Blake distinguished, as all great imaginative artists have distinguished, between allegory, which is but realism's excuse for existence, and symbol, which is none of the 'daughters of Memory,' but itself vision or inspiration. He wrote in the MS. book: 'Vision or imagination is a representation of what actually exists, really and unchangeably. Fable or allegory is formed by the daughters of Memory.' And thus in the designs which accompany the text of his Prophetic Books there is rarely the mere illustration of those pages. He does not copy in line what he has said in words, or explain in words what he has rendered in line; a creation probably contemporary is going on, and words and lines render between them, the one to the eyes, the other to the mind, the same image of spiritual things, apprehended by different organs of perception.
And so in his pictures, what he gives us is not a picture after a mental idea; it is the literal delineation of an imaginative vision, of a conception of the imagination. He wrote: 'If you have not nature before you for every touch, you cannot paint portrait; and if you have nature before you at all, you cannot paint history.' There is a water-color of Christ in the carpenter's shop: Christ, a child, sets to the floor that compass which Blake saw more often in the hands of God the Father, stooping out of heaven; his mother and Joseph stand on each side of him, leaning towards him with the stiff elegance of guardian angels on a tomb. That is how Blake sees it, and not with the minute detail and the aim at local color with which the Pre-Raphaelites have seen it; it is not Holman Hunt's 'Bethlehem' nor the little Italian town of Giotto; it is rendered carefully after the visual imagination which the verses of the Bible awakened in his brain. In one of those variations which he did on the 'Flight into Egypt' (the 'Riposo,' as he called it), we have a lovely and surprising invention of landscape, minute and impossible, with a tree built up like a huge vegetable, and flowers growing out of the bare rock, and a red and flattened sun going down behind the hills; Joseph stands under the tree, nearly of the same height, but grave and kindly, and the Mother and Child are mild eighteenth-century types of innocence; the browsing donkey has an engaging rough homeliness of hide and aspect. It is all as unreal as you like, made up of elements not combined into any faultless pattern; art has gone back further than Giotto, and is careless of human individuality; but it is seen as it were with faith, and it conveys to you precisely what the painter meant to convey. So, in a lovely water-color of the creation of Eve, this blue-haired doll of obviously rounded flesh has in her something which is more as well as less than the appeal of bodily beauty, some suggestion to the imagination which the actual technical skill of Blake has put there. With less delicacy of color, and with drawing in parts actually misleading, there is a strange intensity of appeal, of realization not so much to the eyes as through them to the imagination, in another water-color of the raising of Lazarus, where the corpse swathed in grave-clothes floats sidelong upward from the grave, the weight of mortality as if taken off, and an unearthly lightness in its disimprisoned limbs, that have forgotten the laws of mortal gravity.
Yet, even in these renderings of what is certainly not meant for reality, how abundantly nature comes into the design: mere bright parrot-like birds in the branches of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the donkey of the 'Riposo,' the sheep's heads woven into the almost decorative border. Blake was constantly on his guard against the deceits of nature, the temptation of a 'facsimile representation of merely mortal and perishing substances.' His dread of nature was partly the recoil of his love; he feared to be entangled in the 'veils of Vala,' the seductive sights of the world of the senses; and his love of natural things is evident on every page of even the latest of the Prophetic Books. It is the natural world, the idols of Satan, that creep in at every corner and border, setting flowers to grow, and birds to fly, and snakes to glide harmlessly around the edges of these hard and impenetrable pages. The minute life of this 'vegetable world' is awake and in subtle motion in the midst of these cold abstractions. 'The Vegetable World opens like a flower from the Earth's centre, in which is Eternity,' and it is this outward flowering of eternity in the delicate living forms of time that goes on incessantly, as if by the mere accident of the creative impulse, as Blake or Los builds Golgonooza or the City of God out of the 'abstract void' and the 'indefiniteness of unimaginative existence.' It is, on every page, the visible outer part of what, in the words, can hut speak a language not even meant to be the language of the 'natural man.'
In these symbolic notations of nature, or double language of words and signs, these little figures of men and beasts that so strangely and incalculably decorate so many of Blake's pages, there is something Egyptian, which reminds me of those lovely riddles on papyri and funeral tablets, where the images of real things are used so decoratively, in the midst of a language itself all pictures, with colours never seen in the things themselves, but given to them for ornament.The Marriage of Heaven and Hellis filled with what seem like the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian tomb or obelisk, little images which might well mean things as definite as the images of Egyptian writing. They are still visible, sometimes mere curves or twines, in the latest of the engraved work, and might exist equally for some symbolic life which they contain, or for that decorative life of design which makes them as expressive mosaics of pattern as the hieroglyphics. I cannot hut think that it was partly from what he had seen, in actual basalt, or in engravings after ancient monuments which must have been about him at Basire the engraver's, that Blake found the suggestion of his picture-writing in the Prophetic Books. He believed that all Greek art was but a pale copy of a lost art of Egypt, 'the greater works of the Asiatic Patriarchs,' Apotheoses of Persian, Hindu, and Egyptian antiquity.' In such pictures as 'The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth,' he professed to be but 'applying to modern heroes, on a smaller scale,' what he had seen in vision of these 'stupendous originals now lost, or perhaps buried till some happier age.' Is it not likely therefore that in his attempt to create the religious books of a new religion, 'the Everlasting Gospel' of 'the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord,' he should have turned to the then unintelligible forms in which the oldest of the religions had written itself down in a visible pictorial message?
But, whatever suggestions may have come to him from elsewhere, Blake's genius was essentially Gothic, and took form, I doubt not, during those six years of youth when he drew the monuments in Westminster Abbey, and in the old churches about London. He might have learned much from the tombs in the Abbey, and from the brasses, and from the carved angels in the chapels, and from the naïve groups on the screen in the chapel of Edward the Confessor, and from the draped figures round the sarcophagus of Aymer de Valence. There is often, in Blake's figures, something of the monumental stiffness of Gothic stone, as there is in the minute yet formal characterization of the faces. His rendering of terrible and evil things, the animal beings who typify the passions and fierce distortions of the soul, have the same childlike detail, content to be ludicrous if it can only be faithful to a distinct conception, of the carvers of gargoyles and of Last Judgments. Blake has, too, the same love of pattern for its own sake, the same exuberance of ornament, always living and organic, growing out of the structure of the design or out of the form of the page, not added to it from without. Gothic art taught him his hatred of vacant space, his love of twining and trailing foliage and flame and water; and his invention of ornament is as unlimited as theirs. A page of one of his illuminated books is like the carving on a Gothic capital. Lines uncoil from a hidden centre and spread like branches or burst into vast vegetation, emanating from leaf to limb, and growing upward into images of human and celestial existence. The snake is in all his designs; whether, inJerusalem, rolled into chariot-wheels and into the harness of a chariot drawn by hoofed lions, and into the curled horns of the lions, and into the pointing fingers of the horns; or, inThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a leviathan of the sea with open jaws, eyed and scaled with poisonous jewels of purple and blood-red and corroded gold, swelling visibly out of a dark sea that foams aside from its passage; or, curved above the limbs and wound about the head of a falling figure in lovely diminishing coils like a corkscrew which is a note of interrogation; or, in mere unterrifying beauty, trailed like a branch of a bending tree across the tops of pages; or, bitted and bridled and a thing of blithe gaiety, ridden by little, naked, long-legged girls and boys in the new paradise of an America of the future. The Gothic carvers loved snakes, but hardly with the strange passion of Blake. They carved the flames of hell and of earthly punishment with delight in the beauty of their soaring and twisting lines; but no one has ever made of fire such a plaything and ecstasy as Blake has made of it. In his paintings he invents new colors to show forth the very soul of fire, a soul angrier and more variable than opals; and in his drawings he shows us lines and nooses of fire rushing upward out of the ground, and fire drifting across the air like vapor, and fire consuming the world in the last chaos. And everywhere there are gentle and caressing tongues and trails of fire, hardly to be distinguished from branches of trees and blades of grass and stems and petals of flowers. Water, which the Gothic carvers represented in curving lines, as the Japanese do, is in Blake a not less frequent method of decoration; wrapping frail human figures in wet caverns under the depths of the sea, and destroying and creating worlds.
