispensable and
indestructible, the sooner it is put out of the way the better. If
anything can be done instead better worth doing than painting or poetry,
let that preferable thing be done with all the might and haste that may
be attainable. And if to live well be really better than to write or paint
well, and a noble action more valuable than the greatest poem or most
perfect picture, let us have done at once with the meaner things that
stand in the way of the higher. For we cannot on any terms have
everything; and assuredly no chief artist or poet has ever been fit to
hold rank among the world's supreme benefactors in the way of doctrine,
philanthropy, reform, guidance, or example: what is called the artistic
faculty not being by any means the same thing as a general capacity for
doing good work, diverted into this one strait or shallow in default of a
better outlet. Even were this true for example of a man so imperfect as
Burns, it would remain false of a man so perfect as Keats. The great men,
on whichever side one finds them, are never found trying to take truce or
patch up terms. Savonarola burnt Boccaccio; Cromwell proscribed
Shakespeare. The early Christians were not great at verse or sculpture.
Men of immense capacity and energy who do seem to think or assert it
possible to serve both masters--a Dante, a Shelley, a Hugo--poets whose
work is mixed with and coloured by personal action or suffering for some
cause moral or political--these even are no real exceptions. It is not as
artists that they do or seem to do this. The work done may be, and in such
high cases often must be, of supreme value to art; but not the moral
implied. Strip the sentiments and re-clothe them in bad verse, what
residue will be left of the slightest importance to art? Invert them,
retaining the manner or form (supposing this feasible, which it might be),
and art has lost nothing. Save the shape, and art will take care of the
soul for you:[11] unless that is all right, she will refuse to run or
start at all; but the shape or style of workmanship each artist is bound
to look to, whether or no he may choose to trouble himself about the moral
or other bearings of his work. This principle, which makes the manner of
doing a thing the essence of the thing done, the purpose or result of it
the accident, thus reversing the principle of moral or material duty, must
inevitably expose art to the condemnation of the other party--the party of
those who (as aforesaid) regard what certain of their leaders call an
earnest life or a great acted poem (that is, material virtue or the mere
doing and saying of good or instructive deeds and words) as infinitely
preferable to any possible feat of art. Opinion is free, and the choice
always open; but if any man leaning on crutches of theory chooses to halt
between the two camps, it shall be at his own peril--imminent peril of
conviction as one unfit for service on either side. For Puritanism is in
this one thing absolutely right about art; they cannot live and work
together, or the one under the other. All ages which were great enough to
have space for both, to hold room for a fair fighting-field between them,
have always accepted and acted upon this evident fact. Take the
Renaissance age for one example; you must have Knox or Ronsard, Scotch or
French; not both at once; there is no place under reformers for the
singing of a "Pleiade." Take the mediaeval period in its broadest sense;
not to speak of the notably heretical and immoral Albigeois with their
exquisite school of heathenish verse, or of that other rebellious
gathering under the great emperor Frederick II., a poet and pagan, when
eastern arts and ideas began to look up westward at one man's bidding and
open out Saracenic prospects in the very face and teeth of the
Church--look at home into familiar things, and see by such poems as
Chaucer's _Court of Love_, absolutely one in tone and handling as it is
with the old Albigensian _Aucassin_ and all its paganism,[12] how the
poets of the time, with their eager nascent worship of beautiful form and
external nature, dealt with established opinion and the incarnate
moralities of church or household. It is easy to see why the Church on its
own principle found it (as in the Albigensian case) a matter of the
gravest necessity to have such schools of art and thought cut down or
burnt out. Priest and poet, all those times through, were proverbially on
terms of reciprocal biting and striking. That magnificent invention of
making "Art the handmaid of Religion" had not been stumbled upon in the
darkness of those days. Neither minstrel nor monk would have caught up the
idea with any rapture. As indeed they would have been unwise to do; for
the thing is impossible. Art is not like fire or water, a good servant and
bad master; rather the reverse. She will help in nothing, of her own
knowledge or freewill: upon terms of service you will get worse than
nothing out of her. Handmaid of religion, exponent of duty, servant of
fact, pioneer of morality, she cannot in any way become; she would be none
of these things though you were to bray her in a mortar. All the battering
in the world will never hammer her into fitness for such an office as
that. It is at her peril, if she tries to do good: one might say,
borrowing terms from the other party, "she shall not try that under
penalty of death and damnation." Her business is not to do good on other
grounds, but to be good on her own: all is well with her while she sticks
fast to that. To ask help or furtherance from her in any extraneous good
work is exactly as rational as to expect lyrical beauty of form and flow
in a logical treatise. The contingent result of having good art about you
and living in a time of noble writing or painting may no doubt be this;
that the spirit and mind of men then living will receive on some points a
certain exaltation and insight caught from the influence of such forms and
colours of verse or painting; will become for one thing incapable of
tolerating bad work, and capable therefore of reasonably relishing the
best; which of course implies and draws with it many other advantages of a
sort you may call moral or spiritual. But if the artist does his work with
an eye to such results or for the sake of bringing about such
improvements, he will too probably fail even of them. Art for art's sake
first of all, and afterwards we may suppose all the rest shall be added to
her (or if not she need hardly be overmuch concerned); but from the man
who falls to artistic work with a moral purpose, shall be taken away even
that which he has--whatever of capacity for doing well in either way he
may have at starting. A living critic[13] of incomparably delicate insight
and subtly good sense, himself "impeccable" as an artist, calls this "the
heresy of instruction" (_l'heresie de l'enseignement_): one might call it,
for the sake of a shorter and more summary name, the great moral heresy.
Nothing can be imagined more futile; nothing so ruinous. Once let art
humble herself, plead excuses, try at any compromise with the Puritan
principle of doing good, and she is worse than dead. Once let her turn
apologetic, and promise or imply that she really will now be "loyal to
fact" and useful to men in general (say, by furthering their moral work or
improving their moral nature), she is no longer of any human use or value.
The one fact for her which is worth taking account of is simply mere
excellence of verse or colour, which involves all manner of truth and
loyalty necessary to her well-being. That is the important thing; to have
her work supremely well done, and to disregard all contingent
consequences. You may extract out of Titian's work or Shakespeare's any
moral or immoral inference you please; it is none of their business to see
after that. Good painting or writing, on any terms, is a thing quite
sufficiently in accordance with fact and reality for them. Supplant art by
all means if you can; root it out and try to plant in its place something
useful or at least safe, which at all events will not impede the noble
moral labour and trammel the noble moral life of Puritanism. But in the
name of sense and fact itself let us have done with all abject and
ludicrous pretence of coupling the two in harness or grafting the one on
the other's stock: let us hear no more of the moral mission of earnest
art; let us no longer be pestered with the frantic and flatulent
assumptions of quasi-secular clericalism willing to think the best of all
sides, and ready even, with consecrating hand, to lend meritorious art
and poetry a timely pat or shove. Philistia had far better (always
providing it be possible) crush art at once, hang or burn it out of the
way, than think of plucking out its eyes and setting it to grind moral
corn in the Philistine mills; which it is certain not to do at all well.
Once and again the time has been that there was no art worth speaking of
afloat anywhere in the world; but there never has been or can have been a
time when art, or any kind of art worth having, took active service under
Puritanism, or indulged for its part in the deleterious appetite of saving
souls or helping humanity in general along the way of labour and
progress.[14] Let no artist or poet listen to the bland bark of those
porter dogs of the Puritan kingdom even when they fawn and flirt with
tongue or tail. _Cave canem._ That Cerberus of the portals of Philistia
will swallow your honey-cake to no purpose; if he does not turn and rend
you, his slaver as he licks your hand will leave it impotent and palsied
for all good work.

