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By this invention (which it is absurd to consider, as some have considered it, a mere makeshift, to which he had been driven by the refusal of publishers to issue his poems and engravings according to the ordinary trade methods) Blake was the first, and remains the only, poet who has in the complete sense made his own books with his own hands: the words, the illustrations, the engraving, the printing, the coloring, the very inks and colors, and the stitching of the sheets into boards. With Blake, who was equally a poet and an artist, words and designs came together and were inseparable; and to the power of inventing words and designs was added the skill of engraving, and thus of interpreting them, without any mechanical interference from the outside. To do this must have been, at some time or another, the ideal of every poet who is a true artist, and who has a sense of the equal importance of every form of art, and of every detail in every form. Only Blake has produced a book of poems vital alike in inner and outer form, and, had it not been for his lack of a technical knowledge of music, had he but been able to write down his inventions in that art also, he would have left us the creation of something like an universal art. That universal art he did, during his own lifetime, create; for he sang his songs to his own music; and thus, while he lived, he was the complete realization of the poet in all his faculties, and the only complete realization that has ever been known.
To define the poetry of Blake one must find new definitions for poetry; but, these definitions once found, he will seem to be the only poet who is a poet in essence; the only poet who could, in his own words, 'enter into Noah's rainbow, and make a friend and companion of one of these images of wonder, which always entreat him to leave mortal things.' In this verse there is, if it is to be found in any verse, the 'lyrical cry'; and yet, what voice is it that cries in this disembodied ecstasy? The voice of desire is not in it, nor the voice of passion, nor the cry of the heart, nor the cry of the sinner to God, nor of the lover of nature to nature. It neither seeks nor aspires nor laments nor questions. It is like the voice of wisdom in a child, who has not yet forgotten the world out of which the soul came. It is as spontaneous as the note of a bird, it is an affirmation of life; in its song, which seems mere music, it is the mind which sings; it is lyric thought. What is it that transfixes one in any couplet such as this:
'If the sun and moon should doubtThey'd immediately go out'?
It is no more than a nursery statement, there is not even an image in it, and yet it sings to the brain, it cuts into the very flesh of the mind, as if there were a great weight behind it. Is it that it is an arrow, and that it comes from so far, and with an impetus gathered from its speed out of the sky?
The lyric poet, every lyric poet but Blake, sings of love; but Blake sings of forgiveness:
'Mutual forgiveness of each vice,Such are the gates of Paradise.'
Poets sing of beauty, but Blake says:
'Soft deceit and idleness,These are Beauty's sweetest dress.'
They sing of the brotherhood of men, but Blake points to the 'divine image':
'Cruelty has a human heart,And Jealousy a human face;Terror the human form divine,And Secrecy the human dress.'
Their minds are touched by the sense of tears in human things, but to Blake 'a tear is an intellectual thing.' They sing of 'a woman like a dewdrop,' but Blake of 'the lineaments of gratified desire.' They shout hymns to God over a field of battle or in the arrogance of material empire; but Blake addresses the epilogue of hisGates of Paradise'to the Accuser who is the God of this world':
'Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce,And dost not know the garment from the man;Every harlot was a virgin once,Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.Though thou art worshipped by the names divineOf Jesus and Jehovah, thou art stillThe son of morn in weary night's decline,The lost traveller's dream under the hill.'
Other poets find ecstasy in nature, but Blake only in imagination. He addresses the Prophetic Book ofThe Ghost of Abel'to Lord Byron in the wilderness,' and asks: 'What doest thou here, Elijah? Can a poet doubt of the visions of Jehovah? Nature has no outline, but Imagination has. Nature has no time, but Imagination has. Nature has no supernatural, and dissolves. Imagination is eternity.' The poetry of Blake is a poetry of the mind, abstract in substance, concrete in form; its passion is the passion of the imagination, its emotion is the emotion of thought, its beauty is the beauty of idea. When it is simplest, its simplicity is that of some 'infant joy' too young to have a name, or of some 'infant sorrow' brought aged out of eternity into the 'dangerous world,' and there:
'Helpless, naked, piping loud,Like a fiend hid in a cloud.'
There are no men and women in the world of Blake's poetry, only primal instincts and the energies of the imagination.
His work begins in the garden of Eden, or of the childhood of the world, and there is something in it of the naïveté of beasts: the lines gambol awkwardly, like young lambs. His utterance of the state of innocence has in it something of the grotesqueness of babies, and enchants the grown man, as they do. Humour exists unconscious of itself, in a kind of awed and open-eyed solemnity. He stammers into a speech of angels, as if just awakening out of Paradise. It is the primal instincts that speak first, before riper years have added wisdom to intuition. It is the supreme quality of this wisdom that it has never let go of intuition. It is as if intuition itself ripened. And so Blake goes through life with perfect mastery of the terms of existence, as they present themselves to him: 'perfectly happy, wanting nothing,' as he said, when he was old and poor; and able in each stage of life to express in art the corresponding stage of his own development. He is the only poet who has written the songs of childhood, of youth, of mature years, and of old age; and he died singing.
Blake lived in Poland Street for five years, and issued from it theSongs of Innocence(1789), and, in the same year,The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hellin 1790, and, in 1791, the first book ofThe French Revolution: a Poem in Seven Books, which Gilchrist says was published anonymously, in ordinary type, and without illustrations, by the bookseller Johnson. No copy of this book is known to exist. At this time he was a fervent believer in the new age which was to be brought about by the French Revolution, and he was much in the company of revolutionaries and freethinkers, and the only one among them who dared wear the 'bonnet rouge' in the street. Some of these, Thomas Paine, Godwin, Holcroft, and others, he met at Johnson's shop in St. Paul's Churchyard, where Fuseli and Mary Wollstonecraft also came. It was at Johnson's, in 1792, that Blake saved the life of Paine, by hurrying him off to France, with the warning, 'You must not go home, or you are a dead man,' at the very moment when a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Johnson himself was in 1798 put into gaol for his republican sympathies, and continued to give his weekly literary dinners in gaol.