Blake's color is unearthly, and is used for the most part rather as a symbol of emotion than as a representation of fact. It is at one time prismatic, and radiates in broad bands of pure color; at another, and more often, is as inextricable as the veins in mineral, and seems more like a natural growth of the earth than the creation of a painter. In the smaller Book of Designs in the Print Room of the British Museum the colors have moldered away, and blotted themselves together in a sort of putrefaction which seems to carry the suggestions of poisonous decay further than Blake carried them. This will be seen by a comparison of the minutely drawn leviathan ofThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with the colored print in the Book of Designs, in which the outline of the folds melts and crumbles into a mere chaos of horror. Color in Blake is never shaded, or, as he would have said, blotted and blurred; it is always pure energy. In the faint coloring of theBook of Thelthere is the very essence of gentleness; the color is a faultless interpretation of the faint and lovely monotony of the verse, and of its exquisite detail. Several of the plates recur in the Book of Designs, colored at a different and, no doubt, much later time; and while every line is the same the whole atmosphere and mood of the designs is changed. Bright rich color is built up in all the vacant spaces; and with the color there comes a new intensity; each design is seen over again, in a new way. Here, the mood is a wholly different mood, and this seeing by contraries is easier to understand than when, as in the splendid design on the fourth page ofThe Book of Urizen, repeated in the Book of Designs, we see a parallel, yet different, vision, a new, yet not contrary, aspect. In the one, the colors of the open book are like corroded iron or rusty minerals; in the other, sharp blues, like the wings of strange butterflies, glitter stormily under the red flashes of a sunset. The vision is the same, but every color of the thing seen is different.
To Blake, color is the soul rather than the body of his figures, and seems to clothe them like an emanation. What Behmen says of the world itself might be said of Blake's rendering of the aspects of the world and men. 'The whole outward visible World,' he tells us, 'with all its Being is a Signature, or Figure of the inward spiritual World; whatever is internally, and however its Operation is, so likewise it has its Character externally; like as the Spirit of each Creature sets forth and manifests the internal Form of its Birth, by its Body, so does the Eternal Being also.' Just as he gives us a naked Apollo for the 'spiritual form of Pitt' in the picture in the National Gallery, where Pitt is seen guiding Behemoth, or the hosts of evil, in a hell of glowing and obscure tumult, so he sees the soul of a thing or being with no relation to its normal earthly color. The colors of fire and of blood, an extra-lunar gold, putrescent vegetable colors, and the stains in rocks and sunsets, he sees everywhere, and renders with an ecstasy that no painter to whom color was valuable for its own sake has ever attained. It is difficult not to believe that he does not often use color with a definitely musical sense of its harmonies, and that colour did not literally sing to him, as it seems, at least in a permissible figure, to sing to us out of his pages.
At the end of September 1800 Blake left Lambeth, and took a cottage at Felpham, near Bognor, at the suggestion of William Hayley, the feeblest poet of his period, who imagined, with foolish kindness, that he could become the patron of one whom he called 'my gentle visionary Blake.' Hayley was a rich man, and, as the author ofThe Triumphs of Temper, was looked upon as a person of literary importance. He did his best to give Blake opportunities of making money, by doing engraving and by painting miniatures of the neighbors. He read Greek with him and Klopstock. 'Blake is just become a Grecian, and literally learning the language,' he says in one letter, and in another: 'Read Klopstock into English to Blake.' The effect of Klopstock on Blake is to be seen in a poem of ribald magnificence, which no one has yet ventured to print in full. The effect of Blake on Hayley, and of Hayley on Blake, can be realized from a few passages in the letters. At first we read: 'Mr. Hayley acts like a prince.' Then: 'I find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery of business, and intimations that, if I do not confine myself to this, I shall not live.' Last: 'Mr. H. is as much averse to my poetry as he is to a chapter in the Bible. He knows that I have writ it, for I have shown it to him' (this is apparently theMiltonor theJerusalem), and he has read part by his own desire, and has looked with sufficient contempt to enhance my opinion of it.... But Mr. H. approves of my designs as little as he does of my poems, and I have been forced to insist on his leaving me, in both, to my own self-will; for I am determined to be no longer pestered with his genteel ignorance and polite disapprobation. I know myself both poet and painter, and it is not his affected contempt that can move to anything but a more assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness I have brought down his affected loftiness, and he begins to think that I have some genius: as if genius and assurance were the same thing! But his imbecile attempts to depress me only deserve laughter.' What laughter they produced, while Blake was still suffering under them, can be seen by any one who turns to the epigrams on H. in the note-book. But the letter goes on, with indignant seriousness: 'But I was commanded by my spiritual friends to bear all and be silent, and to go through all without murmuring, and, in fine, hope till my three years shall be accomplished; at which time I was set at liberty to remonstrate against former conduct, and to demand justice and truth; which I have done in so effectual a manner that my antagonist is silenced completely, and I have compelled what should have been of freedom—my just right as an artist and as a man.'
In Blake's behavior towards Hayley, which has been criticized, we can test his sincerity to himself under all circumstances: his impeccable outward courtesy, his concessions, 'bearing insulting benevolence' meekly, his careful kindness towards Hayley and hard labour on his behalf, until the conviction was forced upon him from within that 'corporeal friends were spiritual enemies,' and that Hayley must be given up.
'Remembering the verses that Hayley sungWhen my heart knocked against the roof of my tongue.'