Thus much it seemed useful to premise, by way of exposition rather than
excursion, so as once for all to indicate beyond chance of mistake the
real point of view taken during life by Blake, and necessary to be taken
by those who would appreciate his labours and purposes. Error on this
point would be ruinous to any student. No one again need be misled by the
artist's eager incursions into grounds of faith or principle; his design
being merely to readjust all questions of such a kind by the light of art
and law of imagination--to reduce all outlying provinces, and bring them
under government of his own central empire--the "fourfold spiritual city"
of his vision. Power of imaginative work and insight--"the Poetic Genius,
as you now call it"--was in his mind, we shall soon have to see, "the
first principle" of all things moral or material, "and all the others
merely derivative;" a hazardous theory in its results and corollaries, but
one which Blake at all events was always ready to push to its utmost
consequences and defend at its extreme outworks. Against all pretensions
on the part of science or experimental reasoning to assume this post he
was especially given to rebel and recalcitrate. Whether or no he were
actually prepared to fight science in earnest on its own pitched field--to
dispute seriously the conquest of facts achieved by it--may be
questionable; I for one am inclined to disbelieve this, and to refer much
of his verbal pugnacity on such matters to the strong irregular humour,
rough and loose as that of children, and the half simple half scornful
love of paradox, which were ingrained in the man. For argument and proof
he had the contempt of a child or an evangelist. Not that he would have
fallen back in preference upon the brute resource of thaumaturgy; the
coarse and cheap machinery of material miracle was wholly insufficient and
despicable to him. No wonder-monger of the low sort need here have hoped
for a pupil, a colleague, or an authority. This the biographer has acutely
noted, and taken well into account; as we must all do under pain of waste
time and dangerous error. Let this too be taken note of; that to believe a
thing is not necessarily to heed or respect it; to despise a thing is not
the same as to disbelieve it. Those who argue against the reality of the
meaner forms of "spiritualism" in disembodied life, on the ground
apparently that whatever is not of the patent tangible flesh must be of
high imperishable importance, are merely acting on the old ascetic
assumption that the body is of its nature base and the soul of its nature
noble, and that between the two there is a great gulf fixed, neither to be
bridged over nor filled up. Blake, as a mystic of the higher and subtler
kind, would have denied this superior separate vitality of the spirit; but
far from inferring thence that the soul must expire with the body, would
have maintained that the essence of the body must survive with the essence
of the soul: accepting thus (as we may have to observe he did), in its
most absolute and profound sense, the doctrine of the Resurrection of the
Flesh. As a temporary blind and bar to the soul while dwelling on earth,
fit only (if so permitted) to impede the spiritual vision and hamper the
spiritual feet, he did indeed appear to contemn the "vegetable" and
sensual nature of man; but on no ascetic grounds. Admitting once for all
that it was no fit or just judge of things spiritual, he claimed for the
body on its own ground an equal honour and an equal freedom with the soul;
denying the river's channel leave to be called the river--refusing to the
senses the license claimed for them by materialism to decide by means of
bodily insight or sensation questions removed from the sphere of sensual
evidence--and reserving always the absolute assurance and certain faith
that things do exist of which the flesh can take no account, but only the
spirit--he would grant to the physical nature the full right to every form
of physical indulgence: would allow the largest liberty to all powers and
capacities of pleasure proper to the pure bodily life. In a word,
translated into crude practical language, his creed was about this: as
long as a man believes all things he may do any thing; scepticism (not
sin) is alone damnable, being the one thing purely barren and negative; do
what you will with your body, as long as you refuse it leave to disprove
or deny the life eternally inherent in your soul. That we believe is what
people call or have called by some such name as "antinomian mysticism:" do
anything but doubt, and you shall not in the end be utterly lost. Clearly
enough it was Blake's faith; and one assuredly grounded not on mere
contempt of the body, but on an equal reverence for spirit and flesh as
the two sides or halves of a completed creature: a faith which will allow
to neither license to confute or control the other. The body shall not
deny, and the spirit shall not restrain; the one shall not prescribe doubt
through reasoning; the other shall not preach salvation through
abstinence. A man holding such tenets sees no necessity to deny that the
indulged soul may be in some men as ignoble as the indulged body in others
may be noble; and that a spirit ignoble while embodied need not become
noble or noticeable by the process of getting disembodied; in other words,
that death or change need not be expected to equalize the unequal by
raising or lowering spirits to one settled level. Much of the existing
evidence as to baser spiritual matters, Blake, like other men of candid
sense and insight, would we may suppose have accepted--and dropped with
the due contempt into the mass of facts worth forgetting only, which the
experience of every man must carry till his memory succeeds in letting go
its hold of them. Nothing, he would doubtless have said, is worth
disputing in disproof of, which if proved would not be worth giving thanks
for. Let such things be or not be as the fates of small things please; but
will any one prove or disprove for me the things I hold by warrant of
imaginative knowledge? things impossible to discover, to analyze, to
attest, to undervalue, to certify, or to doubt?

