WILLIAM BLAKE

The Collected Works of
Arthur Symons

Volume 4

William Blake

No.

F- 8

Book No.

Wilii

Blak

Arthur Symoni

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Printed in Great Britain

London: Martin Seeker (Ltd.)
Number Five John Street Adelphi

To

AUGUSTE RODIN

Whose Work is the

Marriage of
Heaven and Hell

CONTENTS

Introduction, p. i
William Blake, p. 13

INTRODUCTION

WHEN Blake spoke the firft word of the nineteenth
century there was no one to hear it, and now
that his message, the message of emancipation
from reality through the * e shaping spirit of imagination/'
has penetrated the world, and is slowly remaking it, few
are conscious of the first utterer, in modern times, of the
message with which all are familiar. Thought to-day,
wherever it is mot individual, owes either force or dire&ion
to Nietzsche, and thus we see, on our topmost towers, the
Philistine armed and winged, and without the love or fear
of God or man in his heart, doing battle in Nietzsche's name
against the ideas of Nietzsche. No one can think, and
escape Nietzsche ; but Nietzsche has come after Blake, and
will pass before Blake passes.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell anticipates Nietzsche in
his mot significant paradoxes, and, before his time, exalts
energy above reason, and Evil, f c the active springing from
energy," above Good, " the passive that obeys reason."
Did not Blake astonish Crabb Robinson by declaring that
" there was nothing in good and evil, the virtues and vices " ;
that " vices in the natural world were the highest sublimities
in the spiritual world " ? " Man must become better and
wickeder," says Nietzsche in Zarafbuftra; and, elsewhere ;
ce Every man mul find Ms own virtue." Sin, to Blake,
is negation, is nothing ; * c everything is good in God's
IV B i

William

eyes " ; it is the eating of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil that has brought sin into the world : educa-
tion, that is, by which we are taught to distinguish between
things that do not differ. When Nietzsche says : " Let
us rid the world of the notion of sin, and banish with it
the idea of punishment," he expresses one of Blake's central
doctrines, and he realises the corollary, which, however, he
does not add. " The Christian's soul," he says, " which has
freed itself from sin is in most cases ruined by the hatred
against sin. Look at the faces of great Christians. They
are the faces of great haters." Blake sums up all Christianity
as forgiveness of sin :

" Mutual forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the gates of Paradise."

The doctrine of the Atonement was to him a " horrible
doftrine," because it seemed to make God a hard creditor,
from whom pity could be bought for a price. " Doth
Jehovah forgive a debt only on condition that it shall be
paid ? . . /That debt is not forgiven ! " he says in Jerusalem.
To Nietzsche, far as he goes on the same road, pity is " a
weakness, which increases the world's suffering " ; but to
Blake, in the spirit of the French proverb, forgiveness is
understanding. " This forgiveness," says Mr. Yeats, " was
not the forgiveness of the theologian who has received a
commandment from afar off, but of the poet and artist, who
Believes he has been taught, in a mystical vision, "that
the imagination is the man himself," and believes he has
discovered in the praclice of his art that without a perfect
sympathy there is no perfect imagination, and therefore no
perfect life." He trusted the passions, because they were
alive; and, like Nietzsche, hated asceticism, because

IntrodulKon

" Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,
But desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and Heauty there.

<e

tc

Put off holiness," he said, " and put on intellect." And
the fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so
holy." Is not this a heaven after the heart of Nietzsche ?
Nietzsche is a Spinoza d rebours. The essence of the
individual, says Spinoza, " is the effort by which it endeavours
to persevere in its own being." " Will and understanding
are one and the same." " By virtue and power I understand
the same thing." " The effort to understand is the fift
and sole basis of virtue." So far it might be Nietzsche
who is speaking. Only, in Spinoza, this affirmation of will,
persistent egoism, power, hard understanding, leads to a
conclusion which is far enough from the conclusion of
Nietzsche. " The absolute virtue of the mind is to under-
stand ; its highest virtue, therefore, to understand or know
God." That, to Nietzsche, is one of " the beautiful words
by which the conscience is lulled to sleep." " Virtue is
power," Spinoza leads us to think, because it is virtue ;
" power is virtue," affirms Nietzsche, because it is power.
And in Spinoza's profound heroism of the mind, really a
great humility, " he who loves God does not desire that
God should love him in return," Nietzsche would find
the material for a kind of desperate heroism, made up wholly
of pride and defiance.

To Blake, " God-intoxicated " more than Spinoza, " God
only ads and is, in existing beings and men/' as Spinoza
might also have said ; to him, as to Spinoza, all moral
virtue is identical with understanding, and "men are ad-
mitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and

3

William

governed their passions, but because they have cultivated
their understandings." Yet to Bkke Spinoza's mathematical
approach to truth would have been a kind of negation.
Even an argument from reason seemed to him atheistical :
to one who had truth, as he was assured, within him, reason
was only " the bound or outward circumference of energy,"
but " energy is the only life," and, as to Nietzsche, is " eternal
delight."

Yet, to Nietzsche, with his Strange, scientific distrust
of the imagination, of those who so " suspiciously " say
" We see what others do not see," there comes distrust,
hesitation, a kind of despair, precisely at the point where
Blake enters into his liberty. " The habits of our senses,"
says Nietzsche, " have plunged us into the lies and deceptions
of feeling." "Whoever believes in nature," says Blake,
<e disbelieves in God ; for nature is the work of the Devil."
<e These again," Nietzsche goes on, " are the foundations
of all our judgments and * knowledge ' ; there is no escape
whatever, no back-way or by-way into the real world."
But the real world, to Blake, into which he can escape at
every moment, is the world of imagination, from which
messengers come to him, daily and nightly.

Bkke said ee The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses
of instruction," and it is partly in what they helped to destroy
that Blake and Nietzsche are at one ; but destruction, with
Bkke, was the gesture of a hand which brushes aside needless
hindrances, while to Nietzsche it was " an intellectual thing,"
the outer militant part of " the silent, self-sufficient man in
the midst of a general enslavement, who practises self-
defence against the outside world, and is constantly living
in a State of supreme fortitude." Blake rejoins Nietzsche
as he had rejoined Spinoza, by a different road, having fewer
4

Introduction

devils to caSt out, and no difficulty at all in maintaining his
spiritual isolation, his mental liberty, under all circumstances.
And to Blake, to be " myself alone, shut up in myself,"
was to be in no merely individual but in a universal world,
that world of imagination whose gates seemed to him to be
open to every human being. No less than Nietzsche he
says to every man : Be yourself, nothing else matters or
exists ; but to be myself, to him, was to enter by the imagina-
tion into eternity.

The philosophy of Nietzsche was made out of his nerves
and was suffering, but to Blake it entered like sunlight into
the eyes. Nietzsche's mind is the most sleepless of minds ;
with him every sensation turns instantly into the stuff of
thought ; he is terribly alert, the more so because he never
stops to systematise ; he must be for ever apprehending. He
darts out feelers in every direction, relentlessly touching the
whole substance of the world. His apprehension is minute
rather than broad ; he is content to seize one thing at a
time, and he is content if each separate thing remains separate ;
no theory ties together or limits his individual intuitions.
What we call his philosophy is really no more than the
aggregate of these intuitions coming to us through the
medium of a remarkable personality. His personality
Stands to him in the place of a system. Speaking of Kant
and Schopenhauer, he says : " Their thoughts do not
constitute a passionate history of the soul." His thoughts
are the passionate history of his soul. It is for this reason
that he is an artist among philosophers rather than a pure
philosopher. And remember that he is also not, in the
absolute sense, the poet, but the artist. He saw and dreaded
the weaknesses of the artist, his side-issues in the pursuit of
truth. But in so doing he dreaded one of his own weaknesses .

5

William

Blake, on the other hand, receives nothing through his
sensations, suffers nothing through his nerves. " I know of
no other Christianity," he says, " and of no other Gospel
than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the
divine arts of Imagination: Imagination, the real and
eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a
faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our eternal or
imaginative bodies, when these vegetable mortal bodies
are no more." To Nietzsche the sense of a divine haunting
became too heavy a burden for his somewhat inhuman
solitude, the solitude of Alpine regions, with their Steadfast
glitter, their thin, high, intoxicating air. " Is this obtrusive-
ness of heaven," he cried, " this inevitable superhuman
neighbour, not enough to drive one mad ? " But Blake,
when he says, " I am under the dire&ion of messengers
from heaven, daily and nightly," speaks out of natural joy,
which is wholly humility, and it is only " if we fear to do
the dictates of our angels, and tremble at the tasks set before
us," it is only then that he dreads, as the one punishment,
that " every one in eternity will leave him."

11

"There are three powers in man of conversing with
Paradise," said Blake, and he defined them as the three sons
of Noah who survived the flood, and who are Poetry, Paint-
ing, and Music. Through all three powers, and to the last
moments of his life on earth, Blake conversed with Paradise.
We are told that he used to sing his own songs to his own
music, and that, when he was dying, " he composed and
uttered songs to his Maker," and " burst out into singing
of the things he saw in heaven." And with almost the last
Strength of bis hands he had made a sketch of his wife before
6

Introduction

he " made the rafters ring," as a bystander records, with
the improvisation of his la& breath.

Throughout life his desire had been, as he said, <e to
converse with my friends in eternity, see visions, dream
dreams, and prophesy and speak parables unobserved."
He says again :

" I rel not from my great task

To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes
Of Man inwards into the worlds of thought, into eternity,
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human imagination.**

And, writing to the uncomprehending Hayley (who had
called him " gentle, visionary Blake "), he says again : " I
am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a
pencil or graver into my hand." To the newspapers of his
time, on the one or two occasions when they mentioned his
name, he was " an unfortunate lunatic " ; even to Lamb,
who looked upon him as <c one of the mot extraordinary
persons of the age," he was a man " flown, whither I know
not to Hades or a madhouse." To the firSt editor of his
collected poems there seemed to be " something in his
mind not exactly sane " ; and the critics of to-day Still discuss
his sanity as a man and as a poet.

It is true that Blake was abnormal ; but what was abnormal
in him was his sanity. To one who believed that " The
ruins of Time build mansions in eternity," that <c imagination
is eternity," and that " our deceased friends are more really
with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part,"
there could be none of that confusion at the edge of mystery
which makes a man mad because he is unconscious of the
gulf. No one was ever more conscious than Blake was
of the limits of that region which we call reality and of
that other region which we call imagination. It pleased

7

William

him to rejeft the one and to dwell in the other, and his
choice was not the choice of most men, but of some of
those who have been the greatest saints and the greatest
artists. And, like the mot authentic among them, he
walked firmly among those realities to which he cared to
give no more than a side-glance from time to time ; he
lived his own life quietly and rationally, doing always exactly
what he wanted to do, and with so fine a sense of the subtlety
of mere worldly manners, that when, at his one moment
of worldly success, in 1793, he refused the post of drawing-
matter to the royal family, he gave up all his other pupils
at the same time, left the refusal should seem ungracious
on the part of one who had been the friend of revolutionaries.
He saw visions, but not as the spiritualists and the magicians
have seen them. These desire to quicken mortal sight
until the soul limits itself again, takes body, and returns
to reality ; but Blake, the inner mystic, desired only to
quicken that imagination which he knew to be more real
than the reality of nature. Why should he call up shadows
when he could talk in the spirit with spiritual realities ?
" Then I asked," he says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
" does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so ? "
He replied, c All poets believe that it does.' "

In the Descriptive Catalogue to his exhibition of pi&ures
in 1809, Blake defines, more precisely than in any other place,
what vision was to him. He is speaking of his pictures,
but it is a plea for the raising of painting to the same " sphere
of invention and visionary conception " as that which poetry
and music inhabit. " The Prophets," he says, " describe
what they saw in vision as real and existing men, whom they
saw with their imaginative and immortal organs; the

Apostles the same ; the clearer the organ, the more distinct
8

Introduction

the object. A spirit and a vision are not, as the modern
philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing. They
are organised and minutely articulated beyond all that the
mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does
not imagine in Stronger and better lineaments and in Stronger
and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see,
does not imagine at all. The painter of this work asserts
that all his imaginations appear to him infinitely more perfect
and more minutely organised than anything seen by his
mortal eye." " Inspiration and vision," he says in one
of the marginal notes to Reynolds's Discourses, " was then,
and now is, and I hope will always remain, my element,
my eternal dwelling-place." And <e God forbid," he says
also, " that Truth should be confined to mathematical
demonstration. He who does not know Truth at sight is
not worthy of her notice."

The mind of Blake lay open to eternity as a seed-plot
lies open to the sower. In 1802 he writes to Mr. Butts
from Felpham : cc I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to
tell you what ought to be told that I am under the direction
of messengers from heaven, daily and nightly." <e I have
written this poem," he says of ^CA Jerusalem, " from immediate
dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a
time, without premeditation, and even against my will."
" I may praise it," he says in another letter, " since I dare
not pretend to be any other than the secretary ; the authors
are in eternity." In these words, the most precise claim for
direct inspiration which Blake ever made, there is nothing
different in kind, only in degree, from what must be felt
by every really creative artist and by every profoundly and
simply religious person. There can hardly be a poet who
is not conscious of how little his own highest powers are

William

under ids own control. The creation of beauty is the end
of art, but the artist should rarely admit to himself that
such is his purpose. A poem is not written by the man
who says : I will sit down and write a poem ; but rather
by the man who, captured by rather than capturing an
impulse, hears a tune which he does not recognise, or sees
a sight which he does not remember, in some " close corner

of his brain/' and eserts the only energy at his disposal in
recording it faithfully, in the medium of his particular art.
And so in every creation of beauty, some obscure desire
Stirred in the soul, not realised by the mind for what it was,
and, aiming at most other things in the world than pure
beauty, produced it. Now, to the critic this is not more
important to remember than it is for him to remember
that the result, the end, must be judged, not by the impulse
which brought it into being, nor by the purpose which it
sought to serve, but by its success or failure in one thing:
the creation of beauty. To the artist himself this precise
consciousness of what he has done is not always given, any
more than a precise consciousness of what he is doing.
Only in the greatest do we find vision and the correction of
vision equally powerful and equally constant.

To Blake, as to some artists and to most devout people,
there was nothing in vision to correct, nothing even to
modify. His language in all his letters and in much of his
printed work is identical with the language used by the
followers of Wesley and Whitefield at the time in which he
was writing. In Wesley's journal you will find the same
simple and immediate consciousness of the communion of
the soul with the world of spiritual reality : not a vague
longing, like Shelley's, for a principle of intellectual beauty,
nor an unattained desire after holiness, like that of the

10

Introduction

conventionally religious person, but a literal ce power of
conversing with Paradise," as Blake called it, and as many
Methodists would have been equally content to call it. And
in Blake, as in those whom the people of that age called
** enthusiasts " (that word of reproach in the eighteenth
century and of honour in all other centuries), there was
no confusion (except in brains where (f true superstition,"
as Blake said, was " ignorant honesty, and this is beloved
of God and man ") between the realities of daylight and
these other realities from the other side of day. Messrs.
Ellis and Yeats quote a mysterious note written in Blake's
handwriting, with a reference to Spurzheim, page 154. I
find that this means Spurzheim's Observations on the Deranged
Manifestations of the Mind, or Insanity (1817), and the passage
in the text is as follows : " Religion is another fertile cause
of insanity. Mr. Haslam, though he declares it sinful to
consider religion as a cause of insanity, adds, however, that
he would be ungrateful, did he not avow his obligations to
Methodism for its supply of numerous cases. Hence the
primitive feelings of religion may be misled and produce
insanity ; that is what I would contend for, and in that
sense religion often leads to insanity." Blake has written :
" Methodism, etc., p. 154. Cowper came to me and said :
c Oh ! that I were insane, always. I will never rest. Can
not you make me truly insane ? I will never rest till I am so.
Oh ! that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health
and yet are mad as any of us all over us all mad as a
refuge from unbelief from Bacon, Newton, and Locke.' "
What does this mean but that " madness," the madness of
belief in spiritual things, must be complete if it is to be
effeftual, and that, once complete, there is no disturbance
of bodily or mental health, as in the doubting and diftra&ed

William

Cowper, who was driven mad, not by the wildness of his
belief, but by the hesitations of his doubt ?

Attempts have been made to claim Blake for an adept of
magic. But whatever cabbaliStical terms he may have added
to the somewhat composite and fortuitous naming of his
mythology (" all but names of persons and places," he says,
" is invention, both in poetry and painting "), his whole
mental attitude was opposed to that of the pra&isers of magic.
We have no record of his ever having evoked a vision, but
only of his accepting or enduring visions. Blake was, above
all, spontaneous : the pradiser of magic is a deliberate
craftsman in the art of the soul. I can no more imagine
Blake sitting down to juggle with symbols or to gaze into
a pool of ink than I can imagine him searching out words
that would make the best effects in his lyrics, or fishing for
inspiration, pen in hand, in his own ink-pot. A man does
not beg at the gate of dreams when he is the master for whose
entrance the gate Stands open.