Blake wrote down bitter epigrams, which were written down for mere relief of mind, and certainly never intended for publication; and I can see no contradiction between these inner revolts and an outer politeness which had in it its due measure of gratitude. Both were strictly true, and only in a weak and foolish nature can the consciousness of kindness received distract or blot out the consciousness of the intellectual imbecility which may lurk behind it. Blake said:
'I never made friends but by spiritual gifts,By severe contentions of friendship and the burningfire of thought.'
What least 'contention of friendship' would not have been too much for the 'triumphs of temper' of 'Felpham's eldest son'? what 'fire of thought' could ever have enlightened his comfortable darkness? And is it surprising that Blake should have written in final desperation:
'Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache:Do be my enemy—for friendship's sake'?
He quarreled with many of his friends, with those whom he had cared for most, like Stothard and Flaxman; but the cause was always some moral indignation, which, just or unjust, was believed, and which, being believed, could not have been acted upon. With Blake belief and action were simultaneous. 'Thought is Act,' as he wrote on the margin of Bacon's essays.
I am inclined to attribute to this period the writing down of a mysterious manuscript in the possession of Mr. Buxton Forman, which has never been printed, but which, by his kind permission, I have been allowed to read. This manuscript is headed in large lettering: 'The Seven Days of the Created World,' above which is written, as if by an afterthought, in smaller lettering: 'Genesis.' It is written at the beginning of a blue-covered copy-book, of which the paper is water-marked 1797. It consists of some two hundred lines of blank verse, numbered by tens in the margin up to one hundred and fifty, then follow over fifty more lines without numberings, ending without a full stop or any apparent reason for coming to an end. The handwriting is unmistakably Blake's; on the first page or two it is large and careful; gradually it gets smaller and seems more hurried or fatigued, as if it had all been written at a single sitting. The earlier part goes on without a break, but in the later part there are corrections; single words are altered, sometimes as much as a line and a half is crossed out and rewritten, the lines are sometimes corrected in the course of writing. If it were not for these signs of correction I should find it difficult to believe that Blake had actually composed anything so tamely regular in metre or so destitute of imagination or symbol. It is an argument or statement, written in the formal eighteenth-century manner, with pious invocations, God being addressed as 'Sire,' and 'Wisdom Supreme' as his daughter, epithets are inverted that they may fit the better into a line, and geographical names heaped up in a scarcely Miltonic manner, while Ixion strangely neighbors the 'press'd African.' Nowhere is there any characteristic felicity, or any recognizable sign of Blake.
When I saw first the manuscript it occurred to me that it might have been a fragment of translation from Klopstock, done at Felpham under the immediate dictation of Hayley. 'Read Klopstock into English to Blake' we have seen Hayley noting down. But I can find no original for it in Klopstock. That Blake could have written it out of his own head at any date after 1797 is incredible, even as an experiment in that 'monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare and all writers of English blank verse, derived from the modern bondage of rhyming,' which he tells us in the preface toJerusalemhe considered 'to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse,' at the time 'when this verse was first dictated to me.' The only resemblance which we find to it in Blake's published work is in an occasional early fragment like that known as 'The Passions,' and where it is so different from this or any of the early attempts at blank verse is in the absolute regularity of the metre. All I can suggest is that Blake may have written it at a very early age, and preserved a rough draft, which Hayley may have induced him to make a clean copy of, and that in the process of copying he may have touched up the metre without altering the main substance. If this is so, I think he stopped so abruptly because he would not, even to oblige Hayley, go on any longer with so uncongenial a task.
Blake's three years at Felpham (September 1800 to September 1803) were described by him as 'my three years' slumber on the banks of ocean,' and there is no doubt that, in spite of the neighborhood and kindly antagonism of Hayley, that 'slumber' was, for Blake, in a sense an awakening. It was the only period of his life lived out of London, and with Felpham, as he said in a letter to Flaxman, 'begins a new life, because another covering of earth is shaken off.' The cottage at Felpham is only a little way in from a seashore which is one of the loveliest and most changing shores of the English coast. Whistler has painted it, and it is always as full of faint and wandering color as a Whistler. It was on this coast that Rossetti first learned to care for the sea. To Blake it must have been the realization of much that he had already divined in his imagination. There, as he wrote to Flaxman, 'heaven opens on all sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapors; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard and their forms more distinctly seen; and my cottage is also a shadow of their houses.' He drew the cottage on one of the pages ofMilton, with a naked image of himself walking in the garden, and the image of an angel about to alight on a tree. The cottage is still, as he found it, 'a perfect model for cottages, and I think for palaces of magnificence, only enlarging, not altering its proportions, and adding ornaments and not principles'; and no man of imagination could live there, under that thatched roof and with that marvelous sea before him, and not find himself spiritually naked and within arm's reach of the angels.
The sea has the properties of sleep and of awakening, and there can be no doubt that the sea had both those influences on Blake, surrounding him for once with an atmosphere like that of his own dreams. 'O lovely Felpham,' he writes, after he had left it, 'to thee I am eternally indebted for my three years' rest from perturbation and the strength I now enjoy.' Felpham represents a vivid pause, in which he had leisure to return upon himself; and in one of his letters he says: 'One thing of real consequence I have accomplished by coming into the country, which is to me consolation enough, namely, I have recollected all my scattered thoughts on art, and resumed my primitive and original ways of execution in both painting and engraving, which in the confusion of London I had very much obliterated from my mind.' It is to this period, no doubt (a period mentally overcome in the quiet of Felpham, but awaiting, as we shall see, the electric spark of that visit to the Truchsessian Gallery in London), that Blake refers in theDescriptive Catalogue, when he speaks of the 'experiment pictures' which 'were the result of temptations and perturbations, laboring to destroy imaginative power, by means of that infernal machine, called Chiaro Oscuro, in the hands of Venetian and Flemish demons,' such as the 'outrageous demon,' Rubens, the 'soft and effeminate and cruel demon,' Correggio, and, above all, Titian. 'The spirit of Titian,' we are told, in what is really a confession of Blake's consciousness of the power of those painters whose influence he dreaded, 'was particularly active in raising doubts concerning the possibility of executing without a model; and, when once he had raised the doubt, it became easy for him to snatch away the vision time after time; for when the artist took his pencil, to execute his ideas, his power of imagination weakened so much, and darkened, that memory of nature and of pictures of the various schools possessed his mind, instead of appropriate execution, resulting from the inventions.' It was thus at Felpham that he returned to himself in art, and it was at Felpham also that he had what seems to have been the culminating outburst of 'prophetic' inspiration, writing from immediate dictation, he said, 'and even against my will.' Visions came readily to him out of the sea, and he saw them walk on the shore, 'majestic shadows, grey but luminous, and superior to the common height of men.'