This old war--not (as some would foolishly have it defined) a war between
facts and fancies, reason and romance, poetry and good sense, but simply
between the imagination which apprehends the spirit of a thing and the
understanding which dissects the body of a fact--this strife which can
never be decided or ended--was for Blake the most important question
possible. He for one, madman or no madman, had the sense to see that the
one thing utterly futile to attempt was a reconciliation between two sides
of life and thought which have no community of work or aim imaginable.
This is no question of reconciling contraries. Admit all the implied
pretensions of art, they remain simply nothing to science; accept all the
actual deductions of science, they simply signify nothing to art. The
eternal "Apres?" is answer enough for both in turn. "True, then, if you
will have it; but what have we to do with your good or bad poetries and
paintings?" "Undeniably; but what are we to gain by your deductions and
discoveries, right or wrong?" The betrothal of art and science were a
thing harder to bring about and more profitless to proclaim than "the
marriage of heaven and hell." It were better not to fight, but to part in
peace; but better certainly to fight than to temporize, where no
reasonable truce can be patched up. Poetry or art based on loyalty to
science is exactly as absurd (and no more) as science guided by art or
poetry. Neither in effect can coalesce with the other and retain a right
to exist. Neither can or (while in its sober senses) need wish to destroy
the other; but they must go on their separate ways, and in this life their
ways can by no possibility cross. Neither can or (unless in some fit of
fugitive insanity) need wish to become valuable or respectable to the
other: each must remain, on its own ground and to its own followers, a
thing of value and deserving respect. To art, that is best which is most
beautiful; to science, that is best which is most accurate; to morality,
that is best which is most virtuous. Change or quibble upon the simple and
generally accepted significance of these three words, "beautiful,"
"accurate," "virtuous," and you may easily (if you please, or think it
worth while) demonstrate that the aim of all three is radically one and
the same; but if any man be correct in thinking this exercise of the mind
worth the expenditure of his time, that time must indeed be worth very
little. You can say (but had perhaps better not say) that beauty is the
truthfullest, accuracy the most poetic, and virtue the most beautiful of
things; but a man of ordinary or decent insight will perceive that you
have merely reduced an affair of things to an affair of words--shifted the
body of one thing into the clothes of another--and proved actually
nothing.

To attest by word or work the identity of things which never can become
identical, was no part of Blake's object in life. What work it fell to his
lot to do, that, having faith in the fates, he believed the best work
possible, and performed to admiration. It is in consequence of this belief
that, apart from all conjectural or problematic theory, the work he did is
absolutely good. Intolerant he was by nature to a degree noticeable even
among freethinkers and prophets; but the strange forms assumed by this
intolerance are best explicable by the singular facts of his training--his
perfect ignorance of well-known ordinary things and imperfect quaint
knowledge of much that lay well out of the usual way. He retained always
an excellent arrogance and a wholly laudable self-reliance; being
incapable of weak-eyed doubts or any shuffling modesty. His great
tenderness had a lining of contempt--his fiery self-assertion a kernel of
loyalty. No one, it is evident, had ever a more intense and noble
enjoyment of good or great works in other men--took sharper or deeper
delight in the sense of a loyal admiration: being of his nature noble,
fearless, and fond of all things good; a man made for believing. This
royal temper of mind goes properly with a keen relish of what excellence
or greatness a man may have in himself. Those must be readiest to feel and
to express unalloyed and lofty pleasure in the great powers and deeds of
a neighbour, who, while standing clear alike of reptile modesty and
pretentious presumption, perceive and know in themselves such qualities as
give them a right to admire and a right to applaud. If a man thinks meanly
of himself, he can hardly in reason think much of his judgment; if he
depreciates the value of his own work, he depreciates also the value of
his praise. Those are loyallest who have most of a just self-esteem; and
their applause is best worth having. It is scarcely conceivable that a man
should take delight in the real greatness or merit of his own work for so
pitiful and barren a reason as merely that it _is_ his own; should be
unable to pass with a fresh and equal enjoyment from the study and relish
of his own capacities and achievements to the study and relish of another
man's. A timid jealousy, easily startled into shrieks of hysterical malice
and disloyal spite, is (wherever you may fall in with it) the property of
base men and mean artists who, at sight of some person or thing greater
than themselves, are struck sharply by unconscious self-contempt, and at
once, whether they know it or not, lose heart or faith in their own
applauded work. To recognize their equal, even their better when he does
come, must be the greatest delight of great men. "All the gods," says a
French essayist, "delight in worship: is one lesser for the other's
godhead? Divine things give divine thanks for companionship; the stars
sang not one at once, but all together." Like all men great enough to
enjoy greatness, Blake was born with the gift of admiration; and in his
rapid and fervent nature it struck root and broke into flower at the
least glimpse or chance of favourable weather. Therefore, if on no other
ground, we may allow him his curious outbreaks of passionate dispraise and
scorn against all such as seemed to stand in the way of his art. Again, as
we have noted, he had a faith of his own, made out of art for art's sake,
and worked by means of art; and whatever made against this faith was as
hateful to him as any heresy to any pietist. In a rough and rapid way he
chose to mass and sum up under some one or two types, comprehensible at
first sight to few besides himself, the main elements of opposition which
he conceived to exist. Thus for instance the names of Locke and Newton, of
Bacon and Voltaire, recur with the most singular significance in his
writings, as emblems or incarnate symbols of the principles opposite to
his own: and when the clue is once laid hold of, and the ear once
accustomed to the curious habit of direct mythical metaphor or figure
peculiar to Blake--his custom of getting whole classes of men or opinions
embodied, for purposes of swift irregular attack, in some one
representative individual--much is at once clear and amenable to critical
reason which seemed before mere tempestuous incoherence and clamour of
bodiless rhetoric. There is also a certain half-serious perversity and
wilful personal humour in the choice and use of these representative
names, which must be taken into account by a startled reader unless he
wishes to run off at a false tangent. After all, it is perhaps impossible
for any one not specially qualified by nature for sympathy with such a
man's kind of work, to escape going wrong in his estimate of Blake; to
such excesses of paradox did the poet-painter push his favourite points,
and in such singular attire did he bring forward his most serious
opinions. But at least the principal and most evident chances of error may
as well be indicated, by way of warning off the over-hasty critic from
shoals on which otherwise he is all but certain to run.