Blake's back-windows at Poland Street looked out on the yard of Astley's circus, and Tatham tells a story of Blake's wonder, indignation, and prompt action on seeing a wretched youth chained by the foot to a horse's hobble. The neighbor whom he regarded as 'hired to depress art,' Sir Joshua Reynolds, died in 1792. A friend quoted by Gilchrist tells us: 'When a very young man he had called on Reynolds to show him some designs, and had been recommended to work with less extravagance and more simplicity, and to correct his drawing. This Blake seemed to regard as an affront never to be forgotten. He was very indignant when he spoke of it.' There is also a story of a meeting between Blake and Reynolds, when each, to his own surprise, seems to have found the other very pleasant. Blake's mother died in 1792, at the age of seventy, and was buried in Bunhill Fields on September 9. In the following year he moved to 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,[2]where, during the next seven years, he did engraving, both of his own designs and of those of others, and published the engraved book of designs calledThe Gates of Paradise(1793), the poems and illustrations of theSongs of Experience(1794), and the greater part of the Prophetic Books, besides writing, apparently in 1797, the vast and never really finished MS. ofThe Four Zoas.This period was that of which we have the largest and most varied result, in written and engraved work, together with a large number of designs, including five hundred and thirty-seven done on the margin of Young'sNight Thoughts, and the earliest of the color-prints. It was Blake's one period of something like prosperity, as we gather from several stories reported by Tatham, who says that during the absence of Blake and his wife on one of their long country walks, which would take up a whole day, thieves broke into the house, and 'carried away plate to the value of £60 and clothes to the amount of £40 more.' Another £40 was lent by Blake to 'a certain freethinking speculator, the author of many elaborate philosophical treatises,' who complained that 'his children had not a dinner.' A few days afterwards the Blakes went to see the destitute family, and the wife 'had the audacity to ask Mrs. Blake's opinion of a very gorgeous dress, purchased the day following Blake's compassionate gift.' Yet another story is of a young art-student who used to pass the house every day carrying a portfolio under his arm, and whom Blake pitied for his poverty and sickly looks, and taught for nothing and looked after till he died. Blake had other pupils too, among 'families of high rank,' but being 'aghast' at the prospect of 'an appointment to teach drawing to the Royal Family,' he gave up all his pupils, with his invariably exquisite sense of manners, on refusing the royal offer.
It was in 1799 that Blake found his first patron, and one of his best friends, in Thomas Butts, 'that remarkable man—that great patron of British genius,' as Samuel Palmer calls him, who, for nearly thirty years, with but few intervals, continued to buy whatever Blake liked to do for him, paying him a small but steady price, and taking at times a drawing a week. A story which, as Palmer says, had 'grown in the memory,' connects him with Blake at this time, and may be once more repeated, if only to be discredited. There was a back-garden at the house in Hercules Buildings, and there were vines in it, which Blake would never allow to be pruned, so that they grew luxuriant in leaf and small and harsh in fruit. Mr. Butts, according to Gilchrist, is supposed to have come one day into 'Blake's Arcadian Arbour,' as Tatham calls it, and to have found Blake and his wife sitting naked, reading out Milton'sParadise Lost'in character,' and to have been greeted with: 'Come in, it is only Adam and Eve.' John Linnell, in some notes written after reading Gilchrist, and quoted in Story'sLife of Linnell, writes with reason: 'I do not think it possible. Blake was very unreserved in his narrations to me of all his thoughts and actions, and I think if anything like this story had been true, he would have told me of it. I am sure he would have laughed heartily at it if it had been told of him or of anybody else, for he was a hearty laugher at absurdities.' In such a matter, Linnell's authority may well be final, if indeed any authority is required, beyond a sense of humour, and the knowledge that Blake possessed it.
Another legend of the period, which has at least more significance, whether true or not, is referred to by both Swinburne and Mr. W. M. Rossetti, on what authority I cannot discover, and is thus stated by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats: 'It is said that Blake wished to add a concubine to his establishment in the Old Testament manner, but gave up the project because it made Mrs. Blake cry.' 'The element of fable,' they add, 'lies in the implication that the woman who was to have wrecked this household had a bodily existence.... There is a possibility that he entertained mentally some polygamous project, and justified it on some patriarchal theory. A project and theory are one thing, however, and a woman is another; and though there is abundant suggestion of the project and theory, there is no evidence at all of the woman.' I have found in the unpublished part of Crabb Robinson'sDiaryandReminiscencesmore than a 'possibility' or even 'abundant suggestion' that Blake accepted the theory as a theory. Crabb Robinson himself was so frightened by it that he had to confide it to hisDiaryin the disguise of German, though, when he came to compile hisReminiscencesmany years later he ventured to put it down in plain English which no editor has yet ventured to print. Both passages will be found in their place in the verbatim reprint given later; but I will quote the second here:
'13th June(1826).—I saw him again in June. He was as wild as ever, says my journal, but he was led to-day to make assertions more palpably mischievous and capable of influencing other minds, and immoral, supposing them to express the will of a responsible agent, than anything he had said before. As for instance, that he had learned from the Bible that wives should be in common. And when I objected that Marriage was a Divine institution he referred to the Bible, "that from the beginning it was not so." He affirmed that he had committed many murders, and repeated his doctrine, that reason is the only Sin, and that careless, gay people are better than those who think, etc., etc.'
This passage leaves no doubt as to Blake's theoretical view of marriage, but it brings us no nearer to any certainty as to his practical action in the matter. With Blake, as with all wise men, a mental decision in the abstract had no necessary influence on conduct. To have the courage of your opinions is one thing, and Blake always had this; but he was of all people least impelled to go and do a thing because he considered the thing a permissible one to do. Throughout all his work Blake affirms freedom as the first law of love; jealousy is to him the great iniquity, the unforgivable selfishness. He has the frank courage to praise inThe Visions of the Daughters of Albion:
'Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy, nestling for delightIn laps of pleasure! Innocence, honest, open, seekingThe vigorous joys of morning light';
And of woman he asks, 'Who taught thee modesty, subtle modesty?' In the same book, which is Blake's Book of Love, Oothoon offers 'girls of mild silver or of furious gold' to her lover; in the paradisal state ofJerusalem'every female delights to give her maiden to her husband.' All these things are no doubt symbols, but they are symbols which meet us on every page of Blake, and I no not doubt that to him they represented an absolute truth. Therefore I think it perfectly possible that some 'mentally polygamous project' was at one time or another entertained by him, and 'justified on some patriarchal theory.' What I am sure of, however, is that a tear of Mrs. Blake ('for a tear is an intellectual thing') was enough to wipe out project if not theory, and that one to whom love was pity more than it was desire would have given no nearer cause for jealousy than some unmortal Oothoon.