It was at Felpham that Blake wrote the two last of the Prophetic Books which remain to us,MiltonandJerusalem.Both bear the date of 1804 on the title-page, and this, no doubt, indicates that the engraving was begun in that year. Yet it is not certain that the engraved text ofJerusalem, at any rate, was formally published till after 1809. Pages were certainly inserted between those two dates. On p. 38 Blake says:
'I heard in Lambeth's shades:In Felpham I heard and saw the Visions of Albion:I write in South Molton Street, what I both see andhear,In regions of Humanity, in London's opening streets.'
That the main part was written in Felpham is evident from more than one letter to Butts. In a letter dated April 25, 1803, Blake says: 'But none can know the spiritual acts of my three years' slumber on the banks of ocean, unless he has seen them in the spirit, or unless he should read my long poem descriptive of those acts; for I have in these years composed an immense number of verses on one grand theme, similar to Homer'sIliador Milton'sParadise Lost; the persons and machinery entirely new to the inhabitants of earth (some of the persons excepted). I have written the poems from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even against my will. The time it has taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent, and an immense poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study. I mention this to show you what I think the grand reason of my being brought down here.' The poem is evidentlyJerusalem, for the address 'To the Public' on the first page begins: 'After my three years' slumber on the banks of the Ocean, I again display my Giant forms to the Public.' In the next letter, dated July 6, Blake again refers to the poem: 'Thus I hope that all our three years' trouble ends in good-luck at last, and shall be forgot by my affections, and only remembered by my understanding, to be a memento in time to come, and to speak to future generations by a sublime allegory, which is now perfectly completed into a grand poem. I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in eternity. I consider it as the grandest poem that this world contains. Allegory addressed to the intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding, is my definition of the most sublime poetry. It is somewhat in the same manner defined by Plato. This poem shall, by divine assistance, be progressively printed and ornamented with prints, and given to the public.'
This I take to mean that before Blake's return to London in 1803 the letterpress ofJerusalemwas, as he imagined, completely finished, but that the printing and illustration were not yet begun. The fact of this delay, and the fact that pages written after 1803 were inserted here and there, must not lead us to think, as many writers on Blake have thought, that there could be any allusion inJerusalemto the attacks of theExaminerof 1808 and 1809, or that 'Hand,' one of the wicked sons of Albion, could possibly be, as Rossetti desperately conjectured, 'a hieroglyph for Leigh Hunt.' The sons of Albion are referred to on quite a third of the pages ofJerusalem, from the earliest to the latest, and must have been part of the whole texture of the poem from the beginning. In a passage of the 'Public Address,' contained in the Rossetti MS., Blake says: 'The manner in which my character has been blasted these thirty years, both as an artist and as a man, may be seen particularly in a Sunday paper called theExaminer, published in Beaufort's Buildings; the manner in which I have rooted out the nest of villains will be seen in a poem concerning my three years' Herculean labours at Felpham, which I shall soon publish.' Even if this is meant forJerusalem, as it may well be, Blake is far from saying that he has referred in the poem to these particular attacks: 'the nest of villains' has undoubtedly a much broader meaning, and groups together all the attacks of thirty years, public or private, of which theExamineris but quoted as a recent example.
The chief reason for supposing thatJerusalemmay not have been published till after the exhibition of 1809, is to be found in a passage in theDescriptive Cataloguewhich seems to summarize the main subject of the poem, though it is quite possible that it may refer to some MS. now lost. The picture of the Ancient Britons, says Blake, represents three men who 'were originally one man who was fourfold. He was self-divided, and his real humanity slain on the stems of generation, and the form of the fourth was like the Son of God. How he became divided is a subject of great sublimity and pathos. The Artist has written it, under inspiration, and will, if God please, publish it. It is voluminous, and contains the ancient history of Britain, and the world of Satan and Adam.' 'All these things,' he has just said, 'are written in Eden.' And he says further: 'The British Antiquities are now in the Artist's hands; all his visionary contemplations relating to his own country and its ancient glory, when it was, as it again shall be, the source of learning and inspiration.' 'Adam was a Druid, and Noah.' In the description of his picture of the 'Last Judgment' Blake indicates 'Albion, our ancestor, patriarch of the Atlantic Continent, whose history preceded that of the Hebrews, and in whose sleep, or chaos, creation began. The good woman is Britannia, the wife of Albion. Jerusalem is their daughter.'
We see here the symbols, partly Jewish and partly British, into which Blake had gradually resolved his mythology. 'The persons and machinery,' he said, were 'entirely new to the inhabitants of earth (some of the persons excepted).' This has been usually, but needlessly, supposed to mean that real people are introduced under disguises. Does it not rather mean, what would be strictly true, that the 'machinery' is here of a kind wholly new to the Prophetic Books, while of the 'persons' some have already been met with, others are now seen for the first time? It is all, in his own words, 'allegory addressed to the intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding,' and the allegory becomes harder to read as it becomes more and more naked, concentrated, and unexplained.Miltonseems to have arisen out of a symbol which came visibly before Blake's eyes on his first waking in the cottage at Felpham. 'Work will go on here with Godspeed,' he writes to Butts. 'A roller and two harrows lie before my window. I met a plough on my first going out at my gate the first morning after my arrival, and the ploughboy said to the ploughman, "Father, the gate is open."' At the beginning of his poem Blake writes:
'The Plow goes forth in tempests and lightnings andthe Harrow cruelIn blights of the east; the heavy Roller follows inhowlings;'
And the imagery returns at intervals, in the vision of 'the Last Vintage,' the 'Great Harvest and Vintage of the Nations.' The personal element comes in the continual references to the cottage at Felpham;
'He set me down in Felpham's Vale and prepared abeautifulCottage for me that in three years I might write allthese VisionsTo display Nature's cruel holiness: the deceits ofNatural Religion;'
And it is in the cottage near the sea that he sees the vision of Milton, when he:
'Descended down a Paved work of all kinds of preciousstonesOut from the eastern sky; descending down into myCottageGarden; clothed in black, severe and silent hedescended.'
He awakes from the vision to find his wife by his side:
'My bones trembled. I fell outstretched upon thepathA moment, and my Soul returned into its mortal stateTo Resurrection and Judgment in the Vegetable Body,And my sweet Shadow of delight stood trembling bymy side.'
In the prayer to be saved from his friends ('Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies'), in the defense of wrath ('Go to thy labours at the Mills and leave me to my wrath'), in the outburst:
'The idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of ImaginationAnd from laughter proceeds to murder by undervaluingcalumny,'
It is difficult not to see some trace or transposition of the kind, evil counsellor Hayley, a 'Satan' of mild falsehood in the sight of Blake. But the main aim of the book is the assertion of the supremacy of the imagination:
'The Imagination is not a State: it is the HumanExistence itself,'
And the putting off of the 'filthy garments,' of 'Rational Demonstration,' of 'Memory,' of 'Bacon, Locke, and Newton,' the clothing of oneself in imagination:
'To cast aside from Poetry, all that is notInspiration,That it shall no longer dare to mock with the aspersionof Madness.Cast on the Inspired by the tame high finisher ofpaltry Blots,Indefinite or paltry Rhymes; or paltry harmonies.'