It is a thing especially worth regretting that Balzac, in his
Swedenborgian researches, could not have fallen in with Blake's
"prophetic" works. Passed through the crucible of that supreme
intellect--submitted to the test of that supple practical sense, that
laborious apprehension, so delicate and so passionate at once, of all
forms of thought or energy, which were the great latent gifts of the
deepest and widest mind that ever worked within the limits of inventive
prose--the strange floating forces of Blake's instinctive and imaginative
work might have been explained and made applicable to direct ends in a way
we cannot now hope for. The incomparable power of condensing apparent
vapour into tangible and malleable form, of helping us to handle air and
measure mist, which is so instantly perceptible whenever Balzac begins to
open up any intricate point of physical or moral speculation, would here
have been beyond price. He alone who could push analysis to the verge of
creation, and with his marvellous clearness of eye and strength of hand
turn discovery almost to invention; he who was not "a prose Shakespeare"
merely, but rather perhaps a Shakespeare complete in all but the lyrical
faculty; he alone could have brought a scale to weigh this water, a sieve
to winnow this wind. That wonderful wisdom, never at fault on its own
ground, which made him not simply the chief of dramatic story, but also
the great master of morals,[15] would not have failed of foothold or
eyesight even in this cloudy and noisy borderland of vision and of faith.
Even to him too, the supreme student and interpreter of things, our
impulsive prophet with his plea of mere direct inspiration might have been
of infinite help and use: to such an eye and brain as his, Blake might
have made straight the ways which Swedenborg had left crooked, set right
the problems which mesmerism had set wrong. As however we cannot have
this, we must do what share of interpreter's work falls to our lot as well
as we can.

There are two points in the work of Blake which first claim notice and
explanation; two points connected, but not inseparable; his mysticism and
his mythology. This latter is in fact hardly more in its relation to the
former, than the clothes to the body or the body to the soul. To make
either comprehensible, it is requisite above all things to get sight of
the man in whom they became incarnate and active as forces or as opinions.
Now, to those who regard mysticism with distaste or contempt, as
essentially in itself a vain or noxious thing--a sealed bag or bladder
that can only be full either of wind or of poison--the man, being above
all and beyond all a mystic in the most subtle yet most literal sense,
must remain obscure and contemptible. Such readers--if indeed such men
should choose or care to become readers at all--will be (for one thing)
unable to understand that one may think it worth while to follow out and
track to its root the peculiar faith or fancy of a mystic without being
ready to accept his deductions and his assertions as absolute and durable
facts. Servility of extended hand or passive brain is the last quality
that a mystic of the nobler kind will demand or desire in his auditors.
Councils and synods may put forth notes issued under their stamp, may
exact of all recipients to play the part of clerks and indorse their paper
with shut eyes: to the mystic such a way of doing spiritual business would
seem the very frenzy of fatuity; whatever else may be profitable, that (he
would say) is suicidal. And assuredly it is not to be expected that
Blake's mystical creed, when once made legible and even partially
coherent, should prove likely to win over proselytes. Nor can this be the
wish or the object of a reasonable commentator, whose desire is merely to
do art a good turn in some small way, by explaining the "faith and works"
of a great artist. It is true that whatever a good poet or a good painter
has thought worth representing by verse or design must probably be worth
considering before one deliver judgment on it. But the office of an
apostle of some new faith and the business of a commentator on some new
evangel are two sufficiently diverse things. The present critic has not
(happily) to preach the gospel as delivered by Blake; he has merely, if
possible, to make the text of that gospel a little more readable. And this
must be worth doing, if it be worth while to touch on Blake's work at all.
What is true of all poets and artists worth judging is especially true of
him; that critics who attempt to judge him piecemeal do not in effect
judge him at all, but some one quite different from him, and some one (to
any serious student) probably more inexplicable than the real man. For
what are we to make of a man whose work deserves crowning one day and
hooting the next? If the "Songs" be so good, are not those who praise them
bound to examine and try what merit may be latent in the
"Prophecies"?--bound at least to explain as best they may how the one
comes to be worth so much and the other worth nothing? On this side alone
the biography appears to us emphatically deficient; here only do we feel
how much was lost, how much impaired by the untimely death of the writer.
Those who had to complete his work have done their part admirably well;
but here they have not done enough. We are not bound to accept Blake's
mysticism; we are bound to take some account of it. A disciple must take
his master's word for proof of the thing preached. This it would be folly
to expect of a biographer; even Boswell falls short of this, having
courage on some points to branch off from the strait pathway of his
teacher and strike into a small speculative track of his own. But a
biographer must be capable of expounding the evangel (or, if such a word
could be, "dysangel") of his hero, however far he may be from thinking it
worth acceptance. And this, one must admit, the writers on Blake have upon
the whole failed of doing. Consequently their critical remarks on such
specimens of Blake's more speculative and subtle work as did find favour
in their sight have but a narrow range and a limited value. Some clue to
the main character of the artist's habit of mind we may hope already to
have put into the reader's hands--some frayed and ravelled "end of the
golden string," which with due labour he may "wind up into a ball." To
pluck out the heart of Blake's mystery is a task which every man must be
left to attempt for himself: for this prophet is certainly not "easier to
be played on than a pipe." Keeping fast in hand what clue we have, we may
nevertheless succeed in making some further way among the clouds. One
thing is too certain; if we insist on having hard ground under foot all
the way we shall not get far. The land lying before us, bright with fiery
blossom and fruit, musical with blowing branches and falling waters, is
not to be seen or travelled in save by help of such light as lies upon
dissolving dreams and dividing clouds. By moonrise, to the sound of wind
at sunset, one may tread upon the limit of this land and gather as with
muffled apprehension some soft remote sense of the singing of its birds
and flowering of its fields.