It was in 1794 that Blake engraved theSongs of Experience.Four of the Prophetic Books had preceded it, but here Blake returns to the clear and simple form of theSongs of Innocence, deepening it with meaning and heightening it with ardor. Along with this fierier art the symbolic contents of what, in theSongs of Innocence, had been hardly more than a child's strayings in earthly or divine Edens, becomes angelic, and speaks with more deliberately hid or doubled meanings. Even 'The Tiger,' by which Lamb was to know that here was 'one of the most extraordinary persons of the age,' is not only a sublime song about a flame-like beast, but contains some hint that 'the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.' In this book, and in the poems which shortly followed it, in that MS. book whose contents have sometimes been labelled, after a rejected title of Blake's,Ideas of Good and Evil, we see Blake more wholly and more evenly himself than anywhere else in his work. From these central poems we can distinguish the complete type of Blake as a poet.
Blake is the only poet who sees all temporal things under the form of eternity. To him reality is merely a symbol, and he catches at its terms, hastily and faultily, as he catches at the lines of the drawing-master, to represent, as in a faint image, the clear and shining outlines of what he sees with the imagination; through the eye, not with it, as he says. Where other poets use reality as a spring-board into space, he uses it as a foothold on his return from flight. Even Wordsworth seemed to him a kind of atheist, who mistook the changing signs of 'vegetable nature' for the unchanging realities of the imagination. 'Natural objects,' he wrote in a copy of Wordsworth, 'always did and now do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me. Wordsworth must know that what he writes valuable is not to be found in nature.' And so his poetry is the most abstract of all poetry, although in a sense the most concrete. It is everywhere an affirmation, the register of vision; never observation. To him observation was one of the daughters of memory, and he had no use for her among his Muses, which were all eternal, and the children of the imagination. 'Imagination,' he said, 'has nothing to do with memory.' For the most part he is just conscious that what he sees as 'an old man grey' is no more than a 'frowning thistle':
'For double the vision my eyes do see,And a double vision is always with me.With my inward eyes, 'tis an old man grey,With my outward, a thistle across my way.'
In being so far conscious, he is only recognizing the symbol, not admitting the reality.
In his earlier work, the symbol still interests him, he accepts it without dispute; with, indeed, a kind of transfiguring love. Thus he writes of the lamb and the tiger, of the joy and sorrow of infants, of the fly and the lily, as no poet of mere observation has ever written of them, going deeper into their essence than Wordsworth ever went into the heart of daffodils, or Shelley into the nerves of the sensitive plant. He takes only the simplest flowers or weeds, and the most innocent or most destroying of animals, and he uses them as illustrations of the divine attributes. From the same flower and beast he can read contrary lessons without change of meaning, by the mere transposition of qualities, as in the poem which now reads:
'The modest rose puts forth a thorn,The humble sheep a threatening horn;While the lily white shall in love delight,Nor a thorn, nor a threat, stain her beauty bright.'
Mr. Sampson tells us in his notes: Beginning by writing:
"The rose puts envious ..."
He felt that "envious," did not express his full meaning, and deleted the last three words, writing above them "lustful rose," and finishing the line with the words "puts forth a thorn." He then went on:
"The coward sheep a threatening horn;While the lily white shall in love delight,And the lion increase freedom and peace;"
At which point he drew a line under the poem to show that it was finished. On a subsequent reading he deleted the last line, substituting for it:
'"The priest loves war, and the soldier peace;"
But here, perceiving that his rhyme had disappeared, he cancelled this line also, and gave the poem an entirely different turn by changing the word "lustful" to "modest," and "coward" to "humble," and completing the quatrain (as in the engraved version) by a fourth line simply explanatory of the first three.' This is not merely obeying the idle impulse of a rhyme, but rather a bringing of the mind's impulses into that land where 'contraries mutually exist.'
And when I say that he reads lessons, let it not be supposed that Blake was ever consciously didactic. Conduct does not concern him; not doing, but being. He held that education was the setting of a veil between light and the soul. 'There is no good in education,' he said. 'I hold it to be wrong. It is the great sin. It is eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was the fault of Plato. He knew nothing but the virtues and vices, and good and evil. There is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God's eyes.' And, as he says with his excellent courage: 'When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do'; and, again, with still more excellent and harder courage: 'When I am endeavoring to think rightly, I must not regard my own any more than other people's weaknesses'; so, in his poetry, there is no moral tendency, nothing that might not be poison as well as antidote; nothing indeed but the absolute affirmation of that energy which is eternal delight. He worshipped energy as the wellhead or parent fire of life; and to him there was no evil, only a weakness, a negation of energy, the ignominy of wings that droop and are contented in the dust.
And so, like Nietzsche, but with a deeper innocence, he finds himself 'beyond good and evil,' in a region where the soul is naked and its own master. Most of his art is the unclothing of the soul, and when at last it is naked and alone, in that 'thrilling' region where the souls of other men have at times penetrated, only to shudder back with terror from the brink of eternal loneliness, then only is this soul exultant with the supreme happiness.
It is to the seven years at Lambeth that what may be called the first period of the Prophetic Books largely belongs, though it does not indeed begin there. The roots of it are strongly visible inThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which was written at Poland Street, and they may be traced even further back. Everything else, until we come to the last or Felpham period, which has a new quality of its own, belongs to Lambeth.
In his earlier work Blake is satisfied with natural symbols, with nature as symbol; in his later work, in the final message of the Prophetic Books, he is no longer satisfied with what then seems to him the relative truth of the symbols of reality. Dropping the tools with which he has worked so well, he grasps with naked hands after an absolute truth of statement, which is like his attempt in his designs to render the outlines of vision literally, without translation into the forms of human sight. He invents names harsh as triangles, Enitharmon, Theotormon, Rintrah, for spiritual states and essences, and he employs them as Wagner employed his leading motives, as a kind of shorthand for the memory. His meaning is no longer apparent in the ordinary meaning of the words he uses; we have to read him with a key, and the key is not always in our hands; he forgets that he is talking to men on the earth in some language which he has learnt in heavenly places. He sees symbol within symbol, and as he tries to make one clear to us, he does but translate it into another, perhaps no easier, or more confusing. And it must be remembered, when even interpreters like Mr. Ellis and Mr. Yeats falter, and confess 'There is apparently some confusion among the symbols,' that after all we have only a portion of Blake's later work, and that probably a far larger portion was destroyed when the Peckham 'angel,' Mr. Tatham (copartner in foolish wickedness with Warburton's cook), sat down to burn the books which he did not understand. Blake's great system of wheels within wheels remains no better than a ruin, and can but at the best be pieced together tentatively by those who are able to trace the connection of some of its parts. It is no longer even possible to know how much consistency Blake was able to give to his symbols, and how far he failed to make them visible in terms of mortal understanding. As we have them, they evade us on every side, not because they are meaningless, but because the secret of their meaning is so closely kept. To Blake actual contemporary names meant even more than they meant to Walt Whitman. 'All truths wait in all things,' said Walt Whitman, and Blake has his own quite significant but perplexing meaning when he writes:
'The corner of Broad Street weeps; Poland StreetlanguishesTo Great Queen Street and Lincoln's Inn: all is distressand woe.'