It is because 'Everything in Eternity shines by its own Internal light,' and that jealousy and cruelty and hypocrisy are all darkenings of that light, that Blake declares his purpose of:
'Opening to every eyeThese wonders of Satan's holiness showing to theEarthThe Idol Virtues of the Natural Heart, and Satan'sSeatExplore in all its Selfish Natural Virtue, and put offIn Self-annihilation all that is not of God alone.'
Such meanings as these flare out from time to time with individual splendors of phrase, like 'Time is the mercy of Eternity,' and the great poetic epigram, 'O Swedenborg! strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches' (where, for a moment, a line falls into the regular rhythm of poetry), and around them are deserts and jungles, fragments of myth broken off and flung before us after this fashion:
'But Bahab and Tirzah pervertTheir mild influences, therefore the Seven Eyes ofGod walk roundThe Three Heavens of Ulro, where Tirzah and herSistersWeave the black Woof of Death upon EntuthonBenythonIn the Vale of Surrey where Horeb terminates inRephaim.'
InJerusalem, which was to have been 'the grandest poem which the world contains,' there is less of the exquisite lyrical work which still decorates many corners ofMilton, but it is Blake's most serious attempt to set his myth in order, and it contains much of his deepest wisdom, with astonishing flashes of beauty. InMiltonthere was still a certain approximation to verse, most of the lines had at least a beginning and an end, but inJerusalem, although he tells us that 'every word and every letter is studied and put into its place,' I am by no means sure that Blake ever intended the lines, as he wrote them, to be taken as metrical lines, or read very differently from the prose of the English Bible, with its pause in the sense at the end of each verse. A vague line, hesitating between six and seven beats, does indeed seem from time to time to emerge from chaos, and inversions are brought in at times to accentuate a cadence certainly intended, as here:
'Why should Punishment Weave the Veil with IronWheels of War,When Forgiveness might it Weave with Wings ofCherubim?'
But read the whole book as if it were prose, following the sense for its own sake, and you will find that the prose, when it is not a mere catalogue, has generally a fine biblical roll and swing in it, a rhythm of fine oratory; while if you read each line as if it were meant to be a metrical unit you will come upon such difficulties as this:
'Such is the Forgiveness of the Gods, the Moral Virtuesof the'
That is one line, and the next adds 'Heathen.' There may seem to be small reason for such an arrangement of the lines if we readJerusalemin the useful printed text of Mr. Russell and Mr. Maclagan; but the reason will be seen if we turn to the original engraved page, where we shall see that Blake had set down in the margin a lovely little bird with outstretched wings, and that the tip of the bird's wing almost touches the last letter of the 'the' and leaves no room for another word. That such a line was meant to be metrical is unthinkable, as unthinkable as that:
'Los stood and stamped the earth, then he threw downhis hammer in rage&In fury'
Has any reason for existing in this form beyond the mere chance of a hand that writes until all the space of a given line is filled. Working as he did within those limits of his hand's space, he would accustom himself to write for the most part, and and especially when his imagination was most vitally awake, in lines that came roughly within those limits. Thus it will often happen that the most beautiful passages will have the nearest resemblance to a regular metrical scheme, as in such lines as these:
In vain: he is hurried afar into an unknown Night.He bleeds in torrents of blood, as he rolls thro'heaven above,He chokes up the paths of the sky: the Moon isleprous as snow:Trembling and descending down, seeking to rest onhigh Mona:Scattering her leprous snow in flakes of disease overAlbion.The Stars flee remote: the heaven is iron, the earthis sulphur,And all the mountains and hills shrink up like awithering gourd.'
Here the prophet is no longer speaking with the voice of the orator, but with the old, almost forgotten voice of the poet, and with something of the despised 'Monotonous Cadence.'
Blake lived for twenty-three years after the date on the title-page ofJerusalem, but, with the exception of the two plates calledThe Ghost of Abel, engraved in 1822, this vast and obscure encyclopaedia of unknown regions remains his last gospel. He thought it his most direct message. Throughout the Prophetic Books Blake has to be translated out of the unfamiliar language into which he has tried to translate spiritual realities, literally, as he apprehended them. Just as, in the designs which his hand drew as best it could, according to its limited and partly false knowledge, from the visions which his imagination saw with perfect clearness, he was often unable to translate that vision into its real equivalent in design, so in his attempts to put these other mental visions into words he was hampered by an equally false method, and often by reminiscences of what passed for 'picturesque' writing in the work of his contemporaries. He was, after all, of his time, though he was above it, and just as he only knew Michelangelo through bad reproductions, and could never get his own design wholly free, malleable, and virgin to his 'shaping spirit of imagination,' so, in spite of all his marvelous lyrical discoveries, made when his mind was less burdened by the weight of a controlling message, he found himself, when he attempted to make an intelligible system out of the 'improvisations of the spirit,' and to express that system with literal accuracy, the half-helpless captive of formal words, conventional rhythms, a language not drawn direct from its source. Thus we find, in the Prophetic Books, neither achieved poems nor an achieved philosophy. The philosophy has reached us only in splendid fragments (the glimmering of stars out of separate corners of a dark sky), and we shall never know to what extent these fragments were once parts of a whole. Had they been ever really fused, this would have been the only system of philosophy made entirely out of the raw material of poetry. As it has come to us unachieved, the world has still to wait for a philosophy untouched by the materialism of the prose intelligence.
In the Prophetic Books Blake labours at the creation of a myth, which may be figured as the representation in space of a vast spiritual tragedy. It is the tragedy of Man, a tragedy in which the first act is creation. Milton was content to begin with 'Man's first disobedience,' but Blake would track the human soul back into chaos, and beyond. He knows, like Krishna, in theBhagavad Gita, that 'above this visible nature there exists another, unseen and eternal, which, when all created things perish, does not perish'; and he sees the soul's birth in that 'inward spiritual world,' from which it falls to mortal life and the body, as into a death. He sees its new, temporal life, hung round with fears and ambushes, out of which, by a new death, the death of that mortal self which separates it from eternity, it may reawaken, even in this life, into the eternal life of imagination. The persons of the drama are the powers and passions of Man, and the spiritual forces which surround him, and are the 'states' through which he passes. Man is seen, as Blake saw all things, fourfold: Man's Humanity, his Spectre, who is Reason, his Emanation, who is Imagination, his Shadow, who is Desire. And the states through which Man passes, friendly or hostile, energies of good or of evil, are also four: the Four Zoas, who are the Four Living Creatures of Ezekiel, and are called Urizen, Luvah, Tharmas, and Urthona (or, to mortals, Los). Each Zoa has his Emanation: Ahania, who is the emanation of Intellect, and is named 'eternal delight'; Vala, the emanation of Emotion, who is lovely deceit, and the visible beauty of Nature; Enion, who is the emanation of the Senses, and typifies the maternal instinct; Enitharmon, who is the emanation of Intuition, and personifies spiritual beauty. The drama is the division, death, and resurrection, in an eternal circle, of the powers of man and of the powers in whose midst he fights and struggles. Of this incommensurable action we are told only in broken hints, as of a chorus crying outside doors where deeds are being done in darkness. Images pass before us, make their gesture, and are gone; the words spoken are ambiguous, and seem to have an under meaning which it is essential for us to apprehend. We see motions of building and of destruction, higher than the topmost towers of the world, and deeper than the abyss of the sea; souls pass through furnaces, and are remade by Time's hammer on the anvil of space; there are obscure crucifixions, and Last Judgments return and are re-enacted.