This premised, we may start with a clear conscience. Of Blake's faith we
have by this time endeavoured to give the reader some conception--if a
faint one, yet at least not a false: of the form assumed by that faith
(what we have called the mythology) we need not yet take cognizance. To
follow out in full all his artistic and illustrative work, with a view to
extract from each separate fruit of it some core of significance, would be
an endless labour: and we are bound to consider what may be feasible
rather than what, if it were feasible, might be worth doing. Therefore the
purpose of this essay is in the main to deal with the artist's personal
work in preference to what is merely illustrative and decorative. Designs,
however admirable, made to order for the text of Blair, of Hayley, or of
Young, are in comparison with the designer's original and spontaneous work
mere extraneous by-play. These also are if anything better known than
Blake's other labours. Again, the mass of his surviving designs is so
enormous and as yet (except for the inestimable _Catalogue_ in Vol. 2 of
the _Life_) so utterly chaotic and unarrangeable that in such an element
one can but work as it were by fits and plunges. Of these designs there
must always be many which not having seen we cannot judge; many too on
which artists alone are finally competent to deliver sentence by
authority. Moreover the supreme merits as well as the more noticeable
qualities merely special and personal of Blake are best seen in his mixed
work. Where both text and design are wholly his own, and the two forms or
sides of his art so coalesce or overlap as to become inextricably
interfused, we have the best chance of seeing and judging what the workman
essentially was. In such an enterprise, we must be always duly grateful
for any help or chance of help given us: and for one invaluable thing we
have at starting to give due honour and thanks to the biographer. He has,
one may rationally hope, finally beaten to powder the rickety and flaccid
old theory of Blake's madness. Any one wishing to moot that question again
will have to answer or otherwise get over the facts and inferences so
excellently set out in Chap. xxxv.: to refute them we may fairly consider
impossible. Here at least no funeral notice or obsequies will be bestowed
on the unburied carcase of that forlorn fiction. Assuming as a reasonable
ground for our present labour that Blake was superior to the run of men,
we shall spend no minute of time in trying to prove that he was not
inferior. Logic and sense alike warn us off such barren ground.

Of the editing of the present selections--a matter evidently of most
delicate and infinite labour--we have here to say this only; that as far
as one can see it could not have been done better: and indeed that it
could only have been done so well by the rarest of happy chances. Even
with the already published poems there was enough work to get through; for
even these had suffered much from the curiously reckless and helpless
neglect of form which was natural to Blake when his main work was done and
his interest in the matter prematurely wound up. Those only who have dived
after the original copies can fully appreciate or apprehend with what
tenderness of justice and subtlety of sense these tumbled folds have been
gathered up and these ragged edges smoothed off. As much power and labour
has gone to the perfect adjustment of these relics of another man's work
as a meaner man could have dreamed only of expending on his own. Nor can
any one thoroughly enter into the value and excellence of the thing here
achieved who has not in himself the impulsive instinct of form--the
exquisite desire of just and perfect work. Alike to those who seem to be
above it as to those who are evidently below, such work must remain always
inappreciable and inexplicable. To the ingeniously chaotic intellect, with
its admirable aptitude for all such feats of conjectural cleverness as are
worked out merely by strain and spasm, it will seem an offensive waste of
good work. But to all who relish work for work's sake and art for art's it
will appear, as it is, simply invaluable--the one thing worth having yet
not to be had at any price or by any means, except when it falls in your
way by divine accident. True however as all this is of the earlier and
easier part of the editor's task, it is incomparably more true of the
arrangement and selection of poems fit for publishing out of the priceless
but shapeless chaos of unmanageable MSS. The good work here done and good
help here given it is not possible to over-estimate. Every light slight
touch of mere arrangement has the mark of a great art consummate in great
things--the imprint of a sure and strong hand, in which the thing to be
done lies safe and gathers faultless form. These great things too are so
small in mere size and separate place that they can never get praised in
due detail. They are great by dint of the achievement implied and the
forbearance involved. Only a chief among lyric poets could so have praised
the songs of Blake; only a leader among imaginative painters could so have
judged his designs; only an artist himself supreme at once in lordship of
colour and mastery of metre could so have spoken of Blake's gifts and
feats in metre and colour. Reading these notes, one can rest with
sufficient pleasure on the conviction that, wherever else there may be
failure in attaining the right word of judgment or of praise, here
certainly there is none. Here there is more than (what all critics may
have) goodwill and desire to give just thanks; for here there is
authority, and the right to seem right in delivering sentence.