He is concerned now only with his message, with the 'minutely particular' statement of it; and as he has ceased to accept any mortal medium, or to allow himself to be penetrated by the sunlight of earthly beauty, he has lost the means of making that message visible to us. It is a miscalculation of means, a contempt for possibilities; not, as people were once hasty enough to assume, the irresponsible rapture of madness. There is not even in these crabbed chronicles the wild beauty of the madman's scattering brain; there is a concealed sanity, a precise kind of truth, which, as Blake said of all truth, 'can never be so told as to be understood, and not be believed.'
Blake's form, or apparent formlessness, in the Prophetic Books, was no natural accident, or unconsidered utterance of inspiration. Addressing the public on the first plate ofJerusalemhe says: 'When this verse was first dictated to me, I considered a monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare and all writers of English blank verse, derived from the bondage of rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I have therefore produced a variety in every line, both of cadences and number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, and the prosaic for inferior parts; all are necessary to each other,' This desire for variety at the expense of unity is illustrated in one of Blake's marginal notes to Reynolds'Discourses.'Such harmony of coloring' (as that of Titian in the Bacchus and Ariadne) 'is destructive of Art. One species of equal hue over all is the cursed thing called harmony. It is the smile of a fool.' This is a carrying to its extreme limit of the principle that 'there is no such thing as softness in art, and that everything in art is definite and minute... because vision is determinate and perfect'; and that 'coloring does not depend on where the colors are put, but on where the lights and darks are put, and all depends on form or outline, on where that is put.' The whole aim of the Prophetic Books is to arrive at a style as 'determinate and perfect' as vision, unmodified by any of the deceiving beauties of nature or of the distracting ornaments of conventional form. What is further interesting in Blake's statement is that he aimed, in the Prophetic Books, at producing the effect, not of poetry but of oratory, and it is as oratory, the oratory of the prophets, that the reader is doubtless meant to take them.
'Poetry fettered,' he adds, 'fetters the human race,' and I doubt not that he imagined, as Walt Whitman and latervers-libristeshave imagined, that in casting off the form he had unfettered the spirit of poetry. There seems never to have been a time when Blake did not attempt to find for himself a freer expression than he thought verse could give him, for among the least mature of thePoetical Sketchesare poems written in rhythmical prose, in imitation partly of Ossian, partly of the Bible. An early MS. calledTiriel, probably of hardly later date, still exists, written in a kind of metre of fourteen syllables, only slightly irregular in beat, but rarely fine in cadence. It already hints, in a cloudy way, at some obscure mythology, into which there already come incoherent names, of an Eastern color, Ijim and Mnetha. Tiriel appears again inThe Book of Urizenas Urizen's first-born, Thiriel, 'like a man from a cloud born.' Har and Heva reappear inThe Song of Los. The Book of Thel, engraved in 1789, the year of theSongs of Innocence, is in the same metre of fourteen syllables, but written with a faint and lovely monotony of cadence, strangely fluid and flexible in that age of strong caesuras, as in:
'Come forth, worm of the silent valley, to thy pensivequeen.'
The sentiment is akin to that of theSongs of Innocence, and hardly more than a shadow of the mythology remains. It sings or teaches the holiness and eternity of life in all things, the equality of life in the flower, the cloud, the worm, and the maternal clay of the grave; and it ends with the unanswered question of death to life: why? why? In 1790 Blake engraved in two forms, on six and ten infinitesimal plates, a tractate which he called,There is no Natural Religion.They contain, the one commenting on the other, a clear and concise statement of many of Blake's fundamental beliefs; such as: 'That the poetic Genius is the true Man, and that the Body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius.' 'As all men are alike in outward form, so (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius.' 'Man's perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception, he perceives more than sense (though ever so acute) can discover.' Yet, since 'Man's desires are limited by his perceptions, none can desire what he has not perceived.' 'Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may become as he is.'
In the same year, probably, was engravedThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a prose fantasy full of splendid masculine thought, and of a diabolical or infernal humour, in which Blake, with extraordinary boldness, glorifies, parodies, and renounces at once the gospel of his first master in mysticism, 'Swedenborg, strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches,' as he was to call him long afterwards, inMilton.Blake's attitude towards Christianity might be roughly defined by calling him a heretic of the heresy of Swedenborg.The Marriage of Heaven and Hellbegins: 'As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting on the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up.' Swedenborg himself, in a prophecy that Blake must have heard in his childhood, had named 1757, the year of Blake's birth, as the first of a new dispensation, the dispensation of the spirit, and Blake's acceptance of the prophecy marks the date of his escape from the too close influence of one of whom he said, as late as 1825, 'Swedenborg was a divine teacher. Yet he was wrong in endeavoring to explain to the rational faculty what reason cannot comprehend.' And so we are warned, inThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell, against the 'confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning. Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new, though it is only the contents or index of already published books.' And again: 'Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's, and from those of Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number. But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.' With Paracelsus it is doubtful if Blake was ever more than slightly acquainted; the influence of Behmen, whom he had certainly read in William Law's translation, is difficult to define, and seems to have been of the most accidental or partial kind, but Swedenborg had been a sort of second Bible to him from childhood, and the influence even of his 'systematic reasoning' remained with him as at least a sort of groundwork, or despised model; 'foundations for grand things,' as he says in theDescriptive Catalogue.When Swedenborg says, 'Hell is divided into societies in the same manner as heaven, and also into as many societies as heaven; for every society in heaven has a society opposite to it in hell, and this for the sake of equilibrium,' we see in this spirit of meek order a matter-of-fact suggestion for Blake's 'enormous wonders of the abysses,' in which heavens and hells change names and alternate through mutual annihilations.
The last note which Blake wrote on the margins of Swedenborg'sWisdom of Angelsis this: 'Heaven and Hell are born together.' The edition which he annotated is that of 1788, and the marginalia, which are printed in Mr. Ellis'sReal Blake, will show how attentive, as late as two years before the writing of the book which that note seems to anticipate, Blake had been to every shade of meaning in one whom he was to deny with such bitter mockery. But, even in these notes, Blake is attentive to one thing only, he is reaching after a confirmation of his own sense of a spiritual language in which man can converse with paradise and render the thoughts of angels. He comments on nothing else, he seems to read only to confirm his conviction; he is equally indifferent to Swedenborg's theology and to his concern with material things; his hells and heavens, 'uses,' and 'spiritual suns,' concern him only in so far as they help to make clearer and more precise his notion of the powers and activities of the spirit in man. To Blake, as he shows us inMilton, Swedenborg's worst error was not even that of 'systematic reasoning,' but that of:
'Showing the Transgressors in Hell: the proudWarriors in Heaven:Heaven as a Punisher and Hell as one underPunishment.'