Of the definite reality of Blake's visions there can be
no question ; no question that, as he once wrote, " nothing
can withstand the fury of my course among the Stars of
God, and in the abysses of the accuser." But imagination
is not one, but manifold ; and the metaphor, professing to
be no more than metaphor, of the poet, may be vision as
essential as the thing a&ually seen by the visionary. The
difference between imagination in Blake and in, say, Shake-
speare, is that the one (himself a painter) has a visual imagina-
tion and sees an image or metaphor as a literal reality, while
the other, seeing it not less vividly but in a more purely
mental way, adds a " like " or an " as," and the image or
metaphor comes to you with its apology or attenuation,
and takes you less by surprise. But to Blake it was the
universe that was a metaphor.
12

WILLIAM BLAKE

THE origin of the family of William Blake has not
yet been found ; and I can claim no more for the
evidence that I have been able to gather than that
it settles us more firmly in our ignorance. But the names
of his brothers and sister, their dates and order of birth, and
the date of his wife's birth, have never, so far as I know,
been corretly given. Even the date of his own birth has
been contested by Mr. Swinburne " on good MS. authority,"
which we know to be that of Frederick Tatham, who further
asserts, wrongly, that James was younger than William, and
that John was " the eldest son." GilchriSt makes no reference
to John, but says, wrongly, that James was " a year and a
half William's senior," and that William had a sister " nearly
seven years younger than himself"; of whom, says Mr.
Yeats, " we hear little, and among that little not even her
name." Most of these problems can be settled by the
entries in parish registers, and I have begun with the registers
of the church of St. James, Westminster.

I find by these entries that James Blake, the son of James
and Catherine Blake, was born July 10, and christened July
J 5> I 753 J nn Blake (" son of John and Catherine," says
the register, by what is probably a slip of the pen) was born
May 12, and christened June i, 1755 ; William Blake was

13

William

born November 28, and christened December u, 1757 ;
another John Blake was born March 20, and christened
March 30, 1760; Richard Blake was born June 19, and
christened July n a 1762 ; and Catherine Elizabeth Blake
was born January 7, and christened January 28, 1764. Here,
where we find the daughter's name and the due order of
births, we find one perplexity in the name of Richard, whose
date of birth fits the date given by GilchriSt and others to
Robert, William's favourite brother, whose name he has
engraved on a design of his " spiritual form " in Milton.,
whom he calls Robert in a letter to Butts, and whom J. T.
Smith recalls not only as Robert, but as " Bob, as he was
familiarly called." In the entry of " John, son of John
and Catherine Blake," I can easily imagine the clerk repeating
by accident the name of the son for the name of the father ;
and I am inclined to suppose that there was a John who
died before the age of five, and that his name was given
to the son next born. Precisely the same repetition of name
is found in the case of Lamb's two sisters christened Eliza-
beth, and Shelley's two sisters christened Helen. " My
brother John, the evil one, J> would therefore be younger
that William; but Tatham, in saying that he was older,
may have been misled by there having been two sons
christened John.

There are two theories as to the origin of Blake's family ;
but neither of them has yet been confirmed by the slightest
documentary evidence. Both of these theories were put
forth in the same year, 1893, one by Mr. Alfred T. Story
in his William Blake, the other by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats
in their Works of William BJake. According to Mr. Story,
Bkke's family was conne&ed with the Somerset family of
the Admiral, through a Wiltshire family of Blakes ; but

William

for this theory he gives merely the report of " two ladies,
daughters of William John Blake, of Southampton, who
claim to be second cousins of William Blake," and in a
private letter he tells me that he has not been able to procure
any documentary evidence of the Statement. According to
Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, Blake's father was Irish, and was
originally called O'Neil. His father, John O'Neil, is
supposed to have changed his name, on marrying Ellen
Blake,- from O'Neil to Blake, and James O'Neil, his son by
a previous union, to have taken the same name, and to have
settled in London, while a younger son, the ahial son of
Ellen Blake, went to Malaga. This Statement reSts entirely
on the assertion of Dr. Carter Blake, who claimed descent
from the latter ; and it has never been supported by docu-
mentary evidence. In answer to my inquiry, Mr. Martin
J. Blake, the compiler of two volumes of Blake Family
Records (first series, 1300-1600 ; second series, 1600-1700),
writes : " Although I have made a special Study of the
genealogies of the Blakes of Ireland, I have not come across
any Ellen Blake who married John O'Neil who afterwards
(as is said by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats) adopted the surname
of Blake."

Mr; Sampson points out that Blake's father was certainly
a Protestant. He is sometimes described as a Swedenborgian,
always as a Dissenter, and it is curious that about half of
the Blakes recorded in the Dictionary of National Biography
were also conspicuous as Puritans or Dissenters. Mr.
Sampson further points out that Blake in one of his poems
speaks of himself as " English Blake." It is true that he is
contracting himself with the German KlopStock ; yet I
scarcely think an Irishman would have used the expression
even for contrast. Blake is nowhere referred to as having

William Blake-;

been In any -way Irish, and the only apparent exception to
this is one which I am obliged to set up with one hand and
knock down with the other. In the index to Crabb Robin-
son's Diary one of the references to Blake shows us Mr.
Sheil speaking at the Academical Society while " Blake,
his countryman, kept watching him to keep htm in order."
That this does not refer to William Blake I have found by
tracking through the unpublished portions of the Diary
in the original manuscript the numerous references to " a
Mr. Blake " who was accustomed to speak at the meetings
of the Academical Society. He is described as " a Mr.
Blake, who spoke with good sense on the Irish side, and
argued from the Irish History and the circumstances which
attended the passing of the bills.' 5 He afterwards speaks
" sharply and coarsely," and answers Mr. Robinson's hour-
long contention that the House of Commons should, or
l&ould not, " possess the power of imprisoning for a breach
of privilege," by " opposing the fafcs of Lord Melville's
prosecution, the Reversion Bill, etc., etc., and Burke's
ReformBill " ; returning, in short, " my civility by incivility."
This was not the learning, nor were these the manners, of
William Blake.

I would again appeal to the evidence of the parish register.
I find Blakes in the parish of St. James, Westminster, from
the beginning of the eighteenth century, the first being a
William Blake, the son of Richard and Elizabeth, who was
born March 19, 1700. Between the years 1750 and 1767
(the time exaftly parallel with the births of the family of
James and Catherine Blake) I find among the baptisms the
names of Frances, Daniel, Reuben, John Cartwright, and
William (another William) Bkke ; and I find among the
marriages, between 1728 and 1747, a Robert, a Thomas,
16

William

a James, and a Richard Blake. The wife of James, who
was married on April 15, 1738, is called Elizabeth, a name
which we have already found as the name of a Mrs. Blake,
and which we find again as the second name of Catherine
Elizabeth Blake (the sister of William Blake), who was born
in 1764. I find two Williams, two Richards, and a John
among the early entries, at the beginning of the eighteenth
century. It is impossible to say positively that any of these
families, not less than nine in number, all bearing the name
of Blake, all living in the same parish, within a space of less
than forty years, were rekted to one another ; but it is
easier to suppose so than to suppose that one only out of
the number, and one which had assumed the name, should
have found itself accidentally in the midst of all the others,
to which the name may be supposed to have more definitely
belonged.- ^

. All that we know with certainty of James Bkke, the
father, is that he was a hosier (" of respectable trade and
easy habits," says Tatham ; " of fifty years' standing," says
Cunningham, at the time of his death), that he was a Dis-
senter (a Swedenborgian, or inclined to Swedenborgknism),
and that he died in 1784 and was buried on July 4 in Bunhill
Fields. The burial register says : " July 4, 1784. Mr.
James Bkke from Soho Square in a grave, 13/6." Of his
wife Catherine all that we know is that she died in 1792
and was also buried in Bunhill Fields. The register says :
"Sept 9, 1792. Catherine Bkke; age 70; brought from
St. James, Westminster. Grave 9 feet, E. & W. 16 ; N.
*& S. 42-43. i9/-." Tatham says that " even when a child,
his mother beat him for running and saying that he saw
the prophet Ezekiel under a tree in the fields." At eight
or ten he comes home from Peckham Rye saying that he
rv c 17

William

has seen a tree filled with angels ; and his father is going
to beat him for telling a lie ; but his mother intercedes.
It was the father, Tatham says, who, noticing to what great
anger he was moved by a blow, decided not to send him to
school.

The eldest son, James, Tatham tells us, " having a saving,

somniferous mind, lived a yard and a half life, and pestered

his brother with timid sentences of bread and cheese advice."

On his father's death in 1784 he carried on the business, and

it was at his house that Blake held his one exhibition of

pictures in 1809. " These paintings filled several rooms of

an ordinary dwelling-house," says Crabb Robinson in his

Reminiscences ; and, telling how he had bought four copies

of the catalogue, " giving io/-, I bargained that I should be

at liberty to go again. i Free ! as long as you live ! ' said

the brother, astonished at such a liberality, which he had

never experienced before nor I dare say did afterwards.

Crabb Robinson had at first written fc as long as you like,

and this he altered into " as long as you live," as if fancying,

so long afterwards as 1852, that he remembered the exact

word ; but in the entry in the Diary 3 in 1810, we read " Oh I

as often as you please 1 " so that we may doubt whether the

" honest, unpretending shopkeeper," who was looked upon

by his neighbours, we are told, as " a bit mad," because he

would "talk Swedenborg," can be credited with all the

enthusiasm of the later and more familiar reading. James

and William no longer spoke to one another when, after

retiring from business, James came to live in Cirencester

Street, near Linnell. Tatham tells us that " he got together

a little annuity, upon which he supported his only sister,

and vegetating to a moderate age, died about three years

before his brother William."

18

3?
33

William

Of John we know only that he was something of a scape-
grace and the favourite son of his patents. He was appren-
ticed, at some co, to a candle-maker, but ran away, and,
after some help from William, enlisted in the army, lived
wildly, and died young. Robert, the favourite of William,
also died young, at the age of twenty-five. He lived with
William and Catherine from 1784 to the time of his death
in 1787, at 27 Broad Street, helping in the print-shop of
" Parker and Blake/' and learning from his brother to draw
and engrave. One of his original sketches, a Stiff drawing
of long, rigid, bearded figures Staring in terror, quite in his
brother's manner, is in the Print Room of the British Museum.
*A Story is told of him by GilchriSt which gives us the whole
man, indeed the whole household, in brief. There had
been a dispute between him and Mrs. Blake. Bkke suddenly
interposed, and said to his wife : " Kneel down and beg
Robert's pardon direftly, or you will never see my face
again." She knelt down (thinking it, as she said afterwards^
*' very hard," for she felt herself to be in the right) and
said : Robert, I beg your pardon ; I am in the wrong."
" Young woman, you lie," said Robert, " I am in the wrong."
Early in 1787 Robert fell ill, and during the last fortnight
William nursed him without taking reft by day or night,
until, at the moment of death, he saw his brother's soul
rise through the ceiling " clapping its hands for joy " ; where-
upon he went to bed and slept for three days and nights.
Robert was buried in Bunhili Fields on February n. The
register says: "Feb. n> 1787- Mr. Robert Blake from
Golden Square in a grave, 13/6." But his spiritual presence
was never to leave the mind of William Blake, whom in
1800 we find writing to Hayley : ' "Thirteen years ago I
lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly

William

in the spirit, and see him in remembrance, in the regions of
my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write
from his di&ate." It was Robert whom he saw in a dream,
not long after his death, telling him the method by which
he was to engrave his poems and designs. The spiritual
forms of William and of Robert, in almosl: exact parallel, are
engraved on separate pages of the Prophetic Book of Milton.
Of the sister, Catherine Elizabeth, we know only that she
lived with Blake and his wife at Felpham. He refers to
her in several letters, and in the poem sent to Butts on
October 2, 1800, he speaks of her as " my sifter and friend."
In another poem, sent to Butts in a letter dated November
22, 1802, but written, he explains, "above a twelvemonth
ago, while walking from Felpham to Lavant to meet my
sister," he asks Strangely :

; MuSt my wife live in my sister's bane,
Or my sister survive on my Love's pain ?

but from the context it is not clear whether this is meant
literally or figuratively. When Tatham was writing his
life of Blake, apparently in the year 1831, he refers to " Miss
Catherine " as sTdll living, " having survived nearly all her
relations." Mrs. GilchriSt, in a letter written to Mr. W. M.
Rossetti in 1862, reports a rumour, for which she gives
no evidence, that " she and Mrs. Blake got on very ill to-
gether, and latterly never met at all," and that she died in
extreme penury.

II

OF the childhood and youth of Blake we know
little beyond what Malkin and Smith have to tell
us. Fom the age of ten to the age of fourteen he
Studied at Pars' drawing-school in the Strand, buying for
himself prints after Raphael, Diirer, and Michelangelo at
the sale-rooms ; at fourteen he was apprenticed to Basire,
the engraver, who lived at 31 Great Queen Street, and in
his shop Blake once saw Goldsmith. "His love for art
increasing/' says Tatham, " and the time of life having
arrived when it was deemed necessary to place him under
some tutor, a painter of eminence was proposed, and necessary
applications were made ; but from the huge premium re-
quired, he requested, with his characteristic generosity, that
his father would not on any account spend so much money
on him, as he thought it would be an injustice to his brothers
and sisters. He therefore himself proposed engraving as
being less expensive, and sufficiently eligible for his future
avocations. Of Basire, therefore, for a premium of fifty
guineas, he learnt the art of engraving." We are told that
he was apprenticed, at his own request, to Basire rather
than to the more famous Ryland, the engraver to the king,
because, on being taken by his father to Ry land's Studio,
he said : " I do not like the man's face : it looks as if he
will live to be hanged." Twelve years later Ryland was
hanged for forgery.

21

William

Blake was with Basire for seven years, and for the last
five years much of his time was spent in making drawings
of Gothic monuments, chiefly in Westminster Abbey, until
he came, says Malkin, to be " himself almost a Gothic monu-
ment." Tatham tells us that the reason of his being sent
" out drawing," as he fortunately was, instead of being kept
at engraving, was " for the circumstance of his having
frequent quarrels with his fellow-apprentices concerning
matters of intelledual argument."

It was in the Abbey that he had a vision of Christ and
the ApoStles, and in the Abbey, too, that he flung an intrusive
Westminster schoolboy from the scaffolding, " in the im-
petuosity of his anger, worn out with interruption," says
Tatham, and then laid a complaint before the Dean which
has caused, to this day, the exclusion of Westminster school-
boys from the precincts.

It was at this time that Blake must have written the larger
part of the poems contained in the Poetical Sketches, printed
(we cannot say published) in 1783, for in the "Advertise-
ment " at the beginning of the book we are told that the
"following Sketches were the produftion of untutored
youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed
by the author till his twentieth year," that is to say, between
the years 1768 and 1777. The earliest were written while
Goldsmith and Gray were still living, the latest (if we may
believe these dates) after Chatterton's death, but before his
poems had been published. Ossian had appeared in 1760,
Percy's Rj/iqws in 1765. The Cliques probably had their
influence on Blake, Ossian certainly, an influence which
returns much later, curiously mingled with the influence of
Milton, in the form taken by the Prophetic Books. It has
been suggested that some of Blake's mystical names, and

22

William

his " fiend in a cloud," came from Ossian ; and Ossian is
very evident in the metrical prose of such pieces as " Samson,"
and even in some of the imagery (" Their helmed youth
and aged warriors in dust together lie, and Desolation
spreads his wings over the knd of Palestine"). But the
influence of Chatterton seems not less evident, an influence
which could hardly have found its way to Blake before the
year 1777. In the fifth chapter of the fantastic Island in the
Moon (probably written about 1784) there is a long discussion
on Chatterton, while in the seventh chapter he is again
discussed in company with Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton.
As late as 1826 Blake wrote on the margin of Words worth's
preface to the Lyrical Ballads : " I believe both Macpherson
and Chatterton that what they say is ancient is so," and on
another page, " I own myself an admirer of Ossian equally
with any poet whatever, of Rowley and Chatterton also."
Whether it be influence or affinity, it is hard to say, but if
the " Mad Song " of Blake has the hint of any predecessor
in our literature, it is to be found in the abrupt energy
and Stormy masculine splendour of the High PriesVs song
in ec Aella," " Ye who hie yn mokie ayre *' ; and if, between
the time of the Elizabethans and the time of " My silks and
fine array " there had been any other song of similar technique
and similar imaginative temper, it was certainly the Minstrel's
song in " Aella," " O ! synge untoe mie roundelaie."

Of the dire& and very evident influence of the Eliza-
bethans we are told by Malkin, with his quaint preciseness :
ce Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Tarquin and 'Lucrece^ and
his Sonnets , . . poems, now little read, were favourite Studies
of Mr. Blake's early days. So were Jonson's Underwoods
and his Miscellanies" " My silks and fine array " goes past
Jonson, and reaches Fletcher, if not Shakespeare himself.

William

And the blank verse of u King Edward the Third " goes
Straight to Shakespeare for its cadence, and for something
of its manner of speech. And there is other blank verre
which, among much not even metrically correct, anticipates
something of the richness of Keats.

Some rags of his time did indeed cling about him, but only
by the edges ; there is even a reflected ghoSt of the pseudo-
Gothic of Walpole in " Fair Elenor," who comes Straight
from the CafUe of Otranto, as " Gwin, King of Norway,"
takes after the Scandinavian fashion of the day, and may
have been inspired by " The Fatal Sisters " or " The Tri-
umphs of Owen " of Gray. ** Blindman's Buff," too, is
a piece of eighteenth-century burlesque realism. But it
is in the ode " To the Muses " that Blake for once accepts,
and in so doing clarifies, the smooth convention of eighteenth-
century classicism, and, as he reproaches it in its own speech,
illuminates it suddenly with the light it had rejected :

** How have you left the ancient love

That batds of old enjoyed in you !
The languid Strings do scacely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few I "

In those lines the eighteenth century dies to music, and
from this time forward we find in the reSt of Blake's work
only a proof of his own assertion, that " the ages are all
equal ; but genius is above the age."