But these notes, good as they are and altogether valuable, are the least
part of the main work. To the beauty and nobility of style, the exquisite
strength of sifted English, the keen vision and deep clearness of
expression, which characterize as well these brief prefaces as the notes
on _Job_ and that critical summary in the final chapter of the _Life_, one
need hardly desire men's attention; that splendid power of just language
and gift of grace in detail stand out at once distinguishable from the
surrounding work, praiseworthy as that also in the main is; neither from
the matter nor the manner can any careful critic mistake the exact moment
and spot where the editor of the poems has taken up any part of the
business, laid any finger on the mechanism of the book. But this work,
easier to praise, must have been also easier to perform than the more
immediate editorial labours which were here found requisite. With care
inappreciable and invaluable fidelity has the editing throughout been
done. The selection must of necessity have been to a certain degree
straitened and limited by many minor and temporary considerations;
publishers, tasters, and such-like, must have fingered the work here and
there, snuffing at this and nibbling at that as their manner is. For the
work and workman have yet their way to make in the judicious reading
world; and so long as they have, they are more or less in the lax limp
clutch of that "dieu ganache des bourgeois" who sits nodding and
ponderously dormant in the dust of publishing offices, ready at any jog of
the elbow to snarl and start--a new Pan, feeding on the pastures of a fat
and foggy land his Arcadian herds of review or magazine:

                          [Greek: enti ge pikros,
  kai hoi aei drimeia chola poti rhini kathetai].

Arcadian virtue and Boeotian brain, under the presidency of such a
stertorous and splenetic goat-god, given to be sleepy in broadest noonday,
are not the best crucibles for art to be tried in. Then, again, thought
had to be taken for the poems themselves; not merely how to expose them in
most acceptable form for public acceptance, but how at the same time to
give them in the main all possible fullness of fair play. This too by
dint of work and patience, still more by dint of pliable sense and taste,
has been duly accomplished. Future editions may be, and in effect will
have to be, altered and enlarged: it is as well for people to be aware
that they have not yet a final edition of Blake; that will have to be some
day completed on a due scale. But for the great mass of his lyrical verse
all there was to do has been done here, and the ground-plan taken of a
larger building to come. These preliminaries stated, we pass on to a rapid
general review of those two great divisions which may be taken as resuming
for us the ripe poetry of Blake's manhood. Two divisions, the one already
published and partially known, the other now first brought into light and
baptized with some legible name; the _Songs of Innocence and Experience_,
and the _Ideas of Good and Evil_. Under this latter head we will class for
purposes of readier reference as well the smaller MS. volume of fairly
transcribed verses as the great mass of more disorderly writing in verse
and prose to which the name above given is attached in a dim broad scrawl
of the pencil evidently meant to serve as general title, though set down
only on the reverse page of the second MS. leaf. This latter and larger
book, extending in date at least from 1789 to (August) 1811, but
presumably beyond the later date, is the great source and treasure-house
from which has been drawn out most of the fresh verse and all of the fresh
prose here given us: and is of course among the most important relics left
of Blake.

First then for the _Songs of Innocence and Experience_. These at a first
naming recall only that incomparable charm of form in which they first
came out clothed, and hence vex the souls of men with regretful
comparison. For here by hard necessity we miss the lovely and luminous
setting of designs, which makes the _Songs_ precious and pleasurable to
those who know or care for little else of the master's doing; the infinite
delight of those drawings, sweeter to see than music to hear, where herb
and stem break into grace of shape and blossom of form, and the
branch-work is full of little flames and flowers, catching as it were from
the verse enclosed the fragrant heat and delicate sound they seem to give
back; where colour lapses into light and light assumes feature in colour.
If elsewhere the artist's strange strength of thought and hand is more
visible, nowhere is there such pure sweetness and singleness of design in
his work. All the tremulous and tender splendour of spring is mixed into
the written word and coloured draught; every page has the smell of April.
Over all things given, the sleep of flocks and the growth of leaves, the
laughter in dividing lips of flowers and the music at the moulded mouth of
the flute-player, there is cast a pure fine veil of light, softer than
sleep and keener than sunshine. The sweetness of sky and leaf, of grass
and water--the bright light life of bird and child and beast--is so to
speak kept fresh by some graver sense of faithful and mysterious love,
explained and vivified by a conscience and purpose in the artist's hand
and mind. Such a fiery outbreak of spring, such an insurrection of fierce
floral life and radiant riot of childish power and pleasure, no poet or
painter ever gave before: such lustre of green leaves and flushed limbs,
kindled cloud and fervent fleece, was never wrought into speech or shape.
Nevertheless this decorative work is after all the mere husk and shell of
the _Songs_. These also, we may notice, have to some extent shared the
comparative popularity of the designs which serve as framework to them.
They have absolutely achieved the dignity of a reprint; have had a chance
before now of swimming for life; whereas most of Blake's offspring have
been thrown into Lethe bound hand and foot, without hope of ever striking
out in one fair effort. Perhaps on some accounts this preference has been
not unreasonable. What was written for children can hardly offend men; and
the obscurities and audacities of the prophet would here have been clearly
out of place. It is indeed some relief to a neophyte serving in the outer
courts of such an intricate and cloudy temple, to come upon this little
side-chapel set about with the simplest wreaths and smelling of the fields
rather than incense, where all the singing is done by clear children's
voices to the briefest and least complex tunes. Not at first without a
sense of release does the human mind get quit for a little of the clouds
of Urizen, the fires of Orc, and all the Titanic apparatus of prophecy.
And these poems are really unequalled in their kind. Such verse was never
written for children since verse-writing began. Only in a few of those
faultless fragments of childish rhyme which float without name or form
upon the memories of men shall we find such a pure clear cadence of verse,
such rapid ring and flow of lyric laughter, such sweet and direct choice
of the just word and figure, such an impeccable simplicity; nowhere but
here such a tender wisdom of holiness, such a light and perfume of
innocence. Nothing like this was ever written on that text of the lion
and the lamb; no such heaven of sinless animal life was ever conceived so
intensely and sweetly.