To Blake, the Prophetic Books were to be the new religious books of a religion which was not indeed new, for it was the Everlasting Gospel' of Jesus, but, because it had been seen anew by Swedenborg and by Wesley and by 'the gentle souls who guide the great wine-press of Love,' among whom was Teresa, seemed to require a new interpretation to the imagination. Blake wrote when the eighteenth century was coming to an end; he announced the new dispensation which was to come, Swedenborg had said, with the year (which was the year of Blake's birth) 1757. He looked forward steadfastly to the time when 'Sexes must vanish and cease to be,' when 'all their crimes, their punishments, their accusations of sin, all their jealousies, revenges, murders, hidings of cruelty in deceit, appear only on the outward spheres of visionary Space and Time, in the shadows of possibility by mutual forgiveness for evermore, and in the vision and the prophecy, that we may foresee and avoid the terrors of Creation and Redemption and Judgment.' He spoke to literalists, rationalists, materialists; to an age whose very infidels doubted only facts, and whose deists affirmed no more than that man was naturally religious. The rationalist's denial of everything beyond the evidence of his senses seemed to him a criminal blindness; and he has engraved a separate sheet with images and statements of the affirmation: 'There is no Natural Religion.' To Blake the literal meaning of things seemed to be of less than no importance. To worship the 'Goddess Nature' was to worship the 'God of this World,' and so to be an atheist, as even Wordsworth seemed to him to be. Religion was asleep, with Art and Literature in its arms: Blake's was the voice of the awakening angel. What he cried was that only eternal and invisible things were true, and that visible temporal things were a veil and a delusion. In this he knew himself to be on the side of Wesley and Whitefield, and that Voltaire and Rousseau, the voices of the passing age, were against him. He called them 'frozen sons of the feminine Tabernacle of Bacon, Newton, and Locke.' Wesley and Whitefield he calls the 'two servants' of God, his 'two witnesses.'
But it seemed to him that he could go deeper into the Bible than they, in their practical eagerness, had gone. 'What are the treasures of Heaven,' he asked, 'that we are to lay up for ourselves—are they any other than Mental Studies and Performances?' 'Is the Holy Ghost,' he asked, 'any other than an intellectual Fountain?' It seemed to him that he could harmonise many things once held to be discordant, and adjust the many varying interpretations of the Bible and the other books of ancient religions by a universal application of what had been taken in too personal a way. Hence many of the puzzling 'correspondences' of English cities and the tribe of Judah, of 'the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord.'
There is an outcry inJerusalem:
'No individual ought to appropriate to HimselfOr to his Emanation, any of the UniversalCharacteristicsOf David or of Eve, of the Woman, of the Lord,Of Reuben or of Benjamin, of Joseph or Judah orLevi.Those who dare appropriate to themselves UniversalAttributesAre the Blasphemous Selfhoods and must be brokenasunder.A Vegetable Christ and a Virgin Eve, are theHermaphroditicBlasphemy: by his Maternal Birth he put off thatEvil One,And his Maternal Humanity must be put offEternally,Lest the Sexual Generation swallow upRegeneration:Come, Lord Jesus, take on Thee the Satanic Body ofHoliness!'
Exactly what is meant here will be seen more clearly if we compare it with a much earlier statement of the same doctrine, in the poem 'To Tirzah' in theSongs of Experience, and the comparison will show us all the difference between the art of Blake in 1794, and what seemed to him the needful manner of his message ten years later. 'Tirzah' is Blake's name for Natural Religion.
'Whatever is Born of Mortal BirthMust be consumed with the Earth,To rise from Generation free:Then what have I to do with thee?The Sexes sprung from Shame and PrideBlow'd in the morn; in evening died;But Mercy changed Death into Sleep;The Sexes rose to work and weep.Thou Mother of my Mortal partWith cruelty didst mould my Heart,And with false, self-deceiving TearsDidst bind my Nostrils, Eyes, and Ears;Didst close my Tongue in senseless clay,And me to Mortal Life betray:The Death of Jesus set me free:Then what have I to do with thee?
Here is expressed briefly and exquisitely a large part of the foundation of Blake's philosophy: that birth into the world, Christ's or ours, is a fall from eternal realities into the material affections of the senses, which are deceptions, and bind us under the bondage of nature, our 'Mother,' who is the Law; and that true life is to be regained only by the death of that self which cuts us off from our part in eternity, which we enter through the eternal reality of the imagination. In the poem, the death of Jesus symbolises that deliverance; in the passage fromJerusalemthe Church's narrow conception of the mortal life of Jesus is rebuked, and its universal significance indicated, but in how different, how obscure, how distorted a manner. What has brought about this new manner of saying the same thing?
I think it is an endeavor to do without what had come to seem to Blake the deceiving imageries of nature, to express the truth of contraries at one and the same time, and to render spiritual realities in a literal translation. What he had been writing was poetry; now what he wrote was to be prophecy; or, as he says inMilton:
'In fury of Poetic Inspiration,To build the Universe Stupendous, Mental FormsCreating.'
And, seeking always the 'Minute Particulars,' he would make no compromise with earthly things, use no types of humanity, no analogies from nature; for it was against all literal acceptance of nature or the Bible or reason, of any apparent reality, that he was appealing. Hence:
'All Human Forms identified, even Tree, Metal, Earth,and Stone, allHuman Forms identified, living, going forth, andreturning weariedInto the planetary lives of Years, Months, Days, andHours.'
Hence the affirmation:
'For all are Men in Eternity, Rivers, Mountains,Cities, Villages;'
And the voice of London saying:
'My Streets are my Ideas of Imagination.'
Hence the parallels and correspondences, the names too well known to have any ready-made meaning to the emotions (London or Bath), the names so wholly unknown that they also could mean nothing to the emotions or to the memory (Bowlahoola, Golgonooza), the whole inhuman mythology, abstractions of frigid fire. InJerusalemBlake interrupts himself to say:
'I call them by their English names; English, therough basement.Los built the stubborn structure of the Language,acting againstAlbion's melancholy, who must else have been aDumb despair.'