In 1778 Blake's apprenticeship to Basire came to an end,
and for a short time he Studied in the Antique School at the
newly founded Royal Academy under Moser, the first
keeper. In the Life of Reynolds which prefaces the 1798
edition of the Discourses, Moser is spoken of as one who
" might in every sense be called the Father of the present

William

race of Artists." Blake has written against this in his
copy : " I was once looking over the prints from Raphael
and Michael Angelo in the Library of the Royal Academy.
Moser came to me and said, ' You should not Study these
old hard, Stiff, and dry unfinished works of art. Stay a little,
and I will show you what you should Study." He then went
and took down Le Brun's and Rubens' Galleries. How did
I secretly rage. I also spoke my mind. I said to Moser,
* These things that you call finished are not even begun :
how can they then be finished ? The man who does not
know the beginning never can know the end of art.' "
Malkin tells us that " Blake professed drawing from life
always to have been hateful to him ; and speaks of it as
looking more like death, or smelling of mortality. Yet
Still he drew a good deal from life, both at the Academy and
at home." A water-colour drawing dating from this time,
" The Penance of Jane Shore," was included by Blake in
his exhibition of 1 809. It is the last number in the catalogue,
and has the note : " This Drawing was done above Thirty
Years ago, and proves to the Author, and he thinks will
prove to any discerning eye, that the productions of our
youth and of our maturer age are equal in all essential
respe&s." He also did engravings, during several years,
for the booksellers, Harrison, Johnson, and others, some
of them after Stothard, who was then working for the
NavelifFs Magazine. Blake met Stothard in 1780, and
Stothard introduced him to Flaxman, with whom he had
himself juSt become acquainted. In the same year Blake
met Fuseli, who settled near him in Broad Street, while
Flaxman, on his marriage in 1781, came to live near by,
at zj Wardour Street. Bartolozzi and John Varley were
both, then or later, living in Broad Street, Angelica Kauff-

William

mann in Golden Square. In 1780 (the year of the Gotdon
Riots, when Bkke, carried along by the crowd, saw the
burning of Newgate) he had for the first time a picture in
the Royal Academy, the water-colour of " The Death of
Earl Godwin."

It was at this time, ' in his twenty-fourth year, that he
fell in love with " a lively little girl " called Polly Wood.
Tatham calls her " a young woman, who by his own account,
and according to his own knowledge, was no trifler. He
wanted to marry her, but she refused, and was as obstinate
as she was unkind." Gilchrist says that on his complaining
to her that she had " kept company " with others besides
himself, she asked him if he was a fool. " That cured me
of jealousy," he said afterwards, but the cure, according
to Tatham, made him so ill that he was sent for change of
air to " Kew, near Richmond " (really to Battersea), to the
house of " a market-gardener whose name was Boutcher."
While there, says Tatham, " he was relating to the daughter,
a girl named Catherine, the lamentable Slory of Polly Wood,
his implacable lass, upon which Catherine expressed her
deep sympathy, it is supposed, in such a tender and afTeUonate
manner, that it quite won him. He immediately said, with
the suddenness peculiar to him, c Do you pity me ? * c Yes,
indeed I do/ answered she. c Then I love you,' said he
again. Such was their courtship. He was impressed by
her tenderness of mind, and her answer indicated her previous
feeling for him, : for she has often said that upon her mother's
asking her who among her acquaintances she could fancy
for a husband, she replied that she had not yet seen the man,
and she has further been heard to say that when she first
came into the room in which Bkke sat, she instantly recognised
(like Britomart in Merlin's wondrous glass) her future
26

William

partner, and was so near fainting that she left his presence
until she recovered." Tatham tells us that Bkke " returned
to his lodgings and worked incessantly " for a whole year,
" resolving that he would not see her until he had succeeded "
in making enough money to be able to marry her. The
marriage took place at Battersea in August 1762.

GilchriSt says that he has traced relatives of Blake to have
been living at Battersea at the time of his marriage. Of this
he gives no evidence ; but I think I have found traces, in
Blake's own parish, of relatives of the Catherine Boucher
whom he married at Battersea. Tatham, as we have seen,
says that she was the daughter of a market-gardener at " Kew,
near Richmond," called Boutcher, to whose house Blake
was sent for a change of air. Allan Cunningham says
that " she lived near his father's house." I think I have
found the reason for Cunningham's mistake, and the prob-
able occasion of Blake's visit to the Bouchers at Battersea.
I find by the birth register in St. Mary's, Battersea, that
Catherine Sophia, daughter of William and Ann Boucher,
was born April 25, and christened May 16, 1762. Four years
after this, another Catherine Boucher, daughter of Samuel
and Betty, born March 28, 1766, was christened March 31,
1766, in the parish church of St. James, Westminster; and
in the same register I find the birth of Gabriel, son of the
same parents, born September i, and christened September
20, 1767 ; and of Ann, daughter of Thomas and Ann Boucher,
born June 12, and christened June 29, 1761. Is it not, there-
fore, probable that there were" Bouchers, related to one
another, living in both parishes, and that Blake's acquaintance
with the family living near him led to his going to Stay with
the family living at Battersea ?

The entry of Blake's marriage, in the register of St. Mary's

27

William

Battersea, gives the name as Butcher, and also describes
Blake as " of the parish of Battersea," by a common enough
error. It is as follows :

1782.
Banns of Marriage.

No. 281 William Blake of the Parish of Battersea Batchelor
and Catherine Butcher of the same Parish Spinster were
Married in this Church by License this Eighteenth Day of
August in the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred and
Eighty two by me J. Gardner Vicar. This marriage was
solemnized between Us

William Bkke

The mark of X Catherine Butcher

In the presence of Thomas Monger Butcher

Jas. Blake
Robt. Munday Parish Clerk.

I imagine that Thomas Monger Butcher was probably
Catherine's brother ; there are other Mongers not far off
in the register, as if the name were a family name. His
handwriting is mean and untidy, James Blake's vague but
fluent; Catherine makes her mark somewhat faintly. As
the register lies open there are entries of seven marriages ;
out of these, no fewer than three of the brides have signed
by making their mark. The name William Blake Stands
out from these " blotted and blurred " signatures ; the
ink is very black, as if he had pressed hard on the pen ;
and the name has a " firm and determinate outline."

GilchrisT: describes Catherine Boucher as " a bright-eyed,
dark-haired brunette, with expressive features and a slim,
graceful form." This seems to be merely a re-writing of
28

William

Allan Cunningham's vague Statement that she " was noticed
by Blake for the whiteness of her hand, the brightness of
her eyes, and a slim and handsome shape, corresponding
with his own notions of sylphs and naiads." But if a quaint
and lovely pencil sketch in the Rossetti MS., representing
a man in bed and a woman sitting on the side of the bed,
beginning to dress, is really as it probably is, done from
life, and meant for Mrs. Blake, we see at once the model
for his invariable type of woman, tall, slender, and with
unusually long legs. There is a drawing of her head by
Blake in the Rossetti MS. which, though apparently somewhat
conventionalised, shows a clear aquiline profile and very
large eyes ; Still to be divined m the rather painful head
drawn by Tatham when she was an old woman, a head in
which there is Still power and fixity. Crabb Robinson, who
met her in 1825, says that she had " a good expression in
her countenance, and, with a dark eye, remains of beauty
in her youth."

No man of genius ever had a better wife. To the last
she called him " Mr. Blake/' while he, we are told, frequently
spoke of her as " his beloved." The most beautiful reference
to her which I find in his letters is one in a letter of September
1 6, 1800, to Hayley, where he calls her "my dear and too
careful and over-joyous woman," and says " Eartham will
be my first temple and altar ; my wife is like a flame of many
colours of precious jewels whenever she hears it named."
He taught her to write, and the copy-book titles to some
of his water-colours are probably hers ; to draw, so that
after his death she finished some of his designs ; and to
help him in the printing and colouring of his engravings.
A story is told, on the authority of Samuel Palmer, that
they would both look into the flames of burning coals, and

29

William

draw grotesque figures which they saw there, hers quite
unlike his. "It is quite certain/ 5 says Crabb Robinson
" that she believed in all his visions " ; and he shows her'
to us reminding her husband, " You know, dear, the firsT:
time you saw God was when you were four years old, and
he put his head to the window, and set you a-screaming."
She would walk with him into the country, whole summer
days, says Tatham, and far into the night. And when
he rose in the night, to write down what was " dictated "
to him, she would rise and sit by him, and hold his hand.
" She would get up in the night," says the unnamed friend
quoted by Gilchrist, "when he was under his very fierce
inspirations, which were as if they would tear him asunder,
while he was yielding himself to the Muse, or whatever else
it could be called, sketching and writing. And so terrible
a task did this seem to be, that she had to sit motionless
and silent; only to Stay him mentally, without moving
hand or foot ; this for hours, and night after night." " His
wife being to him a very patient woman," says Tatham, who
speaks of Mrs. Blake as " an irradiated saint," " he fancied
that while she looked on him as he worked, her sitting
quite Still by his side, doing nothing, soothed his impetuous
mind ; and he has many a time, when a Strong desire pre-
sented itself to overcome any difficulty in his plates or
drawings, in the middle of the night, risen, and requested
her to get up with him, and sit by his side, in which she as
cheerfully acquiesced." "Rigid, pundual, firm, precise,"
she has been described; a good housewife and a good
cook ; refusing to have a servant not only because of the
coft, but because no servant could be scrupulous enough
to satisfy her. " Finding," says Tatham " (as Mrs. Blake
declared, and as every one else knows), the more service
30

William

the more inconvenience, she . . . did all the work herself,
kept the house clean and herself tidy, besides printing all
Blake's numerous engravings, which was a task sufficient
for any industrious woman." He tells us in another place :
" it is a fat known to the writer, that Mrs. Blake's frugality
always kept a guinea or sovereign for any emergency, of
which Blake never knew, even to the day of his death."

Tatham says of Blake at the time of his marriage : " Al-
though not handsome, he must have had a most noble
countenance, full of expression and animation ; his hair
was of a yellow brown, and curled with the utmost crispness
and luxuriance ; his locks, instead of falling down, Stood up
like a curling flame, and looked at a distance like radiations,
which with his fiery eye and expressive forehead, his dignified
and cheerful physiognomy, must have made his appearance
truly prepossessing." In another place he says : " William
Blake in Stature was short [he was not quite five and a half
feet in height], but well made, and very well proportioned ;
so much so that WeSt, the great history painter, admired
much the form of his limbs ; he had a large head and wide
shoulders. Elasticity and promptitude of action were the
characteristics of his contour. His motions were rapid and
energetic, betokening a mind filled with elevated enthusiasm ;
his forehead was very high and prominent over the frontals ;
his eye moSt unusually large and glassy, with which he
appeared to look into some other world." His eyes were
prominent, " large, dark, and expressive," says Allan Cun-
ningham ; the flashing of his eyes remained in the memory
of an old man who had seen him in court at ChicheSter in
1804. His nose, though " snubby," as he himself describes
it, had " a little clenched nostril, a nostril that opened as
far as it could, but was tied down at the end." The mouth

William Blake^

was large and sensitive ; the forehead, larger below than
above, as he himself noted, was broad and high ; and the
whole face, as one sees it in what is probably the best likeness
we have, LinnelTs miniature of 1827, was full of irregular
splendour, eager, eloquent, ecstatic ; eyes and mouth and
nostrils all as if tense with a continual su6Hon, drinking up
" large draughts of intellectual day " with impatient haste.
"Infinite impatience," says Swinburne, "as of a great
preacher or apostle intense tremulous vitality, as of a great
ora tor seem to me to give his face the look of one who
can do all things but hesitate."

After his marriage in August 1782 (which has been said to
have displeased his father, though Tatham says it was " with
the approbation and consent of his parents ") Blake took
lodgings at 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields (now pulled
down), which was only the square's length away from Sir
Joshua Reynolds. Flaxman had married in 1781, and had
taken a house at 27 Wardour Street, and it was probably he
who, about this time, introduced Blake to " the accom-
plished Mrs. Matthew," whose drawing-room in Rathbone
Place was frequented by literary and artistic people. Mr.
Matthew, a clergyman of taste, who is said to have " read the
church service more beautifully than any other clergyman
in London," had discovered Flaxman, when a little boy,
learning Latin behind the counter in his father's shop.
" From this incident," says J. T. Smith in his notice of Flax-
man, " Mr. Matthew continued to notice him, and, as he grew
up, became his first and best friend. Later on, he was
introduced to Mrs. Matthew, who was so kind as to read
Homer to him, whilst he made designs on the same table with
her at the time she was reading." It was apparently at the
Matthews' houses that Smith heard Blake sing his own

William

songs to bis own music, and it was through Mrs. Matthew's
good opinion of these songs that she " requested the Rev.
Henry Matthew, her husband, to join Mr. Flaxman in his
truly kind offer of defraying the expense of printing them " :
to which we owe the " Poetical Sketches., by W. B. " ; printed
in 1783, and given to Bkke to dispose of as he thought fit.
There is no publisher's name on the book, and there is no
reason to suppose that it was ever offered for sale.

" With his usual urbanity," Mr. Matthew had written a
foolish ee Advertisement " to the book, saying that the author
had " been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal
of these sheets, as might have rendered them less unt to
meet the public eye," " his talents having been wholly dire&ed
to the attainment of excellence in his profession." The
book is by no means incorrectly printed, and it is not probable
that Blake would under any circumstances have given his
poems more "revisal" than he did. He did at this time a
good deal of engraving, often after the designs of Stothard,
whom he was afterwards to accuse of Stealing his ideas ; and
in 1784 he had two, and in 1785 four, water-colour drawings
at the Royal Academy. Fuseli, Stothard, and Flaxman 1
seem to have been his chief friends, and it is probable that
he also knew Cosway, who practised magic, and Cos way may

1 Compare the lines written in 1 800 :
" I bless thee, O Father of Heaven and Earth, that ever I saw Flagman's

face.
Angels Stand round my spirit in Heaven, the blessed of Heaven are my

friends upon Earth.
When Flaxman was taken to Italy, Fuseli was given to me for a

season . . .
And my Angels have told me that seeing such visions, I could not

subsist on the Earth,
But by my conjunction with Fkxman, who knows to forgive nervous

fear."

iv D 33

William

have told him about Paracelsus, or lent him Law's translation
of Behmen, while Flaxman, who was a Swedenborgkn, may
have brought him still more closely under the influence of
Swedenborg.

In any case, he soon tired of the coterie of the Matthews,
and we are told that it soon ceased to relish his " manly
firmness of opinion." "What he really thought of it we may
know with some certainty from the extravaganza, An Island
in the Moon, which seems to belong to 1784, and which is a
light-hearted and incoherent satire, derived, no doubt, from
Sterne, and pointing, as Mr. Sampson justly says, to Peacock.
It is unfinished, and was not worth finishing, but it contains
the first version of several of the Songs of Innocence, as well as
the lovely song of Phoebe and Jellicoe. It has the further
interest of showing us Blake's first, wholly irresponsible
attempt to create imaginary worlds, and to invent grotesque
and impossible names. It shows us the first explosions of
that inflammable part of his nature, which was to burst
through the quiet surface of his life at many intervals, in
righteous angers and irrational suspicions. It betrays his
deeply rooted dislike of science, and, here and there, a literary
preference, for Osskn or for Chatterton. The original MS.
is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and in this year,
1907, Mr. Edwin J. Ellis has done Blake the unkindness of
printing it for the first time in full, in the pages of his Real
Blake. Bkke's satire is only occasionally good, though
occasionally it is supremely good ; his burlesque is almost al-
ways bad ; and there is little probability that he ever intended
to publish any part of the prose and verse which he threw
off for the relief of personal irritations and spiritual indigna-
tions.

In An Island in the Moon we see Blake casting off the dust of
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William

the drawing-rooms, finally, so far as any mental obstru&ion
was concerned ; but he does not seern to have broken wholly
with the Matthews, who, no doubt, were people of genuinely
good intentions ; and it is through their help that we find
him, in 1784, on the death of his father, setting up as a print-
seller, with his former fellow-apprentice, James Parker, at
No. 27 Broad Street, next door to the house and shop which
had been his father's, and which were now taken on by his
brother James. Smith says that he took a shop and a firsl:-
floor ; and here his brother Robert came to live with him as
his pupil, and remained with him till his death in February
1787.

ni

AFTER Robert's death Blake gave up the print-shop
and moved out of Broad Street to Poland Street, a
Street running between it and Oxford Street. He
took No. 28, a house only a few doors down from Oxford
Street, and lived there for five years. Here, in 1789, he
issued the Songs of Innocence, the first of his books to be
produced by the method of his invention which he de-
scribed as "illuminated printing." According to Smith,
it was Robert who " stood before him in one of his
visionary imaginations, and directed him in the way in
which he ought to proceed." The process is thus de-
scribed by Mr. Sampson : " The text and surrounding
design were written in reverse, in a medium impervious
to acid, upon small copper-plates, which were then etched
in a bath of aqua-fortis until the work Stood in relief as in a
Stereotype. From these plates, which to economise copper
were in many cases engraved upon both sides, impressions
were printed, in the ordinary manner, in tints made to har-
monise with the colour scheme afterwards applied in water-
colours by the artist." GilchriSt tells an improbable Story
about Mrs. Blake going out with the last half-crown in the
house, and spending is. lod. of it in the purchase of " the
simple materials necessary." But we know from a MS. note
of John Linnell, referring to a somewhat later date : " The
copper-plates which Blake engraved to illustrate Hayley's life
of Cowper were, as he told me, printed entirely by himself

William

and his wife in his own press a very good one which cost
him forty pounds." These plates were engraved in 1803,
but it is not likely that Blake was ever able to buy more than
one press.