It is for this more than for any other error that Swedenborgs 'memorable relations' are tossed back to him as 'memorable fancies,' in a solemn parody of his own manner; that his mill and vault and cave are taken from him and used against him; and that one once conversant with his heaven, and now weary of it, 'walks among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torments and insanity.' Blake shows us the energy of virtue breaking the Ten Commandments, and declares: 'Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.' Speaking through 'the voice of the Devil,' he proclaims that 'Energy is eternal delight,' and that 'Everything that lives is holy.' And, in a last flaming paradox, still mocking the manner of the analyst of heaven and hell, he bids us: 'Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together, in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well. I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no.' The Bible of Hell is no doubt the Bible of Blake's new gospel, in which contraries are equally true. We may piece it together out of many fragments, of which the first perhaps is the sentence standing by itself at the bottom of the page: 'One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression.'
The Marriage of Heaven and Hellis loud with 'the clangor of the Arrows of Intellect,' each of the 'Proverbs of Hell' is a jewel of concentrated wisdom, the whole book is Blake's clearest and most vital statement of his new, his reawakened belief; it contains, as I have intimated, all Nietzsche; yet something restless, disturbed, uncouth, has come violently into this mind and art, wrenching it beyond all known limits, or setting alight in it an illuminating, devouring, and unquenchable flame. In common with Swedenborg, Blake is a mystic who enters into no tradition, such as that tradition of the Catholic Church which has a liturgy awaiting dreams. For Saint John of the Cross and for Saint Teresa the words of the vision are already there, perfectly translating ecstasy into familiar speech; they have but to look and to speak. But to Blake, as to Swedenborg, no tradition is sufficiently a matter of literal belief to be at hand with its forms; new forms have to be made, and something of the crudity of Swedenborg comes over him in his rejection of the compromise of mortal imagery.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hellmay be called or not called a Prophetic Book, in the strict sense; withThe Visions of the Daughters of Albion, engraved at Lambeth in 1793, the series perhaps more literally begins. Here the fine masculine prose ofThe Marriage of Heaven and Hellhas given place to a metre vaguer than the metre ofThe Book of Thel, and to a substance from which the savor has not yet gone of theSongs of Innocence, in such lines as:
'The new washed lamb tinged with the village smoke,and the bright swanBy the red earth of our immortal river.'
It is Blake's book of love, and it defends the honesty of the natural passions with unslackenning ardor. There is no mythology in it, beyond a name or two, easily explicable. Oothoon, the virgin joy, oppressed by laws and cruelties of restraint and jealousy, vindicates her right to the freedom of innocence and to the instincts of infancy.
'And trees and birds and beasts and men behold theireternal joy.Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infantjoy:Arise, and drink your bliss, for everything that livesis holy!'
It is the gospel ofThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and, as that proclaimed liberty for the mind, so this, with abundant rhetoric, but with vehement conviction, proclaims liberty for the body. In form it is still clear, its eloquence and imagery are partly biblical, and have little suggestion of the manner of the later Prophetic Books.
America, written in the same year, in the same measure as theVisions of the Daughters of Albion, is the most vehement, wild, and whirling of all Blake's prophecies. It is a prophecy of revolution, and it takes the revolt of America against England both literally and symbolically, with names of 'Washington, Franklin, Paine and Warren, Gates, Hancock and Green,' side by side with Orc and the Angel of Albion; it preaches every form of bodily and spiritual liberty in the terms of contemporary events, Boston's Angel, London's Guardian, and the like, in the midst of cataclysms of all nature, fires and thunders temporal and eternal. The world for a time is given into the power of Orc, unrestrained desire, which is to bring freedom through revolution and the destroying of the bonds of good and evil. He is called 'Antichrist, Hater of Dignities, lover of wild rebellion, and transgressor of God's Law.' He is the Satan ofThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and he also proclaims:
'For everything that lives is holy, life delights inlife;Because the soul of sweet delight can never bedefil'd.'
As, in that book, Blake had seen 'the fiery limbs, the flaming hair' of the son of fire 'spurning the clouds written with curses, stamping the stony law to dust'; so, here, he hears the voice of Orc proclaiming:
'The fierce joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,What night he led the starry hosts through the wildwilderness;That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religionabroadTo the four winds as a torn book, and none shallgather the leaves.'
Liberty comes in like a flood bursting all barriers:
'The doors of marriage are open, and the Priests inrustling scalesRush into reptile coverts, hiding from the fires ofOrc,That play around the golden roofs in wreaths of fiercedesire,Leaving the females naked and glowing with the lustsof youth.For the female spirits of the dead pining in bonds ofreligionRun from their fetters reddening, and in long-drawnarches sitting,They feel the nerves of youth renew, and desires ofancient times,Over their pale limbs as a vine when the tender grapeappears.'
The world, in this regeneration through revolution (which seemed to Blake, no doubt, a thing close at hand, in those days when France and America seemed to be breaking down the old tyrannies), is to be no longer a world laid out by convention for the untrustworthy; and he asks:
'Who commanded this? what God? what Angel?To keep the generous from experience till theungenerousAre unrestrained performers of the energies ofnature,Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a scienceThat men get rich by.'
For twelve years, from the American to the French revolution, 'Angels and weak men' are to govern the strong, and then Europe is to be overwhelmed by the fire that had broken out in the West, though the ancient guardians of the five senses 'slow advance to shut the five gates of their law-built houses.'
'But the gates were consumed, and their bolts andhinges melted,And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens, andround the abode of men.'
Here the myth, though it is present throughout, is an undercurrent, and the crying of the message is what is chiefly heard. InEurope(1794), which is written in lines broken up into frequent but not very significant irregularities, short lines alternating with long ones, in the manner of an irregular ode, the mythology is like a net or spiders web over the whole text. Names not used elsewhere, or not in the same form, are found: Manatha-Varcyon, Thiralatha, who inEuropeis Diralada. The whole poem is an allegory of the sleep of Nature during the eighteen hundred years of the Christian era, under bonds of narrow religions and barren moralities and tyrannous laws, and of the awakening to forgotten joy, when 'Nature felt through all her pores the enormous revelry,' and the fiery spirit of Ore, beholding the morning in the east, shot to the earth:
'And in the vineyards of red France appear'd the lightof his fury.'