In the Prophetic Books we see Blake laboring upon a 'rough basement' of 'stubborn' English; is it, after all this 'consolidated and extended work,' this 'energetic exertion of his talent,' a building set up in vain, the attempt to express what must else have been, and must now for ever remain, 'a dumb despair'?
I think we must take the Prophetic Books not quite as Blake would have had us take them. He was not a systematic thinker, and he was not content to be a lyric poet. Nor indeed did he ever profess to offer us a system, built on logic and propped by reasoning, but a myth, which is a poetical creation. He said inJerusalem:
'I must Create a System, or be enslaved by anotherMan's.I will not Reason or Compare: my business is toCreate.'
To Blake each new aspect of truth came as a divine gift, and between all his affirmations of truth there is no contradiction, or no other than that vital contradiction of opposites equally true. The difficulty lies in co-ordinating them into so minutely articulated a myth, and the difficulty is increased when we possess, instead of the whole body of the myth, only fragments of it. Of the myth itself it must be said that, whether from defects inherent in it or from the fragmentary state in which it comes to us, it can never mean anything wholly definite or satisfying even to those minds best prepared to receive mystical doctrine. We cannot read the Prophetic Books either for their thought only or for their beauty only. Yet we shall find in them both inspired thought and unearthly beauty. With these two things, not always found together, we must be content.
The Prophetic Books bear witness, in their own way, to that great gospel of imagination which Blake taught and exemplified. InJerusalemit is stated in a single sentence: 'I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination: Imagination, the real and eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more.' 'O Human Imagination, O Divine Body I have Crucified!' he cries; and he sees continually:
'Abstract Philosophy warring in enmity againstImagination,Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessedfor ever.'
He finds the England of his time generalising Art and Science till Art and Science is lost,' making:
'A pretence of Art, to destroy Art, a pretence ofLibertyTo destroy Liberty, a pretence of Religion to destroyReligion.'
He sees that:
'The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowedperceptions,Are become weak visions of Time and Space, fix'dinto furrows of death.'
He sees everywhere 'the indefinite Spectre; who is the Rational Power,' crying out:
'I am God, O Sons of Men! I am your RationalPower!Am I not Bacon and Newton and Locke who teachHumility to Man?Who teach Doubt and Experiment: and my twokings, Voltaire, Rousseau.'
He sees this threefold spirit of doubt and negation overspreading the earth, 'brooding Abstract Philosophy,' destroying Imagination; and, as he looked about him:
'Every Universal Form was become barren mountainsof MoralVirtue: and every Minute Particular harden'd intograins of sand:And all the tenderness of the soul cast forth as filthand mire.'
It is against this spiritual deadness that he brings his protest, which is to awaken Albion out of the sleep of death, 'his long and cold repose.' 'Therefore Los,' the spirit of prophecy, and thus Blake, who 'kept the Divine Vision in time of trouble,' stands in London building Golgonooza, 'the spiritual fourfold London,' the divine City of God. Of the real or earthly London he says inJerusalem:
'I see London blind and age bent begging thro' theStreetsOf Babylon, led by a child, his tears run down hisbeard!'
Babylon, in Blake, means 'Rational Morality.' In theSongs of Innocencewe shall see the picture, at the head of the poem called 'London.' In that poem Blake numbers the cries which go up in 'London's chartered streets,' the cry of the chimney-sweeper, of the soldier, of the harlot; and he says:
'In every cry of every man,In every infant's cry of fear,In every voice, in every ban,The mind-forged manacles I hear.'
Into these lines he condenses much of his gospel. What Blake most hated on earth were 'mind-forged manacles.' Reason seemed to him to have laid its freezing and fettering hand on every warm joy, on every natural freedom, of body and soul; all his wrath went out against the forgers and the binders of these fetters. In his earlier poems he sings the instinctive joys of innocence; in his later, the wise joys of experience; and all the Prophetic Books are so many songs of mental liberty and invectives against every form of mental oppression. 'And Jerusalem is called Liberty among the Children of Albion.' One of the Prophetic Books,Ahania, can be condensed into a single sentence, one of its lines: 'Truth has bounds; Error has none.' Yet this must be understood to mean that error is the 'indefinite void 'and truth a thing minutely organized; not that truth can endure bondage or limitation from without. He typifies Moral Law by Rahab, the harlot of the Bible, a being of hidden, hypocritic cruelty. Chastity is no more in itself than a lure of the harlot, typifying unwilling restraint, a negation, and no personal form of energy.
'No individual can keep the Laws, for they are deathTo every energy of man, and forbid the springsof life.'
It is energy that is virtue, and, above all, mental energy. 'The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory.' 'It was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that brought sin into the world by creating distinctions, by calling this good and that evil.' Blake says inJerusalem:
'And in this manner of the Sons of Albion in theirstrength;They take the Two Contraries which are called Qualities,with whichEvery Substance is clothed, they name them Good andEvil,From them they make an Abstract, which is a NegationNot only of the Substance from which it is derived,A murderer of its own Body: but also a murdererOf every Divine Member: it is the Reasoning Power,An Abstract objecting power, that Negativeseverything.This is the Spectre of Man: the Holy ReasoningPower,And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination ofDesolation.'
The active form of sin is judgment, intellectual cruelty, unforgivingness, punishment. 'In Hell is all self-righteousness; there is no such thing as forgiveness of sins.' In his picture of the 'Last Judgment' he represents the Furies by men, not women; and for this reason: 'The spectator may suppose them clergymen in the pulpit, scourging sin instead of forgiving it.' InJerusalemhe says:
'And the appearance of a Man was seen in theFurnaces,Saving those who have sinned from the punishmentof the Law(In pity of the punisher whose state is eternaldeath),And keeping them from Sin by the mild counsels ofhis love.'
And in his greatest paradox and deepest passion of truth, he affirms:
'I care not whether a Man is Good or Evil; all that IcareIs whether he is a Wise Man or a Fool. Go, put offHolinessAnd put on Intellect.'
That holiness may be added to wisdom Blake asks only that continual forgiveness of sins which to him meant understanding, and thus intellectual sympathy; and he sees in the death of Jesus the supreme symbol of this highest mental state.
'And if God dieth not for Man and giveth not himselfEternally for Man, Man could not exist, for Man is love,As God is Love: every kindness to another is a littleDeathIn the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but byBrotherhood.'
Of Blake it may be said as he says of Albion: 'He felt that Love and Pity are the same,' and to Love and Pity he gave the ultimate jurisdiction over humanity.