The problem of " illuminated printing," however definitely
it may have been solved by the dream in which Robert
" Stood before him and directed him," was one which had
certainly occupied the mind of Blake for some years. A
passage, unfortunately incomplete, in An Island in the Moon,
reads as follows : " . . . ' Illuminating the Manuscript '
e Ay,' said she, ' that would be excellent.' ' Then,' said he,
' I would have all the writing engraved instead of printed, and
at every other leaf a high finished print, all in three volumes
folio, and sell them a hundred pounds a piece. They would
print off two thousand.' * Then,' said she, c whoever will
not have them, will be ignorant fools and will not deserve
to live.' " This is evidently a foreshadowing of the process
which is described and defended, with not less confident
enthusiasm, in an engraved prospedus issued from Lambeth
in 1793 . I give k in full :

October 10, 1793.

TO THE PUBLIC.

The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have
been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity ; this
was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect
of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed
the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could
not publish their own works.

This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the
following productions now presented to the Public ; who
has invented a method of Printing both Letter-press and

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William

Engraving in a Style more ornamental, uniform, and grand,
thfrfl any before discovered, while it produces works at less
than one-fourth of the expense.

If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and
the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, pro-
vided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the
Author is sure of his reward.

Mr. Blake's powers of invention very early engaged the
attention of many persons of eminence and fortune ; by
whose means he has been regularly enabled to bring before the
public works (he is not afraid to say) of equal magnitude and
consequence with the productions of any age or country :
among which ate two krge highly finished engravings (and
two more are nearly ready) which will commence a Series of
subjects from the Bible, and another from the History of
England.

The following are the Subjects of the several Works now
published and on Sale at Mr. Blake's, No. 13 Hercules
Buildings, Lambeth :

1. Job, a Historical Engraving. Size i ft. j\ in. by i ft.
2 in. Price 125.

2. Edward and Elinor, a Hi^to^al Engraving. Size i ft.
6 in. by i ft. Price IDS, 6d.

3. America, a Prophecy, in Illuminated Printing. Folio,
with 18 designs. Price tos. 6d.

4. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, in Illuminated
Printing. Folio, with 8 designs. Price ys. 6d.

5. The Book of Thel, a Poem in Illuminated Printing.
Quarto, with 6 designs. Price 35.

6. The Marrkge of Heaven and Hell, in Illuminated Print-
ing. Quarto, with fourteen designs. Price 75. 6d.

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William

7. Songs of Innocence, in Illuminated Printing. Otavo,
with 25 designs. Price 55.

8. Songs of Experience, in Illuminated Printing. Otavo,
with 25 designs. Price 55.

9. The History of England, a small book of Engravings.
Price 35.

10. The Gates of Paradise, a small book of Engravings.
Price 35.

The Illuminated Books are Printed in Colours, and on the
moSt beautiful wove paper that could be procured.

No Subscriptions for the numerous great works now in
hand are asked, for none are wanted ; but the Author will
produce his works, and offer them to sale at a fair price.

By this invention (which it is absurd to consider, as some
have considered it a mere makeshift, to which he had been
driven by the refusal of publishers to issue his poems and
engravings according to the ordinary trade methods) Blake
was the first, and remains the only, poet who has in the
complete sense made his own books with his own hands :
the words, the illustrations, the engraving, the printing, the
colouring, the very inks and colours, 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

39

William Blake-;

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 realisation of the poet in all his faculties,
and the only complete realisation 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 his 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 for-
gotten trie world out of which the soul came. It is as spon-
taneous as the note of a bird, it is an affirmation of life ;
in its song, which seems mere music, it is the mind which
sings ; it is lyric thought. What is it that transfixes one in
any couplet such as this :

" If the sun and moon should doubt
They'd immediately go out " ?

It is no more than a nursery statement, there is not even an
image in it, and yet it sings to the brain, it cuts into the very
fiesh of the mind, as if there were a great weight behind it.
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William

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 <e a tear is an intellectual thing." They
sing of " a woman like a dewdrop," but Blake of ec the
lineaments of gratified desire," They shout hymns to God
over a field of battle or in the arrogance of material empire ;
but Blake addresses the epilogue of his Gate s of Paradise " to
the Accuser who is the God of this world " :

* e Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce,

And dost not know the garment from the man ;

Every harlot was a virgin once,

Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.

Though thou art worshipped by the names divine
Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still

The son of morn in weary night's decline,

The lost traveller's dream under the hill.'*

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William

Other poets find ecstasy in nature, but Blake only in imagin-
ation. He addresses the Prophetic Book of The Ghost of
Abel ** to Lord Byron in the -wilderness," and asks : (< What
doest thou here, Elijah ? Can a poet doubt of the visions of
Jehovah ? Nature has no outline, but Imagination has.
Nature has no time, but Imagination has. Nature has no
supernatural, and dissolves. Imagination is eternity." The
poetry of Blake is a poetry of the mind, abftrad in substance,
concrete in form ; its passion is the passion of the imagina-
tion, its emotion is the emotion of thought, its beauty is the
beauty of idea. When it is simples!:, 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 inftinfts and the energies of the imagination.

His work begins in the garden of Eden, or of the child-
hood of the world, and there is something in it of the naivete
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 inStinfts 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
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William

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 develop-
ment. He is the only poet who has written the songs of
childhood, of youth, of mature years, and of old age ; and he
died singing.

IV

BLAKE lived in Poland Street for five years, and
issued from it the Songs of Innocence (1789), and, in the
same year. The Book of Thel> The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell in 1790, and, in 1791, the first book of The
French Revolution : a 'Poem in Seven Books, which Gilchrist
says was published anonymously, In ordinary type, and
without illustrations, by the bookseller Johnson. No copy
of this book is known to exist. At this time he was a
fervent believer in the new age which was to be brought
about by the French Revolution, and he was much in the
company of revolutionaries and freethinkers, and the only
one among them who dared wear the " bonnet rouge " in
the Street. Some of these, Thomas Paine, Godwin, Holcroft,
and others, he met at Johnson's shop in St. Paul's Church-
yard, 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 sym-
pathies, and continued to give his weekly literary dinners in
gaol.

Bkke'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 ation on seeing a wretched
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William

youth chained by the foot to a horse's hobble. The neigh-
bour whom he regarded as "hired to depress art," Sir
Joshua Reynolds, died in 1792. A friend quoted by Gil-
chrisl: 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 corred 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, 1 where,
during the next seven years, he did engraving, both of his
own designs and of those of others, and published the en-
graved book of designs called The Gates of Paradise (1793),
the poems and illustrations of the Songs of Experience (1794),
and the greater part of the Prophetic Books, besides writing,
apparently in 1797, the vast and never really finished MS. of
The Four Zoas. This period was that of which we have the

1 GilchriSt (i. 98) gives a long account of the house which he took to
be Blake's, and which he supposed to be on the weSl side of Hercules
Road. But it has been ascertained beyond a doubt, on the authority of
the Lambeth rate-books, confirmed by Norwood's map of London at
the end of the eighteenth century, that Blake's house, then numbered 13
Hercules Buildings, was on the eaSt side of the road, and is the house now
numbered 23 Hercules Road. Before 1842 the whole road was renum-
bered, Starting at the south end of the western side and returning by the
eastern side, so that the house which GilchriSt saw ini863asi3 Hercules
Buildings was what afterwards became 70 Hercules Road, and is nov
pulled down. The road was finally renumbered in i89o } and the house
became 23 Hercules Road.

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largest and moSt varied result, in written and engraved work,
together with a large number of designs, including five
hundred and thirty-seven done on the margin of Young's
Night Thoughts,, and the earliest of the colour-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 prospe 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
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William

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 lusuriant in leaf and small and harsh
in fruit. Mr. Butts, according to Gilchrist, is supposed to
have come one day into " Blake's Arcadian Arbour," as
Tatham calls it, and to have found Blake and his wife sitting
naked, reading out Milton's 'Paradise 'Lost " in chara&er,"
and to have been greeted with : " Come in, it is only Adam
and Eve." John Linnell, in some notes written after reading
Gilchrist, and quoted in Story's "Life of Linnet! > writes with
reason : " I do not think it possible. Bkke was very un-
reserved 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, LinnelTs 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 Sated 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. Bkke cry." " The element of
fable," they add, " lies in the implication that the woman
who was to have wrecked this household had a bodily exist-
ence. . . * There is a possibility that he entertained mentally
some polygamous project, and justified it on some patrkrchal

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William

theory. A project and theory are one thing, however, and a
woman is another ; and though there is abundant suggestion
of the project and theory, there is no evidence at all of the
woman." I have found in the unpublished part of Crabb
Robinson's Diary and Reminiscences more than a " possibility "
or even " abundant suggestion " that Blake accepted the
theory as a theory. Crabb Robinson himself was so fright-
ened by it that he had to confide it to his Diary in the disguise
of German, though, when he came to compile his Remi-
niscences many years later, he ventured to put it down in plain
English which no editor has yet ventured to print. I will

quote it here :

" i$th June (1826). I saw him again in June. He was
as wild as ever, says my journal, but he was led to-day to
make assertions more palpably mischievous and capable of
influencing other minds, and immoral, supposing them to
express the will of a responsible agent, than anything he had
said before. As for instance, that he had learned from the
Bible that wives should be in common. And when I
objected that Marriage was a Divine institution he referred
to the Bible, e 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 con-
sidered the thing a permissible one to do. Throughout all
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William

his work Bkke affirms freedom as the firSt kw of love ;
jealousy is to him the great iniquity, the unforgivable selfish-
ness. He has the frank courage to praise in The Visions of the
Daughters of Albion

" Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy, nestling for delight
In laps of pleasure ! Innocence, honest, open, seeking
The vigorous joys of morning light " ;

and of woman he asks, " Who taught thee modesty, subtle
modesty ? " In the same book, which is Bkke's Book of
Love, Oothoon offers " girls of mild silver or of furious gold "
to her lover ; in the paradisal State of Jerusalem ec 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 do not doubt that to
him they represented an absolute truth. Therefore I think
it perfectly possible that some " mentally polygamous pro-
ject " 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 ( <e for a tear is an intel-
lehial 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
immortal Oothoon.

It was in 1 794 that Bkke engraved the Songs of Experience.
Four of the Prophetic Books had preceded it, but here Bkke
returns to the clear and simple form of the Songs of Innocence,
deepening it with meaning and heightening it with ardour.
Along with this fierier art the symbolic contents of what, in
the Songs of Innocence, had been hardly more than a child's
Strayings in earthly or divine Edens, becomes angelic, and
rv E 49

William

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
Ew'I 3 we see Bkke 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.

Bkke 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 observa-
tion 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, cc has
nothing to do with memory." For the most part he is just
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conscious that what he sees as ec 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 recognising 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 observa-
tion 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 c envious ' did not express his full meaning, and

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William

deleted the lat 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 :

c 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 f modeSt,' and
* coward * to f humble/ and completing the quatrain (as
in the engraved version) by a fourth line simply explanatory
of the firt 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 didaHc. 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,

William

again, with Still more excellent and harder courage : " When
I am endeavouring 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 well-head 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 un-
clothing of the soul, and when at last it is naked and alone,
in that " thrilling " region where the souls of other men have
at times penetrated, only to shudder back with terror from
the brink of eternal loneliness, then only is this soul exultant
with the supreme happiness.

V

IT is to the seven years at Lambeth that what may be called
the firs! period of the Prophetic Books largely belongs,
though it does not indeed begin there. The roots of it
are Strongly visible in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which
was written at Poland Street, and they may be traced even
further back. Everything else, until we come to the last or
Felpham period, which has a new quality of its own, belongs
to Lambeth.

In his earlier work Bkke is satisfied with natural symbols,
with nature as symbol ; in his kter 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, Enithar-
mon, Theotormon, Kintrah, 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
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tries to make one clear to us, he does but translate it into
another, perhaps no easier, or less 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
Bkke's later work, and that probably a far larger portion was
destroyed when the Peckham " angel," Mr. Tatham (co-
partner 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 con
temporary 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 per-
plexing meaning when he writes :

The corner of Broad Street weeps ; Poland Street languishes *
To Great Queen Street and Lincoln's Inn : all is distress and woe. 3

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,

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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 Bkke said of all truth, " can never be so told
as to be understood, and not be believed."

Blake's form, or apparent formlessness, in the Prophetic
Books, was no natural accident, or unconsidered utterance
of inspiration. Addressing the public on the first plate of
Jerswhm he says : " When this verse was first dilated 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's Discourses. " Such harmony of colour-
ing " (as that of Titian in the Bacchus and Ariadne) " is
deftru&ive 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 " colouring does not depend on
where the colours are put, but on where the lights and
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William

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 diStrating ornaments of conventional form. What
is further interesting in Blake's Statement is that he aimed,
in the Prophetic Books, at producing the effeft, not of poetry
but of oratory, and it is as oratory, the oratory of the prophets,
that the reader is doubtless meant to take them.

" Poetry fettered," he adds, " fetters the human race,"
and I doubt not that he imagined, as Walt Whitman and
later vers-tibriftes have imagined, that in casting off the
form he had unfettered the spirit of poetry. There seems
never to have been a time when Blake did not attempt to
find for himself a freer expression than he thought verse
could give him, for among the least mature of the Poetical
Sketches are poems written in rhythmical prose, in imitation
partly of Ossian, partly of the Bible. An early MS. called
Tiriel, probably of hardly later date, Still exists, written in
a kind of metre of fourteen syllables, only slightly irregular
in beat, but rarely fine in cadence. It already hints, in a
cloudy way, at some obscure mythology, into which there
already come incoherent names, of an Eastern colour, Ijim
and Mnetha. Tiriel appears again in The Book of Uriyen
as Urizen's firSt-born, Tiriel, " like a man from a cloud
born." Har and Heva reappear in The Song of Los. The
Book of Tbel, engraved in 1789, the year of the Songs of
Innocence, is in the same metre of fourteen syllables, but
written with a faint and lovely monotony of cadence, Strangely
fluid and flexible in that age of Strong caesuras, as in :

"

Come forth, wotm of the silent -valley, to thy pensive queen.

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The sentiment is akin to that of the Songs of Innocence^ and
hardly more than a shadow of the mythology remains. It
sings or teaches the holiness and eternity of life in all things,
the equality of life in the flower, the cloud, the worm, and
the maternal cky of the grave ; and it ends with the un-
answered question of death to life : why ? why ? In 1790
Blake engraved in two forms, on six and ten infinitesimal
pktes, a tractate which he called There is no Natural Religion.
They contain, the one commenting on the other, a clear and
concise Statement of many of Blake's fundamental beliefs ;
such as : " That the poetic Genius is the true Man, and that
the Body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic
Genius." " As all men are alike in outward form, so (and
with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic
Genius." "Man's perceptions are not bounded by organs
of perception, he perceives more than sense (though ever
so acute) can discover." Yet, since "Man's desires are
limited by his perceptions, none can desire what he has not
perceived." "Therefore God becomes as we are, that
we may become as he is."

In the same year, probably, was engraved The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, a prose fantasy full of splendid masculine
thought, and of a diabolical or infernal humour, in which
Blake, with extraordinary boldness, glorifies, parodies, and
renounces at once the gospel of his first maSler in mysticism,
" Swedenborg, Strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the
Churches," as he was to call him long afterwards, in Milton.
Blake's attitude towards Christianity might be roughly
defined by calling him a heretic of the heresy of Swedenborg.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell begins : " As a new heaven
is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent,
the Eternal Hell revives. And lo 1 Swedenborg is the Angel
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William

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, ec Sweden-
borg was a divine teacher. Yet he was wrong in endeavour-
ing to explain to the rational faculty what reason cannot
comprehend." And so we are warned, in The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell., against the " confident insolence sprouting
from systematic reasoning. Thus Swedenborg boaSts that
what he writes is new, though it is only the contents or index
of already published books." And again : " Any man of
mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or
Jacob Behmen produce ten thousand volumes of equal value
with Swedenborg's, and from those of Dante or Shakespeare
an infinite number. But when he has done this, let him not
say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds
a candle in sunshine." With Paracelsus it is doubtful if
Blake was ever more than slightly acquainted ; the influence
of Behmen, whom he had certainly read in William Law's
translation, is difficult to define, and seems to have been of
the moSt accidental or partial kind, but Swedenborg had
been a sort of second Bible to him from childhood, and the
influence even of his " systematic reasoning " remained
with him as at least a sort of groundwork, or despised model ;
" foundations for grand things," as he says in the Descriptive
Catalogue. When Swedenborg says, " Hell is divided into
societies in the same manner as heaven, and also into as
many societies as heaven for every society in heaven has
a society opposite to it in hell, and this for the sake of equili-

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brium," we see in this spirit of meek order a matter-of-faft
suggestion for Bkke'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 Sweden-
borg's Wisdom of Angels is this : " Heaven and Hell are born
together." The edition which he annotated is that of
1788, and the marginalia, which are printed in Mr. Ellis's
Real Blake, will show how attentive, as late as two years
before the writing of the book which that note seems to
anticipate, Bkke had been to every shade of meaning in
one whom he was to deny with such bitter mockery. But,
even in these notes, Bkke is attentive to one thing only,
he is reaching after a confirmation of his own sense of a
spiritual language in which man can converse with paradise
and render the thoughts of angels. He comments on nothing
else, he seems to read only to confirm his conviction ; he is
equally indifferent to Swedenborg's theology and to his
concern with material things ; his hells and heavens, ** uses,"
and " spiritual suns," concern him only in so far as they
help to make clearer and more precise his notion of the
powers and activities 'of the spirit in man. To Blake, as
he shows us in Milton, Swedenborg's worst error was not
even that of " systematic reasoning," but that of

" Showing the Transgressors in Hell : the proud Warriors in Heaven :
Heaven as a Punisher and Hell as one under Punishment."