It is another hymn of revolution, but this time an awakening more wholly mental, with only occasional contemporary allusions like that of the judge in Westminster whose wig grows to his scalp, and who is seen 'groveling along Great George Street through the Park gate.' 'Howlings and hissings, shrieks and groans, and voices of despair,' are heard throughout; we see thought change the infinite to a serpent:
'Then was the serpent temple formed, image of infiniteShut up in finite revolutions, and man become anangel;Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown'd.'
The serpent temple shadows the whole island:
'Enitharmon laugh'd in her sleep to see (O woman'striumph)Every house a den, every man bound: the shadowsare filledWith spectres, and the windows wove over with cursesof iron:Over the doors Thou shalt not: and over the chimneysFear is written:With bands of iron round their necks fasten'd into thewallsThe citizens: in leaden gyves the inhabitants ofsuburbsWalk heavy: soft and bent are the bones of villagers.'
The whole book is a lament and protest, and it ends with a call to spiritual battle. In a gay and naïve prologue, written by Blake in a copy ofEuropein the possession of Mr. Linnell, and quoted by Ellis and Yeats, Blake tells us that he caught a fairy on a streaked tulip, and brought him home:
'As we went alongWild flowers I gathered, and he show'd me each eternalflower.He laughed aloud to see them whimper because theywere pluck'd,Then hover'd round me like a cloud of incense. WhenI cameInto my parlour and sat down and took my pen towrite,My fairy sat upon the table and dictatedEurope.
The First Book of Urizen(1794) is a myth, shadowed in dark symbols, of the creation of mortal life and its severing from eternity; the birth of Time out of the void and self-contemplating shadow' of unimaginative Reason; the creation of the senses, each a limiting of eternity, and the closing of the tent of heavenly knowledge, so that Time and the creatures of Time behold eternity no more. We see the birth of Pity and of Desire, woman the shadow and desire the child of man. Reason despairs as it realizes that life lives upon death, and the cold pity of its despair forms into a chill shadow, which follows it like a spider's web, and freezes into the net of religion, or the restraint of the activities. Under this net the senses shrink inwards, and that creation which is 'the body of our death' and our stationing in time and space is finished:
'Six days they shrank up from existence,And on the seventh they restedAnd they bless'd the seventh day, in sick hope,And forgot their eternal life.'
Then the children of reason, now 'sons and daughters of sorrow,'
'Wept and builtTombs in the desolate places,And form'd laws of prudence and call'd themThe eternal laws of God.'
But Fuzon, the spirit of fire, forsook the 'pendulous earth' with those children of Urizen who would still follow him.
Here, crystallized in the form of a myth, we see many of Blake's fundamental ideas. Some of them we have seen under other forms, as statement rather than as image, inThe Marriage of Heaven and HellandThere is no Natural Religion.We shall see them again, developed, elaborated, branching out into infinite side-issues, multiplying upon themselves, in the later Prophetic Books, partly as myth, partly as statement; we shall see them in many of the lyrical poems, transformed into song, but still never varying in their message; and we shall see them, in the polemical prose of all the remaining fragments, and in the private letters, and in the annotations of Swedenborg, and in Crabb Robinson's records of conversations. TheBook of Urizenis a sort of nucleus, the germ of a system.
Next to theBook of Urizen, if we may judge from the manner of its engraving, cameThe Song of Los(1795), written in a manner of vivid declamation, the lines now lengthening, now shrinking, without fixed beat or measure. It is the song of Time, 'the Eternal Prophet,' and tells the course of inspiration as it passes from east to west, 'abstract philosophy' in Brahma, 'forms of dark delusion' to Moses on Mount Sinai, the mount of law; 'a gospel from wretched Theotormon' (distressed human love and pity) to Jesus, 'a man of sorrows'; the 'loose Bible' of Mahomet, setting free the senses,'Odin's 'code of war.'
'These were the Churches, Hospitals, Castles, Palaces,Like nets and gins and traps to catch the joys ofEternity,And all the rest a desart:Till like a dream Eternity was obliterated and erased.'
'The vast of Nature' shrinks up before the 'shrunken eyes' of men, till it is finally enclosed in the 'philosophy of the five senses,' the philosophy of Newton and Locke. 'The Kings of Asia,' the cruelties of the heathen, the ancient powers of evil, call on 'famine from the heath, pestilence from the fen:'
'To turn man from his path,To restrain the child from the womb,To cut off the bread from the city,That the remnant may learn to obey,That the pride of the heart may fail,That the lust of the eyes may be quench'd,That the delicate ear in its infancyMay be dull'd, and the nostrils clos'd up:To teach mortal worms the pathThat leads from the gates of the grave.'
But, in the darkness of their 'ancient woven dens,' they are startled by 'the thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of Orc'; and at their cry Urizen comes forth to meet and challenge the liberating spirit; he thunders against the pillar of fire that rises out of the darkness of Europe; and at the clash of their mutual onset 'the Grave shrieks aloud.' But 'Urizen wept,' the cold pity of reason which, as we have seen in the book named after him, freezes into nets of religion, 'twisted like to the human brain.'
The Book of Los(also dated 1795) is written in the short lines ofUrizenandAhania, a metre following a fixed, insistent beat, as of Los's hammer on his anvil. It begins with the lament of 'Eno, aged Mother,' over the liberty of old times:
'O Times remote!When Love and Joy were adoration,And none impure were deem'd.Not Eyeless Covet,Nor Thin-lip'd Envy,Nor Bristled Wrath,Nor Curled Wantonness;'
None of these, that is, yet turned to evil, but still unfallen energies. At this, flames of desire break out, 'living, intelligent,' and Los, the spirit of Inspiration, divides the flames, freezes them into solid darkness, and is imprisoned by them, and escapes, only in terror, and falls through ages into the void ('Truth has bounds, Error none'), until he has organized the void and brought into it a light which makes visible the form of the void. He sees it as the backbone of Urizen, the bony outlines of reason, and then begins, for the first time in the Prophetic Books, that building of furnaces, and wielding of hammer and anvil of which we are to hear so much inJerusalem.He forges the sun, and chains cold intellect to vital heat, from whose torments:
'A twinWas completed, a Human IllusionIn darkness and deep clouds involved.'
InThe Book of Losalmost all relationship to poetry has vanished; the myth is cloudier and more abstract. Scarcely less so isThe Book of Ahania(1795), written in the same short lines, hut in a manner occasionally more concrete and realizable. LikeUrizen, it is almost all myth. It follows Fuzon, 'son of Urizen's silent burnings,' in his fiery revolt against:
'This cloudy God seated on waters,Now seen, now obscured, king of Sorrows.'