Blake's gospel of forgiveness rests on a very elaborate structure, which he has built up in his doctrine of 'States.' At the head of the address to the Deists in the third chapter ofJerusalem, he has written: 'The Spiritual States of the Soul are all Eternal. Distinguish between the Man and his present State.' Much of his subtlest casuistry is expended on this distinction, and, as he makes it, it is profoundly suggestive. Erin says, inJerusalem:
'Learn therefore, O Sisters, to distinguish the EternalHumanThat walks about among the stones of fire, in blissand woeAlternate, from those States or Worlds in which theSpirit travels:This is the only means to Forgiveness of Enemies.'
The same image is used again:
'As the Pilgrim passes while the Country permanentremains,So Men pass on; but States remain permanent forever;'
And, again, in almost the same words, in the prose fragment on the picture of the 'Last Judgment': 'Man passes on, but states remain for ever; he passes through them like a traveller, who may as well suppose that the places he has passed through exist no more, as a man may suppose that the states he has passed through exist no more: everything is eternal.' By states Blake means very much what we mean by moods, which, in common with many mystics, he conceives as permanent spiritual forces, through which what is transitory in man passes, while man imagines that they, more transitory than himself, are passing through him. It is from this conception of man as a traveller, and of good and evil, the passions and virtues and sensations and ideas of man, as spiritual countries, eternally remaining, through which he passes, that Blake draws his inference: condemn, if you will, the state which you call sin, but do not condemn the individual whose passage through it may he a necessity of his journey. And his litany is:
'Descend, O Lamb of God, and take away the imputationof SinBy the creation of States and the deliverance ofIndividuals evermore. Amen....Come then, O Lamb of God, and take away theremembrance of Sin.'
Blake had already decided to leave Felpham, 'with the full approbation of Mr. Hayley,' as early as April 1803.'But alas!' he writes to Butts, 'now I may say to you—what perhaps I should not dare to say to any one else—that I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoyed, and that I may converse with my friends in eternity, see visions, dream dreams, and prophesy, and speak parables unobserved, and at liberty from the doubts of other mortals.' 'There is no medium or middle state,' he adds, 'and if a man is the enemy of my spiritual life while he pretends to be the friend of my corporeal, he is a real enemy.' Hayley, once fully realized, had to be shaken off, and we find Blake taking rooms on the first-floor at 17 South Molton Street, and preparing to move to London, when an incident occurs which leaves him, as he put it in a letter to Butts, 'in a bustle to defend myself against a very unwarrantable warrant from a justice of the peace in Chichester, which was taken out against me by a private in Captain Leathes' troop of 1st or Royal Dragoon Guards, for an assault and seditious words.' This was a soldier whom Blake had turned out of his garden, 'perhaps foolishly and perhaps not,' as he said, but with unquestionable vigor. 'It is certain,' he commented, 'that a too passive manner, inconsistent with my active physiognomy, had done me much mischief.' The 'contemptible business' was tried at Chichester on January 11, 1804, at the Quarter Sessions, and Blake was acquitted of the charge of high treason; 'which so gratified the auditory,' says theSussex Advertiserof the date, 'that the court was, in defiance of all decency, thrown into an uproar by their noisy exultations.'
London, on his return to it, seemed to Blake as desirable as Felpham had seemed after London; and he writes to Hayley: 'The shops in London improve; everything is elegant, clean, and neat; the streets are widened where they were narrow; even Snow Hill is become almost level and is a very handsome street, and the narrow part of the Strand near St. Clement's is widened and become very elegant.' But there were other reasons for satisfaction. In a letter written before he left Felpham, Blake said: 'What is very pleasant, every one who hears of my going to London applauds it as the only course for the interest of all concerned in my works; observing that I ought not to be away from the opportunities London affords of seeing fine pictures, and the various improvements in works of art going on in London.' In October 1804 he writes to Hayley, in the most ecstatic of his letters, recording the miracle or crisis that has suddenly opened his eyes, vitalizing the meditations of Felpham. 'Suddenly,' says the famous letter, 'on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures, I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters.... Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm, or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand, even as I used to be in my youth, and as I have not been for twenty dark, but very profitable years.' Some of this new radiance may be seen in the water-color of 'The River of Life,' which has been assigned by Mr. Russell to this year; and in those 'Inventions' in illustration of Blair'sGrave, by which Blake was to make his one appeal to the public of his time.
That appeal he made through the treacherous services of a sharper named Cromek, an engraver and publisher of prints, who bought the twelve drawings for the price of twenty pounds, on the understanding that they were to be engraved by their designer; and thereupon handed them over to the fashionable Schiavonetti, telling Blake 'your drawings have had the good fortune to be engraved by one of the first artists in Europe.' He further caused a difference between Blake and Stothard which destroyed a friendship of nearly thirty years, never made up in the lifetime of either, though Blake made two efforts to be reconciled. The story of the double commission given by Cromek for a picture of Chaucer'sCanterbury Pilgrims, and of the twofold accusation of plagiarism, is told clearly enough in the narrative of J. T. Smith (p. 368 below), while Cunningham does his best to confuse the facts in the interests of Cromek. It has been finally summed up by Mr. Swinburne, who comes to this reasonable conclusion: 'It is probable that Stothard believed himself to be not in the wrong; it is certain that Blake was in the right.' As for Cromek, he has written himself down for all time in his true character, naked and not ashamed, in a letter to Blake of May 1807, where the false bargainer asserts: 'Herein I have been gratified; for I was determined to bring you food as well as reputation, though, from your late conduct, I have some reason to embrace your wild opinion, that to manage genius, and to cause it to produce good things, it is absolutely necessary to starve it; indeed, the opinion is considerably heightened by the recollection that your best work, the illustrations ofThe Grave, was produced when you and Mrs. Blake were reduced so low as to be obliged to live on half a guinea a week.' Cromek published the book by subscription in August 1808, with an 'advertisement' invoking the approval of the drawings as 'a high and original effort of genius' by eleven Royal Academicians, including Benjamin West, Flaxman, Lawrence, and Stothard. 'To the elegant and classical taste of Mr. Fuseli,' he tells us further, 'he is indebted for the excellent remarks on the moral worth and picturesque dignity of the Designs that accompany this Poem.' Fuseli praises pompously the 'genuine and unaffected attitudes,' the 'simple graces which nature and the heart alone can dictate, and only an eye inspired by both, discover,' though finding the artist 'playing on the very verge of legitimate invention.'
It is by the designs to Blair'sGravethat Blake is still perhaps chiefly known, outside his own public; nor was he ever so clear, or, in a literal way, so convincing in his rendering of imaginative reality. Something formal tempers and makes the ecstasy explicit; the drawing is inflexibly elegant; all the Gothic secrets that had been learnt among the tombs in Westminster Abbey find their way into these stony and yet strangely living death-beds and monuments of death. No more vehement movement was ever perpetrated than that leap together of the soul and body meeting as the grave opens. If ever the soul was made credible to the mind through the eyes, it is in these designs carved out of abstract form, and planned according to a logic which is partly literal faith in imagination and partly the curtailment of scholastic drawing.