It is for this more than for any other error that Swedenborg's
" memorable rektions " are tossed back to him as " memor-
able 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,
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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 Commandmants, and declares :
" Jesus was all virtue, and a&ed from impulse, not from
rules." Speaking through " the voice of the Devil," he
proclaims that " Energy is eternal delight," and that " Every-
thing that lives is holy." And, in a last flaming paradox,
Still mocking the manner of the analyst of heaven and hell,
he bids us : " Note. This Angel, who is now become a
Devil, is my particular friend : we often read the Bible
together, in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world
shall have if they behave well. I have also the Bible of
Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no."
The Bible of Hell is no doubt the Bible of Blake's new
gospel, in which contraries are equally true. We may piece
it together out of many fragments, of which the first perhaps
is the sentence Standing by itself at the bottom of the page :
" One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression."

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is loud with " the clangour
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

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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 reje&ion of the conv
promise of mortal imagery.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell may be called or not
called a Prophetic Book, in the strict sense ; with The Visions
of the Daughters of Albion, engraved at Lambeth in 1793, the
series perhaps more literally begins. Here the fine masculine
prose of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell has given place to
a metre vaguer than the metre of The Book of Tbel, and to
a substance from which the savour has not yet gone of the
Songs of Innocence, in such lines as :

c< The new washed lamb tinged with the village smoke, and the bright

swan
By the red earth of our immortal river."

It is Blake's book of love, and it defends the honesty of the
natural passions with unslackening ardour. There is no
mythology in it, beyond a name or two, easily explicable.
Oothoon, the virgin joy, oppressed by laws and cruelties
of restraint and jealousy, vindicates her right to the freedom
of innocence and to the instincts of infancy.

" And trees and birds and beasts and men behold their eternal joy.
Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy :
Arise, and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is holy I "

It is the gospel of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and, as
that proclaimed liberty for the mind, so this, with abundant
rhetoric, but with vehement convi&ion, proclaims liberty
for the body. In form it is still clear, its eloquence and

William

imagery are partly biblical, and have little suggestion of
the manner of the later Prophetic Books.

America, written in the same year, in the same measure
as the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, is the most vehement,
wild, and whirling of all Blake's prophecies. It is a prophecy
of revolution, and it takes the revolt of America against
Engknd both literally and symbolically, with names of
" Washington, Franklin, Paine and Warren, Gates, Hancock
and Green," side by side with Ore 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 life, in the midSl of cataclysms of all
nature, fires and thunders temporal and eternal. The world
for a time is given into the power of Ore, unrestrained desire,
which is to bring freedom through revolution and the
destroying of the bonds of good and evil. He is called
" Antichrist, Hater of Dignities, lover of wild rebellion,
and transgressor of God's Law." He is the Satan of The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and he also proclaims :

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life ;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defiTd. 3

As, in that book, Bkke 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 Ore proclaiming :

" The fierce joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts through the wild wilderness ;
That stony law I stamp to dust : and scatter religion abroad
To the four winds as a torn book, and none shall gather the leaves."

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Liberty comes in like a flood bursting all barriers :

" The doors of marriage are open, and the Priests in rustling scales
Rush into reptile coverts, hiding from the fires of Ore,
That play around the golden roofs in wreaths of fierce desire,
Leaving the females naked and glowing with the lusts of youth.
For the female spirits of the dead pining in bonds of religion
Run from their fetters reddening, and in long-drawn arches sitting,
They feel the nerves of youth renew, and desires of ancient times,
Over their pale limbs as a vine when the tender grape appears."

The world, in this regeneration through revolution (which
seemed to Blake, no doubt, a thing close at hand, in those
days when France and America seemed to be breaking down
the old tyrannies), is to be no longer a world laid out by
convention for the untrustworthy ; and he asks :

" Who commanded this ? what God ? what Angel ?
To keep the generous from experience till the ungenerous
Are unrestrained performers of the energies of nature,
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science
That men get rich by."

For twelve years, from the American to the French revolu-
tion, " Angels and weak men " are to govern the strong,
and then Europe is to be overwhelmed by the fire that had
broken out in the West, though the ancient guardians of
the five senses " slow advance to shut the five gates of their
law-built houses."

" But the gates were consumed, and their bolts and hinges melted,
And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens, and round the abode of

men."

Here the myth, though it is present throughout, is an
undercurrent, and the crying of the message is what is
chiefly heard. In Europe (1794), which is written in lines
broken up into frequent but not very significant irregularities,

William

short lines alternating with long ones, in the manner of an
irregular ode, the mythology is like a net or spider's web
over the whole text. Names not used elsewhere, or not
in the same form, are found : Manatha-Varcyon, Thiralatha,
who in 'Europe is Diralada. The whole poem is an allegory
of the sleep of Nature during the eighteen hundred years
of the Christian era, under bonds of narrow religions and
barren moralities and tyrannous laws, and of the awakening
to forgotten joy, when " Nature felt through all her pores
the enormous revelry/' and the fiery spirit of Ore, beholding
the morning in the eal, shot to the earth,

" And in the vineyards of red France appeared the light of his fury."

It is another hymn of revolution, but this time an awakening
more wholly mental, with only occasional contemporary
allusions like that of the judge in Westminster whose wig
grows to his scalp, and who is seen " grovelling 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 ser-
pent :

" Then was the serpent temple formed, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions, and man become an angel ;
Heaven a mighty circle turning ; God a tyrant crown'd."

The serpent temple shadows the whole island :

" Enitharmon laugh' d in her sleep to see (O woman's triumph)
Every house a den, every man bound : the shadows are filled
With spe&res, and the windows wove over with curses of iron :
Over the doors Thou shalt not : and over the chimneys Fear is written :
With bands of iron round their necks fa$ten*d into the walls
The citizens : in leaden gyves the inhabitants of suburbs
Walk heavy : soft and bent are the bones of villagers "

IV F 65

William

The whole book is a lament and protest, and it ends with
a call to spiritual battle. In a gay and naive prologue
written by Blake in a copy of Europe in the possession of
Mr. Linnell, and quoted by Ellis and Yeats, Blake tells us
that he caught a fairy on a Streaked tulip, and brought him
home :

ct

As we went along
Wild flowers I gathered, and he show'd me each eternal flower.
He laughed aloud to see them whimper because they were pluck'd,
Then hover'd round me like a cloud of incense. When I came
Into my parlour and sat down and took my pen to write,
My fairy sat upon the table and dictated Europe"

The Fir ft Book of Urhgn (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-con-
templating 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 realises 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 aftivities.
Under this net the senses shrink inwards, and that creation
which is "the body of our death," and our Stationing in
time and space, is finished :

" Six days they shrank up from existence,
And on the seventh they rested
And they bless'd the seventh day, in sick hope,
And forgot their eternal life."
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Then the children of reason, now " sons and daughters of
sorrow,"

" Wept and built
Tombs in the desokte places,
And form'd laws of prudence and calTd them
The eternal laws of God."

But Fuzon, the spirit of fire, forsook the " pendulous earth "
with those children of Urizen who would Still follow him.
Here, crystallised in the form of a myth, we see many of
Blake's fundamental ideas. Some of them we have seen
under other forms, as Statement rather than as image, in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and There is no Natural Re-
ligion. We shall see them again, developed, elaborated,
branching out into infinite side-issues, multiplying upon
themselves, in the later Prophetic Books, partly as myth,
partly as Statement ; we shall see them in many of the lyrical
poems, transformed into song, but Still never varying in their
message ; and we shall see them, in the polemical prose
of all the remaining fragments, and in the private letters, and
in the annotations of Swedenborg, and in Crabb Robinson's
records of conversations. The Book of Urizen is a sort of
nucleus, the germ of a system.

Next to the Book of Urizen, if we may judge from the manner
of its engraving, came The Song of Los (1795), written in a
manner of vivid declamation, the lines now lengthening,
now shrinking, without fixed beat or measure. It is the
song of Time, " the Eternal Prophet," and tells the course
of inspiration as it passes from eaSt to weSt, " abstract philo-
sophy " 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,

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" a man of sorrows " ; the " loose Bible " of Mahomet,
setting free the senses ; Odin's " code of war."

" These were the Churches, Hospitals, Castles, Palaces,
Like nets and gins and traps to catch the joys of Eternity,
And all the rest a desert :
Till like a dream Eternity was obliterated and erased."

<c 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 heatt may fail,
That the lust of the eyes may be quench' d,
That the delicate ear in its infancy
May be dulTd, and the nostrils clos'd up :
To teach mortal worms the path
That leads from the gates of the grave. 5

"

But, in the darkness of their " ancient woven dens," they
are startled by " the thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of
Ore " ; and at their cry Umen 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 " Umen 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
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lines of Uri^en and Abama y 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 Tidn-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, in-
telligent," 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 organised the void and brought Into it a light which
makes visible the form of the void. He sees it as the back-
bone of Urizen, the bony outlines of reason, and then begins,
for the first time in the Prophetic Books, that building of
furnaces, and wielding of hammer and anvil of which we
are to hear so much in Jerusalem. He forges the sun, and
chains cold intellect to vital heat, from whose torments

"a twin

Was completed, a Human Illusion

In darkness and deep clouds involved/*

In The Book of Los almost all relationship to poetry has
vanished ; the myth is cloudier and more abstract. Scarcely
less so is The Book of Ahania (1795), written in the same short
lines, but in a manner occasionally more concrete and realis-

William

able. Like Urfyen, 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 3 recovering his Strength, seizes the bright son
of fire, his energy or passion, and nails him to the dark
" religious " " Tree of MyStery," from under whose shade
comes the voice of Ahania, " weeping upon the void,"
lamenting her lost joys of love, and the days when

" Swelled with ripeness and fat with fatness,
Bursting on winds my odours,
My ripe figs and rich pomegranates,
In infant joy at my feet,
O Urizen, sported and sang."

In The Four Zoas Ahania is called " the feminine indolent
bliss, the indulgent self of weariness." ec 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 :

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cr But now alone over rocks, mountains,
Cast out from thy lovely bosom
Cruel jealousy, selfish fear,
Self-destroying ; how can delight
Renew in these chains of darkness
Where bones of beasts are strown
On the bleak and snowy mountains,
Where bones from the birth are buried
Before they see the light."

The mythology, of which parts are developed in each of
these books, is thrown together, in something more approach-
ing a whole, but without apparent cohesion or consistency,
in The Four Zoas, which probably dates from 1797 and which
exists in seventy sheets of manuscript, of uncertain order,
almost certainly in an unfinished State, perhaps never intended
for publication, but rather as a Storehouse of ideas. This
manuscript, much altered, arranged in a conjectural order,
and printed with extreme incorrectness, was published by
Messrs. Ellis and Yeats in the third volume of their book
on Blake, under the firSl, rejected, title of Vala.^ They
describe it as being in itself a sort of compound of all Blake's
other books, except Milton and Jerusalem, which are enriched
by scraps taken from Vala 9 but are not summarised in it.
In the uncertain State in which we have it, it is impossible
to take it as a wholly authentic text ; but it is both full of
incidental beauty and of considerable assistance in unravelling
many of the mysteries in Milton and Jerusalem, the books
written at Felpham, both dated 1804, in which we find the
final development of the myth, or as much of that final
development as has come to us in the absence of the

1 The text of Vala, with corrections and additional errors, is now
accessible in the second volume of Mr, Ellis's edition of Blake's Poetical
Works.

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manuscripts destroyed or disposed of by Tatham. Those
two books indeed seem to presuppose in their readers an
acquaintance with many matters told or explained in this,
from which passages are taken bodily, but with little apparent
method. As it Stands, Vala is much more of a poem than
either Milton or Jerusalem ; the cipher comes in at times,
but between there are broad spaces of cloudy but not wholly
unlighted imagery. Blake Still remembers that he is writing
a poem, earthly beauty is Still divine beauty to him, and
the message is not yet so Stringent as to forbid all lingering
by the way.

In some parts of the poem the manner is frankly biblical,
and suggests the book of Proverbs, as thus :

" What is the price of experience ? Do men buy it for a song,
Or wisdom for a dance in the Street ? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath his wife, his house, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none comes to buy,
And in the withered fields where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain."

Nature is Still an image accepted as an adequate symbol,
and we get reminiscences here and there of the simpler,
early work of TM, for instance, in such lines as :

** And as the little seed waits eagerly watching for its flower and fruit,
Anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse
To see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array ;
So man looks out in tree and herb, and fish and bird and beaSl,
Collecting'up the scattered portions of his immortal, body
Into the elemental forms of everything that grows."

There are descriptions of feaSts, of flames, of laSt judgments,
of the new Eden, which are full of colour and splendour,
passing without warning into the " material sublime " of
Fuseli, as in the picture of Umen " Stonied upon his throne "
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in the eighth ec Night." In the passages which we possess
in the earlier and later version we see the myth of Bkke
gradually crystallising, 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 Moun-
tain,"

is translated backwards into :

" Ephraim called out to Tiriel, Awake, oh brother Mountain."

Images everywhere are seen freezing into types ; they top
half-way, and have not yet abandoned the obscure poetry
of the earlier Prophetic Books for the harder algebra of
Milton and Jerusalem.

VI

THE fir Statement by Blake of his aims and prin-
ciples in art is to be found in some letters to George
Cumberland and to Dr. Trusler, contained in the
Cumberland Papers in the British Museum. These letters
were first printed by Dr. Garnett in the Hampfiead Annual
of 1903, but with many mistakes and omissions. 1 I have
recopied from the originals the text of such letters as I
quote. It appears that in the year 1799 Blake undertook,
at the suggestion of Cumberland, to do some drawings for
a book by Dr. Trusler, a sort of quack writer and publisher,
who may be perhaps sufficiently defined by the quotation
of the title of one of his books, which is The Way to be Rich
and ILespeftable. 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 aft otherwise it would not fulfil 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 Pi&ures in oil of the same dimensions than

1 They are now to be read in Mr. Russell's edition of The Letters of
William BtaJke.

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9>
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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 Rembrant 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 Cumber-
land, 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 Chris!:." Here, then, is the letter
in which Blake accounts for himself to the quack do&or
(who has docketed it : " Blake, Dimd with superstition "),
as if to posterity :

REVD. SIR,

I really am sorry that you are falln 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 Es-
pecially 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

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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
considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for InStru&ion,
because it rouses the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solo-
mon, Esop, Homer, Plato.

But as you have favord 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 Male-
volence ? But Want of Money and the Distress of a Thief
can never be alledged 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 111 proportiond,
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 Happi-
ness 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

u

a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful pro-
portions 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 glands in the way. Some see Nature

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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 In-

gtrudive 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

sa y S " Sense sends over to Imagination before Reason

have judged, and Reason sends over to Imagination before

the Decree can be afted." See Advancement of Learning,

Part 2, P. 47, of first Edition.

But I am happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals
who can Elucidate My Visions, and Particularly they have
been Elucidated by Children, who have taken a greater
delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped.
Neither Youth nor Childhood is Folly or Incapacity. Some
Children are Fools, and so are some old Men. But There
is a vast Majority on the side of Imagination or Spiritual

Sensation.

To Engrave after another Painter is infinitely more
laborious than to Engrave one's own Inventions. And of
the size you require my price has been Thirty Guineas, and
I cannot afford to do it for less. I had Twelve for the Head
I sent you as a Specimen ; but after my own designs I could

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do at leat Sis 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 Sis times as laborious as Aqua
tinta. I have no objection to Engraving after another
Artist. Engraving is the profession I was apprenticed to,
and I should never have attempted to live by any thing
else If orders had not come in for my Designs and Paintings,
which I have the pleasure to tell you are Increasing Every
Day. Thus If I am a Painter it is not to be attributed to
Seeking after. But I am contented whether I live by Painting
or Engraving.
I am, Revd. Sir, your very obedient Servant,

WILLIAM BLAKE.

13 HERCULES BUILDINGS, LAMBETH,
August 23, 1799.

Blake tells Cumberland the whole glory quite cheer-
fully, 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 neglefc, yet
I am laid by in a corner as if I did not exist, and since my
Young's 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
Pi&ures 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
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William

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 colour-prints which belong to this time ; among them,
or only jut after, the incomparable " Crucifixion," in which
the soldiers cast lots in the foreground and the crosses are
seen from the back, agalnSl a Stormy sky and lances like
Tintoretto's. But it was also the time of all but the latent
Prophetic Books (or of all but the latent 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 folly displaying
in his linear and coloured 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,
Diirer ; 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 pi6tures 3 or

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prints after pictures, of the Italian Primitives, whose attitudes
and composition he at times suggests ; and, to the end, he
worked with Durer's " Melancholia " on his work-table
and Michelangelo's designs on his walls. It not unfrequently
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 Bkke'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
Room of the British Museum. Its appeal to the imagination
is partly in spite of what is " organised and minutely articu-
lated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature
can produce." Death is a version of the Ancient of Days
and of Urizen, only his eyes are turned to blind terror and
his beard to forked flame ; Despair, a statue of greenish
bronze, is the Scofield of Jerusalem ; the limbs and faces
rigid with agony are types of strength and symbols of pain.
Yet even here there is creation, there is the energy of life,
there is a spiritual awe. And wherever Blake works freely,
as in the regions of the Prophetic Books, wholly outside
time and space, appropriate form multiplies under his
creating hand, as it weaves a new creation of worlds and
of spirits, monstrous and angelical.