From the stricken and divided Urizen is born Ahania ('so name his parted soul'), who is 'his invisible lust,' whom he loves, hides, and calls Sin.
'She fell down, a faint shadow wandering,In chaos, and circling dark Urizen,As the moon anguished circles the earth,Hopeless, abhorred, a death shadow,Unseen, unbodied, unknown,The mother of Pestilence.'
But Urizen, recovering his strength, seizes the bright son of fire, his energy or passion, and nails him to the dark 'religious' 'Tree of Mystery,' from under whose shade comes the voice of Ahania, 'weeping upon the void,' lamenting her lost joys of love, and the days when:
'Swelled with ripeness and fat with fatness,Bursting on winds my odours,My ripe figs and rich pomegranates,In infant joy at my feet,O Urizen, sported and sang.'
InThe Four ZoasAhania is called 'the feminine indolent bliss, the indulgent self of weariness.' 'One final glimpse,' says Mr. Swinburne, 'we may take of Ahania after her division—the love of God, as it were, parted from God, impotent therefore and a shadow, if not rather a plague and blight; mercy severed from justice, and thus made a worse thing than useless.' And her lament ends in this despair:
'But now alone over rocks, mountains,Cast out from thy lovely bosomCruel jealousy, selfish fear,Self-destroying; how can delightRenew in these chains of darknessWhere bones of beasts are strownOn the bleak and snowy mountains,Where bones from the birth are buriedBefore they see the light.'
The mythology, of which parts are developed in each of these books, is thrown together, in something more approaching a whole, hut without apparent cohesion or consistency, inThe Four Zoas, which probably dates from 1797 and which exists in seventy sheets of manuscript, of uncertain order, almost certainly in an unfinished state, perhaps never intended for publication, but rather as a storehouse of ideas. This manuscript, much altered, arranged in a conjectural order, and printed with extreme incorrectness, was published by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats in the third volume of their book on Blake, under the first, rejected, title ofVala.[3]They describe it as being in itself a sort of compound of all Blake's other books, exceptMiltonandJerusalem, which are enriched by scraps taken fromVala, but are not summarized in it. In the uncertain state in which we have it, it is impossible to take it as a wholly authentic text; but it is both full of incidental beauty and of considerable assistance in unravelling many of the mysteries inMiltonandJerusalem, the books written at Felpham, both dated 1804, in which we find the final development of the myth, or as much of that final development as has come to us in the absence of the manuscripts destroyed or disposed of by Tatham. Those two books indeed seem to presuppose in their readers an acquaintance with many matters told or explained in this, from which passages are taken bodily, but with little apparent method. As it stands,Valais much more of a poem than eitherMiltonorJerusalem; the cipher comes in at times, but between there are broad spaces of cloudy but not wholly unlighted imagery. Blake still remembers that he is writing a poem, earthly beauty is still divine beauty to him, and the message is not yet so stringent as to forbid all lingering by the way.
In some parts of the poem the manner is frankly biblical, and suggests the book of Proverbs, as thus:
'What is the price of experience? Do men buy it fora song,Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is boughtwith the priceOf all that a man hath—his wife, his house, hischildren.Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where nonecomes to buy,And in the withered fields where the farmer ploughsfor bread in vain.'
Nature is still an image accepted as an adequate symbol, and we get reminiscences here and there of the simpler, early work ofThel, for instance, in such lines as:
'And as the little seed waits eagerly watching for itsflower and fruit,Anxious its little soul looks out into the clearexpanseTo see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisiblearray;So man looks out in tree and herb, and fish and birdand beast,Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortalbodyInto the elemental forms of everything that grows.'
There are descriptions of feasts, of flames, of last judgments, of the new Eden, which are full of color and splendor, passing without warning into the 'material sublime' of Fuseli, as in the picture of Urizen 'stonied upon his throne' in the eighth 'Night.' In the passages which we possess in the earlier and later version we see the myth of Blake gradually crystallizing, the transposition of every intelligible symbol into the secret cipher. Thus we find 'Mount Gilead' changed into 'Mount Snowdon,' 'Beth Peor' into 'Cosway Vale,' and a plain image such as this:
'The Mountain called out to the Mountain, Awake,oh brother Mountain,'
Is translated backwards into:
'Ephraim called out to Tiriel, Awake, oh brotherMountain.'
Images everywhere are seen freezing into types; they stop half-way, and have not yet abandoned the obscure poetry of the earlier Prophetic Books for the harder algebra ofMiltonandJerusalem.
The first statement by Blake of his aims and principles in art is to be found in some letters to George Cumberland and to Dr. Trusler, contained in the Cumberland Papers in the British Museum. These letters were first printed by Dr. Garnett in theHampstead Annualof 1903, but with many mistakes and omissions.[4]I have recopied from the originals the text of such letters as I quote. It appears that in the year 1799 Blake undertook, at the suggestion of Cumberland, to do some drawings for a book by Dr. Trusler, a sort of quack writer and publisher, who may be perhaps sufficiently defined by the quotation of the title of one of his books, which isThe Way to be Rich and Respectable.On August 16, Blake writes to say: 'I find more and more that my Style of Designing is a Species by itself, and in this which I send you have been compelled by my Genius or Angel to follow where he led; if I were to act otherwise it would not fulfill the purpose for which alone I live, which is in conjunction with such men as my friend Cumberland to renew the lost Art of the Greeks.' He tells him that he has attempted to 'follow his Dictate' every morning for a fortnight, but 'it was out of my power!' He then describes what he has done, and says: 'If you approve of my manner, and it is agreeable to you, I would rather Paint Pictures in oil of the same dimensions than make Drawings, and on the same terms. By this means you will have a number of Cabinet pictures, which I flatter myself will not be unworthy of a Scholar of Rembrandt and Teniers, whom I have Studied no less than Rafael and Michaelangelo.' The next letter, which I will give in full, for it is a document of great importance, is dated a week later, and the nature of the reply which it answers can be gathered from Blake's comment on the matter to Cumberland, three days later still. 'I have made him,' he says, 'a Drawing in my best manner: he has sent it back with a Letter full of Criticisms, in which he says It accords not with his Intentions, which are, to Reject all Fancy from his Work. How far he expects to please, I cannot tell. But as I cannot paint Dirty rags and old Shoes where I ought to place Naked Beauty or simple ornament, I despair of ever pleasing one Class of Men.' 'I could not help smiling,' he says later, 'at the difference between the doctrines of Dr. Trusler and those of Christ.' Here, then, is the letter in which Blake accounts for himself to the quack doctor (who has docketed it: 'Blake, Dimd with superstition'), as if to posterity:—
REVD. SIR,
I really am sorry that you are fallen out with the Spiritual World, Especially if I should have to answer for it. I feel very sorry that your Ideas and Mine on Moral Painting differ so much as to have made you angry with my method of study. If I am wrong I am wrong in good company. I had hoped your plan comprehended All Species of this Art, and Especially that you would not regret that Species which gives Existence to Every other, namely, Visions of Eternity. You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that what is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Ideot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considered what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Esop, Homer, Plato.