  "And there the lion's ruddy eyes
    Shall flow with tears of gold,
  And pitying the tender cries,
    And walking round the fold,
    Saying _Wrath by His meekness
    And by His health sickness
    Is driven away
    From our immortal day.
  And now beside thee, bleating lamb,
    I can lie down and sleep,
  Or think on Him who bore thy name,
    Graze after thee, and weep._"

The leap and fall of the verse is so perfect as to make it a fit garment
and covering for the profound tenderness of faith and soft strength of
innocent impulse embodied in it. But the whole of this hymn of _Night_ is
wholly beautiful; being perhaps one of the two poems of loftiest
loveliness among all the _Songs of Innocence_. The other is that called
_The Little Black Boy_; a poem especially exquisite for its noble
forbearance from vulgar pathos and achievement of the highest and most
poignant sweetness of speech and sense; in which the poet's mysticism is
baptized with pure water and taught to speak as from faultless lips of
children, to such effect as this.

  "And we are put on earth a little space
  _That we may learn to bear the beams of love_;
  And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
  Are like a cloud and like a shady grove."

Other poems of a very perfect beauty are those of the Piper, the Lamb, the
Chimney-sweeper, and the two-days-old baby; all, for the music in them,
more like the notes of birds caught up and given back than the modulated
measure of human verse. One cannot say, being so slight and seemingly
wrong in metrical form, how they come to be so absolutely right; but right
even in point of verses and words they assuredly are. Add fuller formal
completion of rhyme and rhythm to that song of _Infant Joy_, and you have
broken up the soft bird-like perfection of clear light sound which gives
it beauty; the little bodily melody of soulless and painless laughter.

Against all articulate authority we do however class several of the _Songs
of Experience_ higher for the great qualities of verse than anything in
the earlier division of these poems. If the _Songs of Innocence_ have the
shape and smell of leaves or buds, these have in them the light and sound
of fire or the sea. Entering among them, a fresher savour and a larger
breath strikes one upon the lips and forehead. In the first part we are
shown who they are who have or who deserve the gift of spiritual sight: in
the second, what things there are for them to see when that gift has been
given. Innocence, the quality of beasts and children, has the keenest
eyes; and such eyes alone can discern and interpret the actual mysteries
of experience. It is natural that this second part, dealing as it does
with such things as underlie the outer forms of the first part, should
rise higher and dive deeper in point of mere words. These give the
distilled perfume and extracted blood of the veins in the rose-leaf, the
sharp, liquid, intense spirit crushed out of the broken kernel in the
fruit. The last of the _Songs of Innocence_ is a prelude to these poems;
in it the poet summons to judgment the young and single-spirited, that by
right of the natural impulse of delight in them they may give sentence
against the preachers of convention and assumption; and in the first poem
of the second series he, by the same "voice of the bard," calls upon earth
herself, the mother of all these, to arise and become free: since upon her
limbs also are bound the fetters, and upon her forehead also has fallen
the shadow, of a jealous law: from which nevertheless, by faithful
following of instinct and divine liberal impulse, earth and man shall
obtain deliverance.

  "Hear the voice of the bard!
    Who present, past, and future sees:
  Whose ears have heard
  The ancient Word
    That walked among the silent trees:
  Calling the lapsed soul
    And weeping in the evening dew;
  That might control
  The starry pole
    And fallen fallen light renew!"

If they will hear the Word, earth and the dwellers upon earth shall be
made again as little children; shall regain the strong simplicity of eye
and hand proper to the pure and single of heart; and for them inspiration
shall do the work of innocence; let them but once abjure the doctrine by
which comes sin and the law by which comes prohibition. Therefore must the
appeal be made; that the blind may see and the deaf hear, and the unity of
body and spirit be made manifest in perfect freedom: and that to the
innocent even the liberty of "sin" may be conceded. For if the soul suffer
by the body's doing, are not both degraded? and if the body be oppressed
for the soul's sake, are not both the losers?

  "O Earth, O Earth, return!
    Arise from out the dewy grass!
  Night is worn,
  And the morn
    Rises from the slumberous mass.
  Turn away no more;
    Why wilt thou turn away?
  The starry shore,
  The watery floor,
    Are given thee till the break of day."

For so long, during the night of law and oppression of material form, the
divine evidences hidden under sky and sea are left her; even "till the
break of day." Will she not get quit of this spiritual bondage to the
heavy body of things, to the encumbrance of deaf clay and blind
vegetation, before the light comes that shall redeem and reveal? But the
earth, being yet in subjection to the creator of men, the jealous God who
divided nature against herself--father of woman and man, legislator of sex
and race--makes blind and bitter answer as in sleep, "her locks covered
with grey despair."

  "Prisoned on this watery shore,
    Starry Jealousy does keep my den;
  Cold and hoar,
  Weeping o'er,
    I hear the father of the ancient men."

Thus, in the poet's mind, Nature and Religion are the two fetters of life,
one on the right wrist, the other on the left; an obscure material force
on this hand, and on that a mournful imperious law: the law of divine
jealousy, the government of a God who weeps over his creature and subject
with unprofitable tears, and rules by forbidding and dividing: the
"Urizen" of the prophetic books, clothed with the coldness and the grief
of remote sky and jealous cloud. Here as always, the cry is as much for
light as for license, the appeal not more against prohibition than against
obscurity.

  "Can the sower sow by night,
  Or the ploughman in darkness plough?"

In the _Songs of Innocence_ there is no such glory of metre or sonorous
beauty of lyrical work as here. No possible effect of verse can be finer
in a great brief way than that given in the second and last stanzas of the
first part of this poem. It recals within one's ear the long relapse of
recoiling water and wash of the refluent wave; in the third and fourth
lines sinking suppressed as with equal pulses and soft sobbing noise of
ebb, to climb again in the fifth line with a rapid clamour of ripples and
strong ensuing strain of weightier sound, lifted with the lift of the
running and ringing sea.