Blake distinguished, as all great imaginative artists have
distinguished, between allegory, which is but realism's
excuse for existence, and symbol, which is none of the
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William

" daughters of Memory," but itself vision or inspiration.
He wrote in the MS. book : " Vision or imagination is a
representation of what afhially 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 pi<5tures, what he gives us is not a pi<hire
after a mental idea ; it is the literal delineation of an imagina-
tive 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-colour
of Christ in the carpenter's shop : Christ, a child, sets to the
floor that compass which Bkke 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 colour 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,
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William

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-colour
of the creadon 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 colour, and with
drawing in parts actually misleading, there is a Strange
intensity of appeal, of realisation not so much to the eyes
as through them to the imagination, in another water-colour
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 disemprisoned 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
Ce Riposo," the sheep's heads woven into the almost decora-
tive border. Blake was constantly on his guard against
the deceits of nature, the temptation of a " facsimile repre-
sentation of merely mortal and perishing substances." His
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William

dread of nature was partly the recoil of his love ; he feared
to be entangled in the " veils of Vala," the sedu&ive 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 but speak a language not even meant
to be the language of the " natural man."

In these symbolic notations of nature, or double language
of words and signs, these little figures of men and beaSts
that so Strangely and incalculably decorate so many of
Blake's pages, there is something Egyptian, which reminds
me of those lovely riddles on papyri and funeral tablets,
where the images of real things are used so decoratively,
in the midst of a language itself all pictures, with colours
never seen in the things themselves, but given to them for
ornament. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is filled with
what seem like the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian tomb or
obelisk, little images which might well mean things as
definite as the images of Egyptian writing. They are Still
visible, sometimes mere curves or twines, in the latest of

William

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 but think that it was partly from
what he had seen, in a5hial basalt, or in engravings after
ancient monuments which must have been about him at Basire
the engraver's, that Bkke found the suggestion of his
pi&ure-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 Cf 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 naive
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
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William

in the minute yet formal characterisation 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 gar-
goyles and of LasTt Judgments. Blake has, too, the same
love of pattern for its own sake, the same exuberance of orna-
ment, always living and organic, growing out of the Stru&ure
of the design or out of the form of the page, not added to
it from without. Gothic art taught him his hatred of vacant
space, his love of twining and trailing foliage and flame and
water ; and his invention of ornament is as unlimited as
theirs. A page of one of his illuminated books is like the
carving on a Gothic capital. Lines uncoil from a hidden
centre and spread like branches or burst into vaSt vegetation,
emanating from leaf to limb, and growing upward into images
of human and celestial existence. The snake is in all his
designs ; whether, in Jerusalem^ rolled into chariot- wheels
and into the harness of a chariot drawn by hoofed lions,
and into the curled horns of the lions, and into the pointing
fingers of the horns ; or, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
a leviathan of the sea with open jaws, eyed and scaled with
poisonous jewels of purple and blood-red and corroded gold,
swelling visibly out of a dark sea that foams aside from its
passage ; or, curved above the limbs and wound about the head
of a falling figure in lovely diminishing coils like a corkscrew
which is a note of interrogation ; or, in mere unterrifying
beauty, trailed like a branch of a bending tree across the tops
of pages ; or, bitted and bridled and a thing of blithe gaiety,
ridden by little, naked, long-legged girls and boys in the
new paradise of an America of the future. The Gothic
carvers loved snakes, but hardly with the Strange passion

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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 Bkke has made of it. In his paint-
ings he invents new colours 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 vapour, 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 Bkke 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.

Bkke's colour is unearthly, and is used for the most part
rather as a symbol of emotion than as a representation of
fat. It is at one time prismatic, and radiates in broad bands
of pure colour ; 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 colours have mouldered away, and blotted themselves
together in a sort of putrefaction which seems to carry the
suggestions of poisonous decay further than Bkke carried
them. This will be seen by a comparison of the minutely
drawn leviathan of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with the
coloured print in the Book of Designs, in which the outline
of the folds melts and crumbles into a mere chaos of horror.
Colour in Bkke is never shaded, or, as he would have said,
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William ~Blak<u

blotted and blurred ; it is always pure energy. In the faint
colouring of the Book of Thel there is the very essence of
gentleness ; the colour is a faultless interpretation of the
faint and lovely monotony of the verse, and of its exquisite
detail. Several of the pktes recur in the Book of Designs,
coloured 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 colour is
built up in all the vacant spaces ; and with the colour there
comes a new intensity : each design is seen over again, in
a new way. Here, the mood is a wholly different mood, and
this seeing by contraries is easier to understand than when,
as in the splendid design on the fourth page of The Book of
Uri^en, repeated in the Book of Designs, we see a parallel,
yet different, vision, a new, yet not contrary, asped. In
the one, the colours 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 colour of
the thing seen is different.

To Blake, colour 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 aspefts of the world and men. <e The whole
outward visible World," he tells us, cc with all its Being is
a Signature, or Figure of the inward spiritual World ; what-
ever 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 pidure in the National Gallery, where Pitt is

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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 colour. The
colours of fire and of blood, an extra-lunar gold, putrescent
vegetable colours, and the stains in rocks and sunsets, he
sees everywhere, and renders with an ecstasy that no painter
to whom colour was valuable for its own sake has ever
attained. It is difficult not to believe that he does not often
use colour with a definitely musical sense of its harmonies,
and that colour did not literally sing to him, as it seems, at
least in a permissible figure, to sing to us out of his pages.

VII

AT the end of September 1800 Bkke left Lambeth,
and took a cottage at Felpham, near Bognor, at
the suggestion of William Hayley, the feeblest
poet of his period, who imagined, with foolish kindness,
that he could become the patron of one whom he called
" my gentle visionary Blake." Hayley was a rich man,
and, as the author of The Triumphs of Temper, was looked
upon as a person of literary importance. He did his besl:
to give Blake opportunities of making money, by doing
engraving and by painting miniatures of the neighbours.
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 effeft 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 Bkke on
Hayley, and of Hayley on Blake, can be realised from a few
passages in the letters. At first we read : " Mr. Hayley
ats 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
t o my poetry as he is to a chapter in the Bible. He knows
that I have writ it, for I have shown it to him" (this is
apparently the Milton or the Jerusalem), ef and he has read

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part b7 Hs own desire, and has looked with sufficient con-
tempt 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 affe&ed
contempt that can move to anything but a more assiduous
pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness I have
brought down his affe&ed 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 condudt,
and to demand justice and truth ; which I have done in so
efFehial 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 behaviour towards Hayley, which has been
criticised, we can test his sincerity to himself under all
circumstances : his impeccable outward courtesy, his con-
cessions, " 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.
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Remembering the verses that Hayley sung

When my heart knocked against the roof of my tongue/

Blake wrote down bitter epigrams, which were written
down for mere relief of mind, and certainly never intended
for publication ; and I can see no contradiction between
these inner revolts and an outer politeness which had in it
its due measure of gratitude. Both were tritly true, and
only in a weak and foolish nature can the consciousness of
kindness received diStraft or blot out the consciousness
of the intellectual imbecility which may lurk behind it.
Blake said :

" I never made friends but by spiritual gifts,
By severe contentions of friendship and the burning fire of thought.

What least cc 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 :

(e Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache :
Do be my enemy for friendship's sake " ?

He quarrelled with many of his friends, with those whom
he had cared for most, like Stothard and Flasman ; but the
cause was always some moral indignation, which, just or
unjust, was believed, and which, being believed, could not
but have been afted upon. With Bkke belief and aftion
were simultaneous. " Thought is Aft," 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

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Forman, which has never been printed, but which, by his
kind permission, I have been allowed to read. This manu-
script 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 hand-
writing 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 neighbours the " press'd African." Nowhere
is there any characteristic felicity, or any recognisable sign
of Blake.

When I first saw the manuscript it occurred to me that it
might have been a fragment of translation from KlopStock,

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done at Felpham under the immediate dictation of Hayley.
" Read Klopstock into English to Bkke " we have seen
Hayley noting down. But I can find no original for it
in Klopstock. That Blake could have written it out of his
own head at any date after 1797 is incredible, even as an
experiment in that " monotonous cadence like that used
by Milton and Shakespeare and all writers of English blank
verse, derived from the modern bondage of rhyming/'
which he tells us in the preface to Jerusalem he considered
" to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse," at the
time " when this verse was first di&ated 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 Bkke 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 Sep-
tember 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 neighbourhood and kindly antagonism of
Hayley, that cc slumber " was, for Bkke, 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 Fkxman,
" begins a new life, because another covering of earth is
shaken off." The cottage at Felpham is only a little way

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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 colour as
a Whistler. It was on this coaSt that Rossetti first learned
to care for the sea. To Blake it must have been the realisa-
tion of much that he had already divined in his imagination.
There, as he wrote to Flasman, " heaven opens on all sides
her golden gates ; her windows are not obstructed by
vapours ; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly
heard and their forms more distinctly seen ; and my cottage
is also a shadow of their houses." He drew the cottage
on one of the pages of Milton., with a naked image of himself
walking in the garden, and the image of an angel about to
alight on a tree. The cottage is Still, as he found it, " a
perfect model for cottages, and I think for palaces of mag-
nificence, 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 marvellous 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 in-
fluences on Blake, surrounding him for once with an atmo-
sphere like that of his own dreams. " O lovely Felpham,"
he writes, after he had left it, ee 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
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original ways of execution in both painting and engraving,
which in the confusion of London I had very much oblit-
erated 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 ele&ric spark of that visit
to the Truchsessian Gallery in London) that Blake refers
in the Descriptive Catalogue ',when he speaks of the ce experiment
pictures " which " were the result of temptations and per-
turbations, labouring 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 con-
sciousness of the power of those painters whose influence
he dreaded, " was particularly active in raising doubt,
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 dida-
tion, 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 Bkke wrote the two last of the

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Prophetic Books which remain to us, Milton and Jerusalem.
Both bear the date of 1804 on the title-page, and this, no
doubt, indicates that the engraving was begun in that year.
Yet it is not certain that the engraved text of Jerusalem, at
any rate, was formally published till after 1809. Pages were
certainly inserted between those two dates. On p. 38 Blake

says :

" I heard in Lambeth's shades :
In Felpham I heard and saw the Visions of Albion :
I write in South Molton Street, what I both see and hear,
In regions of Humanity, in London's opening Streets. 5 '

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 afts ; for I have in these
years composed an immense number of verses on one grand
theme, similar to Homer's Iliad or Milton's Paradise Lotf ;
the persons and machinery entirely new to the inhabitants
of earth (some of the persons excepted). I have written
the poems from immediate diftation, twelve or sometimes
twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and
even against my will. The time it has taken in writing was
thus rendered non-existent, and an immense poem exists
which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produced
without labour or study. I mention this to show you
what I think the grand reason of my being brought down
here." The poem is evidently Jerusalem, for the address
** To the Public " on the first page begins : " After my three
years' slumber on the banks of the Ocean, I again display
my Giant forms to the Public." In the next letter, dated

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July 6, Bkke 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 sba.ll, by divine
assistance, be progressively printed and ornamented with
prints, and given to the public."

This I take to mean that before Blake's return to London
in 1803 the letterpress of Jerusalem was, as he imagined,
completely finished, but that the printing and illustration
were not yet begun. The fact of this delay, and the fact
that pages written after 1803 were inserted here and there,
must not lead us to think, as many writers on Blake have
thought, that there could be any allusion in Jerusalem to
the attacks of the Examiner of 1 808 and 1 809, or that " Hand,"
one of the wicked sons of Albion, could possibly be, as
Rossetti desperately conjectured, " a hieroglyph for Leigh
Hunt." The sons of Albion are referred to on quite a
third of the pages of Jerusalem, from the earliest to the latest,
and must have been part of the whole texture of the poem
from the beginning. In a passage of the " Public Address,"
contained in the Rossetti MS., Blake says : " The manner
in which my character has been blasted these thirty years,
both as an artist and as a man, may be seen particularly in
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a Sunday paper called the Examiner, published in Beaufort's
Buildings ; the manner in which I have rooted out the nest
of villains will be seen in a poem concerning my three years*
Herculean labours at Felpham, which I shall soon publish."
Even if this is meant for Jerusalem, as it may well be, Blake
is far from saying that he has referred in the poem to these
particular attacks : " the nest of villains " has undoubtedly
a much broader meaning, and groups together all the attacks
of thirty years, public or private, of which the 'Examiner
is but quoted as a recent example.

The chief reason for supposing that Jerusalem may not
have been published till after the exhibition of 1809, is to
be found in a passage in the Descriptive Catalogue which seems
to summarise the main sub j eel: 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 skin on the
Stems of generation, and the form of the fourth was like
the Son of God. How he became divided is a sub j eel:
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
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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 ee entirely new
to the inhabitants of earth (some of the persons escepted)."
This has been usually, but needlessly, supposed to mean
that real people are introduced under disguises. Does it
not rather mean, what would be $tritly 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 intells6haal
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 un-
explained. Milton seems to have arisen out of a symbol
which came visibly before Blake's eyes on his first waking
in the cottage at Felpham. ee Work will go on here with
Godspeed," he writes to Butts. "A toller and two
harrows lie before my window. I met a plough on
my first going out at my gate the first morning after my
arrival, and the ploughboy said to the ploughman,
" Father, the gate is open.' " At the beginning of his
poem Blake writes :

" The Plow goes forth in tempests and lightnings and the Harrow

cruel
In blights of the east ; the heavy Roller follows in bowlings " ;

and the imagery returns at intervals, in the vision of " The
Last Vintage," the " Great Harvest and Vintage of the

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Nations." The personal element comes in the continual
references to the cottage at Felpham ;

" He set me down in Felpham's Vale and prepared a beautiful
Cottage for me that in three years I might write all these Visions
To display Nature's cruel holiness : the deceits of Natural Religion " ;

and it is in the cottage near the sea that he sees the vision
of Milton, when he

" Descended down a Paved work of all kinds of precious Stones
Out from the eastern sky ; descending down into my Cottage
Garden ; clothed in black, severe and silent he descended."

He awakes from the vision to find his wife by his side r

" My bones trembled. I fell outstretched upon the path
A moment, and my Soul returned into its mortal State
To Resurrection and Judgment in the Vegetable Body,
And my sweet Shadow of delight stood trembling by my side."

In the prayer to be saved from his friends (" Corporeal
Friends are Spiritual Enemies "), in the defence of wrath,
(" Go to thy labours at the Mills and leave me to my wrath "),
in the outburst :

The idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination

And from laughter proceeds to murder by undervaluing calumny,'

it is difficult not to see some trace or transposition of the
kind, evil counsellor Hayley, a " Satan " of mild falsehood
in the sight of Blake. But the main aim of the book is the
assertion of the supremacy of the imagination :

" The Imagination is not a State : it is the Human Existence itself,"

and the putting off of the " filthy garments/ 7 of " Rational
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Demonstration/' of "Memory," of "Bacon, Locke, and
Newton," the clothing of oneself in imagination,

" To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration,
That it shall no longer dare to mock with the aspersion of Madness
Cast on the Inspired by the tame high finisher of paltry Blots,
Indefinite or paltry Rhymes ; or paltry harmonies."

It is because " Everything in Eternity shines by its own
Internal light," and that jealousy and cruelty and hypocrisy
are all darkenings of that light, that Blake declares his purpose
of

" Opening to every eye

These wonders of Satan's holiness showing to the Earth
The Idol Virtues of the Natural Heart, and Satan*s Seat
Explore in all its Selfish Natural Virtue, and put off
In Self-annihilation all that is not of God alone."

Such meanings as these flare out from time to time with
individual splendours 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 Rahab and Tkzah pervert

Their mild influences, therefore the Seven Eyes of God walk round
The Three Heavens of Ulro, where Tirzah and her Sisters
Weave the black Woof of Death upon Entuthon Benython
In the Vale of Surrey where Horeb terminates in Rephaim."

In Jerusalem, which was to have been " the grandest poem
which the world contains," there is less of the exquisite
lyrical work which Still decorates many corners of Mxltcn,

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but it is Blake's most serious attempt to set Ms myth in
order, and It contains much of his deepest wisdom, with
astonishing flashes of beauty. In Milton there was Still a
certain approximation to verse, most of the lines had at least
a beginning and an end, but in Jerusalem, although he tells
us that " every word and every letter is studied and put
into its place," I am by no means sure that Blake ever in-
tended the lines, as he wrote them, to be taken as metrical
lines, or read very differently from the prose of the English
Bible, with its pause in the sense at the end of each verse.
A vague line, hesitating between six and seven beats, does
indeed seem from time to time to emerge from chaos, and
inversions are brought in at times to accentuate a cadence
certainly intended, as here :

" Why should Punishment Weave the Veil with Iron Wheels of War,
When Forgiveness might it Weave with Wings of Cherubim ? "

But read the whole book as if it were prose, following the
sense for its own sake, and you will find that the prose, when
it is not a mere catalogue, has generally a fine biblical roll
and swing in it, a rhythm of fine oratory ; while if you
read each line as if it were meant to be a metrical unit you
will come upon such difficulties as this :

" Such is the Forgiveness of the Gods, the Moral Virtues of the "

That is one line, and the next adds " Heathen." There
may seem to be small reason for such an arrangement of
the lines if we read Jerusalem in the useful printed text of
Mr. Russell and Mr. Maclagan ; but the reason will be
seen if we turn to the original engraved page, where we
shall see that Blake had set down in the margin a lovely
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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

c< Los Stood and Stamped the earth, then he threw down his hammer in

rage &
In fury"

has any reason for existing in this form beyond the mere
chance of a hand that writes until all the space of a given
line is filled. Working as he did within those limits of his
hand's space, he would accustom himself to write for the
most part, and especially when his imagination was most
vitally awake, in lines that came roughly within those limits*
Thus it will often happen that the most beautiful passages
will have the nearest resemblance to a regular metrical
scheme, as in such lines as these :

" In vain : he is hurried afar into an unknown Night.
He bleeds in torrents of blood, as he rolls thro* heaven above,
He chokes up the paths of the sky : the Moon is leprous as snow :
Trembling and descending down, seeking to rest on high Mona :
Scattering her leprous snow in flakes of disease over Albion.
The Stars flee remote : the heaven is iron, the earth is sulphur,
And all the mountains and hills shrink up like a withering gourd."