But as you have favored me with your remarks on my Design, permit me in return to defend it against a mistaken one, which is, That I have supposed Malevolence without a Cause. Is not Merit in one a Cause of Envy in another, and Serenity and Happiness and Beauty a Cause of Malevolence? But Want of Money and the Distress of a Thief can never be alleged as the Cause of his Thievery, for many honest people endure greater hardships with Fortitude. We must therefore seek the Cause elsewhere than in the want of Money, for that is the Miser's passion, not the Thief's.
I have therefore proved your Reasonings I'll proportioned, which you can never prove my figures to be. They are those of Michael Angelo, Rafael and the Antique, and of the best living Models. I perceive that your Eye is perverted by Caricature Prints, which ought not to abound so much as they do. Fun I love, but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than Fun, and Happiness is better than Mirth. I feel that a Man may be happy in This World, and I know that This World is a World of Imagination and Vision. I see Everything I paint In This World: but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule and Deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a Man is, so he sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly Mistake when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination, and I feel Flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil, and Milton in so high a rank of Art? Why is the Bible more Entertaining and Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation, and but mediately to the Understanding or Reason? Such is True Painting, and such was alone valued by the Greeks and the best modern Artists. Consider what Lord Bacon says—'Sense sends over to Imagination before Reason have judged, and Reason sends over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted.' SeeAdvancement of Learning, Part 2, P. 47, of first Edition.
But I am happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who can Elucidate My Visions, and Particularly they have been Elucidated by Children, who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped. Neither Youth nor Childhood is Folly or Incapacity. Some Children are Fools, and so are some old Men. But There is a vast Majority on the side of Imagination or Spiritual Sensation.
To Engrave after another Painter is infinitely more laborious than to Engrave one's own Inventions. And of the size you require my price has been Thirty Guineas, and I cannot afford to do it for less. I had Twelve for the Head I sent you as a Specimen; but after my own designs I could do at least Six times the quantity of labour in the same time, which will account for the difference in price, as also that Chalk Engraving is at least Six times as laborious as Aqua tinta. I have no objection to Engraving after another Artist. Engraving is the profession I was apprenticed to, and I should never have attempted to live by any thing else If orders had not come in for my Designs and Paintings, which I have the pleasure to tell you are Increasing Every Day. Thus If I am a Painter it is not to be attributed to Seeking after. But I am contented whether I live by Painting or Engraving.
I am, Revd. Sir, your very obedient Servant,
WILLIAM BLAKE.
13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,
August23, 1799.
Blake tells Cumberland the whole story quite cheerfully, and ends with these significant words, full of patience, courtesy, and sad humour: 'As to Myself, about whom you are so kindly Interested, I live by Miracle. I am Painting small Pictures from the Bible. For as to Engraving, in which art I cannot reproach myself with any neglect, yet I am laid by in a corner as if I did not exist, and since my Youngs Night Thoughts have been published, even Johnson and Fuseli have discarded my Graver. But as I know that He who works and has his health cannot starve, I laugh at Fortune and Go on and on. I think I foresee better Things than I have ever seen. My Work pleases my employer, and I have an order for Fifty small Pictures at One Guinea each, which is something better than mere copying after another artist. But above all I feel myself happy and contented, let what will come. Having passed now near twenty years in ups and downs, I am used to them, and perhaps a little practice in them may turn out to benefit. It is now exactly Twenty years since I was upon the ocean of business, and tho I laugh at Fortune, I am persuaded that She Alone is the Governor of Worldly Riches, and when it is Fit She will call on me. Till then I wait with Patience, in hopes that She is busied among my Friends.'
The employer is, no doubt, Mr. Butts, for whom Blake had already begun to work: we know some of the 'frescoes' and color-prints which belong to this time; among them, or only just after, the incomparable 'Crucifixion,' in which the soldiers cast lots in the foreground and the crosses are seen from the back, against a stormy sky and lances like Tintoretto's. But it was also the time of all but the latest Prophetic Books (or of all but the latest of those left to us), and we may pause here for a moment to consider some of the qualities that Blake was by this time fully displaying in his linear and colored inventions and 'Visions of Eternity.'
It is by his energy and nobility of creation that Blake takes rank among great artists, in a place apart from those who have been content to study, to observe, and to copy. His invention of living form is like nature's, unintermittent, but without the measure and order of nature, and without complete command over the material out of which it creates. In his youth he had sought after prints of such inventive work as especially appealed to him, Michelangelo, Raphael, Dürer; it is possible that, having had 'very early in life the ordinary opportunities,' as Dr. Malkin puts it, 'of seeing pictures in the houses of noblemen and gentlemen, and in the king's palaces,' he had seen either pictures, or prints after pictures, of the Italian Primitives, whose attitudes and composition he at times suggests; and, to the end, he worked with Dürer's 'Melancholia' on his work-table and Michelangelo's designs on his walls. It not infrequently happened that a memory of form created by one of these great draughtsmen presented itself as a sort of short cut to the statement of the form which he was seeing or creating in his own imagination. A Devil's Advocate has pointed out 'plagiarisms' in Blake's design, and would dismiss in consequence his reputation for originality. Blake had not sufficient mastery of technique to be always wholly original in design; and it is to his dependence on a technique not as flexible as his imagination was intense that we must attribute what is unsatisfying in such remarkable inventions as 'The House of Death' (Milton's lazar-house) in the Print Doom of the British Museum. Its appeal to the imagination is partly in spite of what is 'organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.' Death is a version of the Ancient of Days and of Urizen, only his eyes are turned to blind terror and his beard to forked flame; Despair, a statue of greenish bronze, is the Scofield ofJerusalem; the limbs and faces rigid with agony are types of strength and symbols of pain. Yet even here there is creation, there is the energy of life, there is a spiritual awe. And wherever Blake works freely, as in the regions of the Prophetic Books, wholly outside time and space, appropriate form multiplies under his creating hand, as it weaves a new creation of worlds and of spirits, monstrous and angelical.