Here also is that most famous of Blake's lyrics, _The Tiger_; a poem
beyond praise for its fervent beauty and vigour of music. It appears by
the MS. that this was written with some pains; the cancels and various
readings bear marks of frequent rehandling. One of the latter is worth
transcription for its own excellence and also in proof of the artist's
real care for details, which his rapid instinctive way of work has induced
some to disbelieve in.

  "Burnt in distant deeps or skies
  The cruel fire of thine eyes?
  Could heart descend or wings aspire?[16]
  What the hand dare seize the fire?"

Nor has Blake left us anything of more profound and perfect value than
_The Human Abstract_; a little mythical vision of the growth of error;
through soft sophistries of pity and faith, subtle humility of abstinence
and fear, under which the pure simple nature lies corrupted and
strangled; through selfish loves which prepare a way for cruelty, and
cruelty that works by spiritual abasement and awe.

  "Soon spreads the dismal shade
  Of Mystery over his head;
  And the caterpillar and fly
  Feed on the Mystery.

  And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
  Ruddy and sweet to eat;
  And the raven his nest has made
  In the thickest shade."

Under the shadow of this tree of mystery,[17] rooted in artificial belief,
all the meaner kind of devouring things take shelter and eat of the fruit
of its branches; the sweet poison of false faith, painted on its outer
husk with the likeness of all things noble and desirable; and in the
deepest implication of barren branch and deadly leaf, the bird of death,
with priests for worshippers ("the priests of the raven of dawn," loud of
lip and hoarse of throat until the light of day have risen), finds house
and resting-place. Only in the "miscreative brain" of fallen men can such
a thing strike its tortuous root and bring forth its fatal flower; nowhere
else in all nature can the tyrants of divided matter and moral law, "Gods
of the earth and sea," find soil that will bear such fruit.

Nowhere has Blake set forth his spiritual creed more clearly and earnestly
than in the last of the _Songs of Experience_. "Tirzah," in his
mythology, represents the mere separate and human nature, mother of the
perishing body and daughter of the "religion" which occupies itself with
laying down laws for the flesh; which, while pretending (and that in all
good faith) to despise the body and bring it into subjection as with
control of bit and bridle, does implicitly overrate its power upon the
soul for evil or good, and thus falls foul of fact on all sides by
assuming that spirit and flesh are twain, and that things pleasant and
good for the one can properly be loathsome or poisonous to the other. This
"religion" or "moral law," the inexplicable prophet has chosen to baptize
under the singular type of "Rahab"--the "harlot virgin-mother," impure by
dint of chastity and forbearance from such things as are pure to the pure
of heart: for in this creed the one thing unclean is the belief in
uncleanness, the one thing forbidden is to believe in the existence of
forbidden things. Of this mystical mother and her daughter we shall have
to take some further account when once fairly afloat on those windy waters
of prophecy through which all who would know Blake to any purpose must be
content to steer with such pilotage as they can get. For the present it
will be enough to note how eager and how direct is the appeal here made
against any rule or reasoning based on reference to the mere sexual and
external nature of man--the nature made for ephemeral life and speedy
death, kept alive "to work and weep" only through that mercy which
"changed death into sleep"; how intense the reliance on redemption from
such a law by the grace of imaginative insight and spiritual freedom,
typified in "the death of Jesus."[18] Nor are any of these poems finer in
structure or nobler in metrical form.

This present edition of the _Songs of Experience_ is richer by one of
Blake's most admirable poems of childhood--a division of his work always
of especial value for its fresh and sweet strength of feeling and of
words. In this newly recovered _Cradle Song_ are perhaps the two loveliest
lines of his writing:

  "Sleep, sleep: in thy sleep
  Little sorrows sit and weep."[19]

Before parting from this chief lyrical work of the poet's, we may notice
(rather for its convenience as an explanation than its merit as a piece of
verse) this projected _Motto to the Songs of Innocence and of
Experience_, which editors have left hitherto in manuscript:

  "The good are attracted by men's perceptions,
    And think not for themselves
  Till Experience teaches them how to catch
    And to cage the Fairies and Elves.

  And then the Knave begins to snarl,
    And the Hypocrite to howl;
  And all his[20] good friends show their private ends,
    And the Eagle is known from the Owl."

Experience must do the work of innocence as soon as conscience begins to
take the place of instinct, reflection of perception; but the moment
experience begins upon this work, men raise against her the conventional
clamour of envy and stupidity. She teaches how to entrap and retain such
fugitive delights as children and animals enjoy without seeking to catch
or cage them; but this teaching the world calls sin, and the law of
material religion condemns: the face of "Tirzah" is set against it, in the
"shame and pride" of sex.

  "Thou, mother of my mortal part,
  With cruelty didst mould my heart,
  And with false self-deceiving fears
  Didst bind my nostrils, eyes, and ears."

And thus those who live in subjection to the senses would in their turn
bring the senses into subjection; unable to see beyond the body, they find
it worth while to refuse the body its right to freedom.

In these hurried notes on the _Songs_ an effort has been made to get that
done which is most absolutely necessary--not that which might have been
most facile or most delightful. Analytic remark has been bestowed on those
poems only which really cannot dispense with it in the eyes of most men.
Many others need no herald or interpreter, demand no usher or outrider:
some of these are among Blake's best, some again almost among his
worst.[21] Poems in which a doctrine or subject once before nobly stated
and illustrated is re-asserted in a shallower way and exemplified in a
feebler form,[22] require at our hands no written or spoken signs of
either assent or dissent. Such poems, as the editor has well indicated,
have places here among their betters: none of them, it may be added,
without some shell of outward beauty or seed of inward value. The simpler
poems claim only pra

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/35995