Here the prophet is no longer speaking with the voice of
the orator, but with the old, almost forgotten voice of the
poet, and with something of the despised e< Monotonous

Cadence."

Blake lived for twenty-three years after the date on the
title-page of Jerusalem, but, with the exception of the two
plates called The Ghofi of Abel, engraved in 1822, this vast

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and obscure encyclopaedia of unknown regions remains
his lal 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 m 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 cc shaping spirit of imagination," so, in
spite of all his marvellous 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 <e 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
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unachieved, the world has still to wait for a philosophy
^i 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 a& is creation. Milton was content
to begin with " Man's first disobedience," but Blake would
track the human soul back into chaos, and beyond. He
knows, like Krishna, in the T^hagavad Gita y 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 ec States " through which he passes. Man
Q is seen, as Blake saw all things, fourfold : Man's Humanity,
his Spe&re, who is Reason, his Emanation, who is Imagina-
tion, 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 emana-
tion of Emotion, who is lovely deceit, and the visible beauty
of Nature ; Enion, who is the emanation of the Senses, and
typifies the maternal inStinft; Enitharmon, who is the

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emanation of Intuition, and personifies spiritual beauty.
The drama is the division, death, and resurre<5Eon, in an
eternal circle, of the powers of man and of the powers in
whose midst he fights and struggles. Of this incommensur-
able 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
top-moSt 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-ena&ed.
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 <c the
gentle souls who guide the great wine-press of Love,"
among whom was Teresa, seemed to require a new inter-
pretation to the imagination. Blake wrote when the
eighteenth century was coming to an end ; he announced
the new dispensation which was to corne, 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 ec 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 Redemp-
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tion and Judgment." He spoke to literalists, rationalists,
materialists ; to an age whose very infidels doubted only
fa&s, 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 ef 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 inter-
pretations of the Bible and the other books of ancient le-
ligions by a universal application of what had been taken
in too personal a way. Hence many of the puzzling " corre-

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spondences '* of English cities and the tribe of Judah, of
<e the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord."
There is an outcry in Jerusalem :

<c No individual ought to appropriate to Himself
Or to his Emanation, any of the Universal CharacTeristics
Of David or of Eve, of the Woman, of the Lord,
Of Reuben or of Benjamin, of Joseph or Judah or Levi.
Those who dare appropriate to themselves Universal Attributes
Are the Blasphemous Selfhoods and must be broken asunder.
A Vegetable Christ and a Virgin Eve, are the Hermaphroditic
Blasphemy : by his Maternal Birth he put off that Evil One,
And his Maternal Humanity must be put off Eternally,
Lest the Sexual Generation swallow up Regeneration :
Come, Lord Jesus, take on Thee the Satanic Body of Holiness ! "

ExacUy 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 the Songs 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 Bom of Mortal Birth
Must be consumed with the Earth,
To rise from Generation free :
Then what have I to do with thee ?

The Sexes sprung from Shame and Pride
Blow'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 part
With cruelty didst mould my Heart,
And with false, self-deceiving Tears
Didst bind my Nostrils, Eyes, and Ears ;
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Didt 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 afFetions 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 sym-
bolises that deliverance ; in the passage from Jerusalem the
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 endeavour 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 in Milton :

" In fury of Poetic Inspiration,
To build the Universe Stupendous, Mental Forms Creating."

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

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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, all
Human Forms identified, living, going forth, and returning -wearied
Into the planetary lives of Years, Months, Days, and Hours."

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, Golgonoo2a), the whole unhuman mythology,
abstractions of frigid fire. In Jerusalem Blake interrupts
himself to say :

" I call them by their English names ; English, the rough basement,
Los built the stubborn Structure of the Language, ating againSl
Albion's melancholy, who mu$l else have been a Dumb despair."

In the Prophetic Books we see Blake labouring 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
';o 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
31ake would have had us take them. He was not a systematic
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thinker, and lie 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 in Jerusalem :

" I must Create a System, or be enslaved by another Man's.
I will not Reason or Compare : my business is to Create."

To Blake each new aspect of truth came as a divine gift,
and between all his affirmations of truth there is no contra-
di&ion, 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 defeats inherent in it or from the frag-
mentary State in which it comes to us, it can never mean
anything wholly definite or satisfying even to those minds
best prepared to receive mySlical doctrine. We cannot
read the Prophetic Books either for their thought only or
for their beauty only. Yet we shall find in them both in-
spired 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. In Jerusalem it 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

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are no more." " O Human Imagination, O Divine Body
I have Crucified ! " he cries ; and he sees continually

Abgtra& Philosophy warring in enmity against Imagination,
Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed for ever. 3

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 of Liberty
To destroy Liberty, a pretence of Religion to destroy Religion.'

He sees that

* The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed perceptions,
Are become weak visions of Time and Space, fix'd into furrows of
death."

He sees everywhere " the indefinite Spe<Ehre, who is the
Rational Power," crying out :

* e I am God, O Sons of Men I I am your Rational Power I
Am I not Bacon and Newton and Locke who teach Humility to Man ?
Who teach Doubt and Experiment : and my two kings, Voltaire,
Rousseau."

He sees this threefold spirit of doubt and negation over-
spreading the earth, " brooding Abstract Philosophy/'
destroying Imagination; and, as he looked about him,

" Every Universal Form was become barren mountains of Moral
Virtue : and every Minute Particular harden'd into grains of sand :
And all the tenderness of the soul cast forth as filth and 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 cc kept the Divine Vision
in time of trouble," stands in London building Golgonoosa,
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" the spiritual fourfold London," the divine City of God.
Of the real or earthly London he says in Jerusalem :

I see London blind and age bent begging thro* the Streets
Of Babylon, led by a child, his tears run down his beard ! "

Babylon, in Blake, means "Rational Morality." In the
Songs of Innocence we 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 bitn 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 ingtLntive joys of innocence ; in his kter, 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 " in-
definite void " and truth a thing minutely organised ; not
that truth can endure bondage or limitation from without.
He typifies Moral Law by Rahab, the harlot of the Bible, a
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William

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 death
To every energy of man, and forbid the springs of life."

Jt 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 in Jerusalem :

" And in this manner of the Sons of Albion in their Strength ;
They take the Two Contraries which are called Qualities, with which
Every Substance is clothed, they name them Good and Evil,
From them they make an Abstract, which is a Negation
Not only of the Substance from which it is derived,
A murderer of its own Body : but also a murderer
Of every Divine Member : it is the Reasoning Power,
An Abstract objecting power, that Negatives everything.
This is the Spectre of Man : the Holy Reasoning Power,
And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation."

The active form of sin is judgment, intellectual cruelty,
unforgiveness, punishment. "In Hell is all self-righteous-
ness ; 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, scourg-
ing sin instead of forgiving it." In Jerusalem he says :

** And the appearance of a Man was seen in the Furnaces,
Saving those who have sinned from the punishment of the Law
(In pity of the punisher whose slate is eternal death),
And keeping them from Sin by the mild counsels of his love."

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And in his greatest paradox and deepest passion of truth
he affirms :

c< I care not whether a Man is Good or Evil ; all that I care
Is whether he is a Wise Man or a Fool. Go, put off Holiness
And put on Intellect."

That holiness may be added to wisdom Blake asks only that
continual forgiveness of sins which to him meant under-
Standing, and thus intelle&ual 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 himself
Eternally for Man, Man could not exist, for Man is love,
As God is Love : every kindness to another is a little Death
In the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood."

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 ekborate
Stru6ture, which he has built up in his dodrine of " States."
At the head of the address to the Deists in the third chapter
of Jerusalem, 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, in Jerusalem :

" Learn therefore, O Sisters, to distinguish the Eternal Human
That walks about among the stones of fire, in bliss and woe
Alternate, from those States or Worlds in which the Spirit travels :
This is the only means to Forgiveness of Enemies."

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William

The same image is used again

As the Pilgrim passes while the Country permanent remains,
So men pass on ; but States remain permanent for ever " ;

and, again, in almost the same words, in the prose fragment
on the pi&ure of the " LaSt Judgment " : ce 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
be a necessity of his journey. And his litany is :

*' Descend, O Lamb of God, and take away the imputation of Sin
By the creation of States and the deliverance of Individuals evermore.

Amen. . . .

Come then, O Lamb of God, and take away the remembrance of
Sin."

vm

BLAKE had already decided to leave Felpham, ec 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 realised, had to be
shaken off, and we find Bkke taking rooms on the firSt-floor
at 17 South Molt on 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 ist 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 vigour.
" It is certain," he commented, " that a too passive manner,
inconsistent with my adive physiognomy, had done me
much mischief." The " contemptible business " was tried

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at Chichester on January n, 1804, at the Quarter Sessions,
and Blake was acquitted of the charge of high treason ;
" which so gratified the auditory," says the Sussex Advertiser
of 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, vitalising 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-colour
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of " The River of Life/* which has been assigned by Mr.
Russell to this year ; and in those " Inventions " in tllustra-
tion of Blair's Grave, by which Bkke 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's Canterbury Pilgrims., and of the twofold accusa-
tion of plagiarism, is told clearly enough in the narrative
of J. T. Smith, 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 conduft, 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

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by the recolle6tion that your best work, the illustrations of
The Grave > was produced when you and Mrs. Blake were
reduced so low as to be obliged to live on half a guinea a
week." Crotnek 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 pi&uresque dignity of the Designs that accompany this
Poem." Fuseli praises pompously the " genuine and un-
affefted attitudes," the " simple graces which nature and the
heart alone can diftate, 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's Grave that Bkke 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.

The book contains the names of more than five hundred
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subscribers, but only one contemporary notice has been
found, a notice of two columns, mere drivel and mere
raving, signed by the happily undiscovered initials R. H.,
in the thirty-second number of Leigh Hunt's paper, The
Examiner (August 7, 1808, pp. 509, 510). It is under the
heading " Fine Arts," and is called " Blake's edition of
Blair's Grave" The notice is rendered specially grotesque
by its serious air of arguing with what it takes to be absurdity
coupled with " an appearance of libidinousness " which
" intrudes itself upon the holiness of our thoughts and
counteracts their impression." Like most moralists of
the press, this critic's meaning is hard to get at. Here,
however, is a specimen : " But a more serious censure
attaches to two of these most heterogeneous and serio-
fantastic designs. At the awful day of judgment, before
the throne of God himself, a male and female figure are
described in most indecent attitudes. It is the same with
the salutation of a man and his wife meeting in the pure
mansions of Heaven." Thus sanctified a voice was it that
first croaked at Blake out of the " nest of villains " which
he imagined that he was afterwards to " root out " of The
Examiner.

A quite different view of him is to be found in a book

which was published before the Grave actually came out,

though it contains a reference to the designs and to the

" ardent and encomiastic applause " of " some of the first

artists in the country." The book, which contained an

emblematic frontispiece designed by Blake and engraved

by Cromek, was A Father's Memoirs of bis Child, written by

Benjamin Heath Malkin, then headmaster of Bury Grammar

School, in which the father gives a minute and ingenuous

account of his child, a prodigy of precocious intellect, who

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died at the age of nearly seven years. The child was accus-
tomed to do little drawings, some of which are reproduced
in the book in facsimile, and the father, after giving his
own opinion of them, adds : " Yet, as my panegyric on such
a sub j eel: can carry with it no recommendation, I subjoin
the testimony of Mr. Blake to this instance of peculiar
ingenuity, who has given me his opinion of these various
performances in the following terms :

** c They are all firm, determinate outlines, of identical
form. Had the hand which executed these little ideas been
that of a plagiary, who works only from the memory, we
should have seen blots, called masses ; blots without form,
and therefore without meaning. These blots of light and
dark, as being the result of labour, are always clumsy and
indefinite ; the effect of rubbing out and putting in, like
the progress of a blind man, or of one in the dark, who
feels his way, but does not see it. These are not so. Even
the copy of Raphael's cartoon of St. Paul preaching is a
firm, determinate outline, struck at once, as Protogenes
Struck his line, when he meant to make himself known to
Apelles. The map of AlleStone has the same character of
the firm and determinate. All his efforts prove this little
boy to have had that greatest of all blessings, a Strong
imagination, a clear idea, and a determinate vision of
things in his own mind." It is in the lengthy dedication
of the book to Thomas Johnes, the translator of Froissart,
that Dr. Malkin gives his very interesting personal account
of Blake.

It is not certain whether Blake had ever known little
Thomas Malkin, and it would be interesting to know whether
it was through any actual influence of his that the child had
come to his curious invention of an imaginary country.
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He drew the map of this country, peopled with names
(Nobblede and Bobblobb, Punchpeach and Closetha) scarcely
more preposterous than the names which Blake was just
then discovering for his own spiritual regions, wrote its
chronicles, and even made music for it. The child was
born in 1 79 5 and died in 1 802, and Blake had been at Felpham
since September 1800; but, if they had met before that
date, there was quite time for Blake's influence to have
shown itself. In 1799 the astonishing child " could read,
without hesitation, any English book. He could spell
any words. . . . He knew the Greek alphabet " ; and on his
fourth birthdayf in that year, he writes to his mother saying
that he has got a Latin grammar and English prints. In
October 1800 he says : "I know a deal of Latin," and in
December he is reading Burns's poems, " which I am very
fond of." Influence or accident, the coincidence is singular,
and at least shows us something in Blake's brain working
like the brain of a precocious child.

In 1806 Blake wrote a generous and vigorous letter to
the editor of the Monthly Review (July i, 1806) in reply to
a criticism which had appeared in Bell's Weekly Messenger
on Fuseli's piture of Count Ugolino in the Royal Academy.
In 1808 he had himself, and for the fifth and last time, two
pictures in the Academy, and in that year he wrote the
letter to Ozias Humphrey, describing one of his many " Last
Judgments," which is given, with a few verbal errors, by
J. T. Smith. In December he wrote to George Cumberland,
who had written to order for a friend " a complete set of all
you have published in the way of books coloured as mine
are," that " new varieties, or rather new pleasures, occupy
my thoughts ; new profits seem to arise before me so tempt-
ing that I have already involved myself in engagements

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that preclude all possibility of promising anything," Does
this refer to the success of Blair's Grave, which had just been
published ? He goes on : "I have, however, the satis-
fa6tion to inform you that I have myself begun to print an
account of my various inventions in Art, for which I have
procured a publisher, and am determined to pursue the
plan of publishing, that I may get printed without disarrang-
ing my time, which in future must alone be designing and
painting." To this project, which was never carried out,
he refers again in the prospe6his printed in anticipation of
his exhibition, a copy of which, given to Ozias Humphrey,
exists with the date May 15, 1809. A second prospectus
is given by Gilchrist as follows :

" Blake's Chaucer, the Canterbury Pilgrims. This Fresco
Piture, representing Chaucer's Characters, painted by
William Blake, as it is now submitted to the public.

" The designer proposes to engrave in a correct and
finished line manner of engraving, similar to those original
copper-plates of Albert Durer, Lucas Van Leyden, Aldegrave,
and the old original engravers, who were great makers in
painting and designing ; whose methods alone can delineate
Character as it is in this Picture, where all the lineaments
are distinct.

" It is hoped that the Painter will be allowed by the public
(notwithstanding artfully disseminated insinuations to the
contrary) to be better able than any other to keep his own
characters and expressions ; having had sufficient evidence
in the works of our own Hogarth, that no other artist can
reach the original spirit so well as the Painter himself, es-
pecially as Mr. B. is an old, well-known, and acknowledged
graver.

* e The size of the engraving will be three feet one inch
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long by one foot high. The artist engages to deliver it,
finished, in one year from September nest. No work of
art can take longer than a year : it may be -worked backwards
and forwards without end, and last a man's whole life ; but
he will, at length, only be forced to bring it back to what
it was, and it will be worse than it was at the end of the first
twelve months. The value of this artist's year is the criterion
of Society ; and as it is valued, so does Society flourish
or decay.

" The price to Subscribers, Four Guineas ; two to be paid
at the time of subscribing, the other two, on delivery of
the print.

" Subscriptions received at No. 28, corner of Broad
Street, Golden Square, where the Pifture is now exhibiting,
among other works, by the same artist.

" The price will be considerably raised to non-sub-
scribers."

The exhibition thus announced was held at the house of
James Blake, and contained sixteen pi&ures, of which the
first nine are described as "Frescoes" or "experiment
pictures," and the remaining seven as " drawings," that is,
drawings in water-colour. The Catalogue (which was
included in the entrance fee of half a crown) is Blake's most
coherent work in prose, and can be read in Gilchrist, ii.
139-163. It is called " A Descriptive Catalogue of Piftures,
Poetical and Historical Inventions, painted by William Bkke
in Water-Colours, being the ancient Method of Fresco
Painting Restored ; and Drawings, for Public Inspection,
and for Sale by Private Contraa." Crabb Robinson, from
whom we have the only detailed account of the exhibi-
tion, says that the pictures filled "several rooms of
an ordinary dwelling-house." He mentions Lamb's

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delight in the Catalogue, 1 and his declaring " that Blake's
description was the finest criticism he had ever read of
Chaucer's poem." In that letter to Bernard Barton (May
15, 1824), which is full of vivid admiration for Blake ("I
must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons
of the age "), Lamb speaks of the criticism as " most spirited,
but mystical and full of vision," and says : " His pictures
one in particular, the c Canterbury Pilgrims ' (far above
Stothard's) have great merit, but hard, dry, yet with
grace." Southey, we know from a sneer in The Doftor
at ec that painter of great but insane genius, William Blake,"
also went to the exhibition, and found, he tells us, the picture
of " The Ancient Britons," " one of the worst pidures,
which is saying much." A note to Mr. Swinburne's William
'Blake tells us that in the competent opinion of Mr. Seymour
Kirkup this pidure was " the very noblest of all Blake's
works." It is now lost; it was probably Blake's largest
work, the figures, Blake asserts, being " full as large as life."
Of the other pictures the seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and
sixteenth are lost ; the ninth exists in a replica in " fresco,"
and the sixteenth in what is probably a first sketch.

Blake's reason for giving this exhibition was undoubtedly
indignation at what he took to be Stothard's treachery in
the matter of the " Canterbury Pilgrims." This pi&ure
(now in the National Gallery, No. 1163) had been exhibited
by Cromek throughout the kingdom, and he had announced
effusively, in a seven page advertisement at the end of Blair's
Grave, the issue of " a print executed in the line manner of
engraving, and in the same excellent Style as the portrait

1 We know from Mr. Lucas's catalogue of Lamb's library that Lamb
boundit up in a thick 1 2mo volume with his own Confessions of a Drunkard,
Southey's Wat Tyler, and Lady Winchilsea's and Lord Rochester's poems.
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William

of Mr. William Blake, prefixed to this work, by Louis Schia-
vonetti, Esq., V.A., the gentleman who has etched the
prints that at once illustrate and embellish the present
volume." The Descriptive Catalogue is full of angry scorn
of " my rival," as Blake calls Stothard, and of the " dumb
dollies " whom he has " jumbled together " in his design,
and of Hoppner for praising them in the letter quoted in the
advertisement. " If Mr. B.'s * Canterbury Pilgrims * had
been done by any other power than that of the poetic visionary,
it would have been as dull as his adversary's," Blake assures
us, and, no doubt, justly. The general feeling of Blake's
friends, I doubt not, is summed up in an ill-spelled letter
from young George Cumberland to his father, written from
the Pay Office, Whitehall, O&ober 14, 1809, which I copy
in all its literal slovenliness from the letter preserved in the
Cumberland Papers : " Blakes has published a Catalogue
of Pitures being the ancient method of Frescoe Painting
Restored, you should tell Mr. Barry to get it, it may be
the means of serving your friend. It sells for 2/6 and may
be had of J. Blake, 28 Broad St., Golden Square, at his
Brothers the Book is a great curiosity. He as given
Stothard a compleet set down."

The Catalogue is badly printed on poor paper in the
form of a small oftavo book of 66 pages. It is full of fierce,
exuberant wisdom, which plunges from time to time into
a bright, demonstrative folly ; it is a confession, a criticism,
and a kind of gospel of sanctity and honesty and imagination
in art. The whole thing is a thinking aloud. One hears
an impetuous voice as if saying : " I have been scorned long
enough by these fellows, who owe to me all that they possess ;
it shall be so no longer." As he thinks, his pen follows ;
he argues with foes actually visible to him ; never does he

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realise the indifferent public that may glance at what he has
written, and how best to interest or convince it if it does.
He throws down a challenge, and awaits an answer.

What answer came is rememberable among the infamies
of journalism. Only one newspaper noticed the exhibition,
and this was again The Examiner. The notice appeared
under the title " Mr. Blake's Exhibition " in No. 90, Sep-
tember 17, 1809, pp. 605-6, where it fills two columns. It
is unsigned, but there can be no doubt that it was written
by the R. H. of the former article. The main part of it is
taken up by extrafe from the Descriptive Catalogue, italicised
and put into small capitals " to amuse the reader, and satisfy
Him of the truth of the foregoing remarks." This is all
that need be quoted of the foregoing remarks :

" But when the ebullitions of a distempered brain are
mistaken for the sallies of genius by those whose works
have exhibited the soundest thinking in art, the malady has
indeed attained a pernicious height, and it becomes a duty
to endeavour to arrest its progress. Such is the case with
the productions and admirers of William Blake, an un-
fortunate lunatic, whose personal inoflfensiveness secures
him from confinement, and, consequently, of whom no
public notice would have been taken, if he was not forced
on the notice and animadversion of The Examiner, in having
been held up to public admiration by many esteemed amateurs
and professors as a genius in some respect original and legi-
timate. The praises which these gentlemen bestowed last
year on this unfortunate man's illustrations to Blair's Grave
have, in feeding his vanity, Stimulated him to publish his
madness more largely, and thus again exposed him, if not
to the derision, at least to the pity of the public. . . . Thus
encouraged, the poor man fancies himself a great master,
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and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which
are unintelligible allegory, others an attempt at sober char-
after by caricature representation, and the whole e blotted
and blurred,' and very badly drawn. These he calls an
Exhibition, of which he has published a Catalogue, or rather
a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious
vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain. One of
the pidures represents Chaucer's Pilgrims, and is in every
respect a Striking contrast to the admirable picture of the
same subject by Mr. Stothard, from which an exquisite
print is forthcoming from the hand of Schiavonetti."

The laSt great words of the Catalogue, " If a man is master
of his profession, he cannot be ignorant that he is so ; and^
if he is not employed by those who pretend to encourage
art, he will employ himself, and kugh in secret at the pretences
of the ignorant, while he has every night dropped into his
shoe, as soon as he puts it off, and puts out the candle, and
gets into bed, a reward for the labours of the day such as
the world cannot give, and patience and time await to give
him all that the world can give " : those noble, lovely,
pathetic and prophetic words, are quoted at the end of
the article without comment, as if to quote them was enough.

It was.

In 1803 William Blake sold to Thomas Butts eleven
drawings for fourteen guineas. In 1903 twelve water-colour
drawings in illustration of U Allegro and II Penseroso were
sold for ;i>96o, and the twenty-one water-colour drawings
for Job for 5,600. These figures have their significance
but the significance muSl not be taken to mean any improve-
ment in individual taSte. When a selection from the pidures
in the Butts collection was on view at Sotheby's I heard a
vulgar person with a loud voice, a dealer or a dealer's assistant,

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William

say with a guffaw : " It would make me sick to have these
things round my room." That vulgar person represents
the eternal taste of the multitude ; only, in the course of a
hundred years, a few men of genius have repeated after one
another that Bkke was a man of genius, and their united
voices have carried further than the guffaws of vulgar
persons, repeated generation after generation. And so in
due course, when Blake has been properly dead long enough,
there is a little public which, bidding against itself, gambles
cheerfully for the possession of the scraps of paper on which
he sent in his account, against the taste of his age and the
taste of all the ages.

Blake himself had never any doubt of his own greatness
as an artist, and some of the proud or petulant things which
he occasionally wrote (the only outbreaks of impatience
in a life wholly given up to unceasing and apparently un-
rewarded labour) have been quoted against him as petty or
unworthy, partly because they are so uncalculated and so
childlike. Blake " bore witness," as he might have said,
that he had done his duty : " for that I cannot live without
doing my duty, to lay up treasures in heaven, is certain and
determined," he writes from Felpham. And he asserted
the truth of his own genius, its truth in the spiritual sense,
its divine origin, as directly and as emphatically as he asserted
everything which he had apprehended as truth. He is merely
stating what seems to him an obvious but overlooked faft
when he says : " In Mr. B.'s Britons the blood is seen to
circulate in their limbs : he defies competition in colouring " ;
and again : " I am, like other men, just equal in invention
and execution of my work." All art, he had realised, which
is true art, is equal, as every diamond is a diamond. There
is only true and false art. Thus when he says in his prospectus
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of 1793 that he has been "enabled to bring before the
Public works (he is not afraid to say) of equal magnitude
and consequence with the productions of any age or country,"
he means neither more nor less than when he says in the
Descriptive Catalogue of 1809 : " He knows that what he
does is not inferior to the grandest antiques. Superior it
cannot be, for human power cannot go beyond either what
he does or what they have done ; it is the gift of God, it
is inspiration and vision. . . . The human mind cannot go
beyond the gift of God, the Holy GhosV It is in humility
rather than in pride that he equals himself with those who
seemed to him the genuine artists, the humility of a belief
that all art is only a portion of that ee Poetic Genius, which
is the Lord," offered up in homage by man, and returning,
in mere gratitude, to its origin. When he says, " I do not
pretend to paint better than Rafael or Michael Angelo, or
Julio Romano, or Albert Durer, but I do pretend to paint
finer than Rubens, or Rembrandt, or Titian, or Correggio,"
he merely means, in that odd coupling and contrasting of
names, to assert his belief in the supremacy of Strong, dear,
masculine execution over what seemed to him (to his limited
knowledge, not false inStkit) the heresy and deceit of " soft
and effeminate " execution, the " broken lines, broken
masses, and broken colours " of the art which " loses form/*
In Standing up for his ideal of art, he Stands up himself,
like a champion. " I am hid," he writes on the flyleaf of
Reynolds' s Discourses, and, in the last sentence of that " Public
Address " which was never printed, he declares : " Resent-
ment for personal injuries has had some share in this public
address, but love to my art, and zeal for my country, a much
greater." And in the last sentence of the Descriptive Catalogue,
he sums up the whole matter, so far as it concerned him,

13*

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finally, and with a " sure and certain hope " which, now that
it has been realised, so long afterwards, comes to us like
a reproach.

Shall Painting," asks Blake in his Descriptive Catalogue,
be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile repre-
sentations of merely mortal and perishing substances, and
not be, as poetry and music are, elevated into its own proper
sphere of invention and visionary conception ? No, it shall
not be so I Painting, as well as poetry and music, exists
and exults in immortal thoughts." It was to restore this
conception of art to England that Blake devoted his life.
"The Enquiry in England," he said, in his marginalia to
Reynolds, " is not whether a Man has Talents and Genius,
but whether he is Passive and Polite and a Virtuous Ass."
He says there : " Ages are all Equal, but Genius is always
above the Age." He looks on Bacon and Locke and Burke
and Reynolds as men who " mock Inspiration and Vision."
" Inspiration and Vision," he says, " was then, and now is,
and I hope will always Remain, my Element, my Eternal
Dwelling-place." " The Ancients did not mean to Impose
when they affirmed their belief in Vision and Revelation.
Plato was in Earnest. Milton was in Earnest. They believed
that God did visit Man Really and Truly." Further, " Know-
ledge of Ideal Beauty is not to be Acquired. It is born with
us. ... Man is Born Like a Garden ready Planted and Sown.
This World is too poor to produce one Seed."

What Blake meant by vision, how significantly yet
cautiously he interchanged the words " seen " and
" imagined," has been already noted in that passage of the
Descriptive Catalogue, where he answers his objectors : " The
connoisseurs and artists who have made objections to Mr.
B.'s mode of representing spirits with real bodies would
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do well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter,
the Apollo, which they admire in Greek Statues are, all of
them, representations of spiritual existences, of Gods im-
mortal, to the ordinary perishing organ of sight ; and yet
they are embodied and organised in solid marble. Mr. B.
requires the same latitude, and all is well." Then comes
the great definition, which I will not repeat : <e He who does
not imagine in Stronger and better lineaments."

" The world of imagination," he says elsewhere, " is
infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation or
vegetation is finite and temporal. There exist in that
eternal world the eternal realities of everything which we
see reflected in this vegetable gkss of nature." What is
said here, transmuted by an instinct; wholly an artist's into
a great defence of the reality of imagination in art, is a form
of the central doctrine of the mystics, formulated by Sweden-
borg in something very like Blake's language, though with
errors or hesitations which is what Blake sets himself to
point out in his marginalia to Swedenborg. As, in those
marginalia, we see Blake altering every allusion to God
into an allusion to " the Poetic Genius," so, always, we shall
find him understanding every promise of Christ, or Old
Testament prophecy, as equally translatable into terms of
the imaginative life, into terms of painting, poetry, or music.
In the rendering of vision he required above all things
that fidelity which can only be obtained through " minutely
particular " execution. " Invention depends Altogether
upon Execution or Organisation ; as that is right or wrong,
so is the Invention perfect or imperfect. Whoever is set
to Undermine the Execution of Art is set to destroy Art.
Michael Angelo's Art depends on Michael Angelo's Execu-
tion Altogether. ... He who admires Rafael Mu admire

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Rafael's Execution. He who does not admire Rafael's
Execution can not admire Rafael." Finally, tc the great
and golden rule of art as well as of life," he says in the
Descriptive Catalogue., " is this : that the more distinct, sharp,
and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of
art ; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence
of weak imagination, plagiarism, and bungling. . . . What
is it that distinguishes honesty from knavery, but the hard
and wiry line of recHtude and certainty in the actions and
intentions ? Leave out this line, and you leave out life
itself. All is chance again, and the line of the Almighty
must be drawn out upon it again, before man or beast can
exist."

In Blake's work a great fundamental conception is rarely
lacking, and the conception is not, as it has often been
asserted, a literary, but always a pi&orial, one. At times
imagination and execution are wholly untired, as in the
splendid water-colour of " Death on the Pale Horse," in
which not only every line and colour is alive with passionate
idea, the implacable and eternal joy of destruction, but also
with a realised beauty, a fully grasped invention. No
detail has been slurred in vision, or in the setting down of
the vision : the crowned old man with the sword, the
galloping horse, the pestilential figure of putrid scales and
flames below, and the wide-armed angel with the scroll
above. In the vision of " Fire " there is grandeur and,
along with it, something inadequately seen, inadequately
rendered. Flame and smoke embrace, coil, spire, swell
in bellying clouds, divide into lacerating tongues, tangle
and whirl ecstatically upward and onward, like a venomous
joy in ation, painting the air with all the colour of all the
flowers of evil. But the figures in the foreground are partly
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academic Studies, partly archaic dolls, in which only the
intention is admirable. In <c Job Confessing his Presump-
tion to God " one sees all that is great and all that is childish
in Blake's genius. I have never seen so sufficing a suggestion
of disembodied divine forces as in this whirling cloud of
angels, cast out and swept round by the wind of God's speed,
like a cascade of veined and tapering wings, out of which
ecstatic and astonished heads leap forward. But in the midst
of the wheel a fierce old man, with outstretched arms (who
is an image of God certainly not corrected out of any authentic
vision), and, below, the extinguished figure of Job's friends,
and Job, himself one of Blake's gnome-like old men with
a face of rigid awe and pointing fingers of inarticulate terror,
remain no more than 'statements, literal statements, of the
fads of the imagination. They are summarised remem-
brances of vision, not anything " imagined in stronger and
better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than the
perishing mortal eye can see."

Or, might it not be said that it is precisely through this
minute accuracy to the detail of imagination that this visionary
reality comes to seem to us unreal ? In Blake every detail
is seen with intensity, and with equal intensity. No one
detail is subordinated to another, every inch of his surface
is equally important to him ; and from this unslackening
emphasis come alike his arresting power and the defed which
leaves us, though arrested, often unconvinced. In his
most splendid things, as in "Satan exulting over Job"
and " Cain fleeing from the Grave of Abel," which are
painted on wood, as if carved or graved, with a tumult of
decorative colour, detail literally overpowers the sense of
sight, like strong sunlight, and every outline seizes and
enters into you simultaneously. At times, as in "The

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Bard of Gray," and " The Spiritual Form of Pitt " in the
National Gallery, he is mysteriously lyrical in his paint, and
creates a vague emotion out of a kind of musical colour,
which is content to suggest. Still more rarely, as in the
ripe and admirable " Canterbury Pilgrims," which is a
pifture in narrative, as like Chaucer as Chaucer himself,
but unlike any other picture, he gives us a vision of worldly
reality ; but it was of this picture that he said : " If Mr. B.'s
c Canterbury Pilgrims ' had been done by any other power
than that of the poetic visionary, it would have been as
dull as his adversary's." Pure beauty and pure terror creep
and flicker in and out of all his pi&ures, with a child's inno-
cence ; and he is unconscious of how far he is helped or
hindered, as an artist, by that burden of a divine message
which is continually upon him. He is unconscious that
with one artist the imagination may overpower the technique,
as awe overpowers the senses, while to another artist the
imagination gives new life to the technique. Blake did
not understand Rembrandt, and imagined that he hated
him ; but there are a few of his pi&ures in which Rembrandt
is Strangely suggested. In " The Adoration of the Three
Kings " and in " The Angel appearing to Zacharias " there
is a lovely depth of colour, bright in dimness, which has
something of the warmth and mySlery of Rembrandt, and
there are details in the design of ee The Three Kings "
(the door open on the pointing Star in the sky and on the
shadowy multitude below) which are as fine in conception
as anything in the Munich " Adoration of the Shepherds."
But in these, or in the almost finer " Christ in the Garden,
sustained by an Angel" (fire flames about the descending
angel, and the garden is a forest of the night), how fatal
to our enjoyment is the thought of Rembrandt 1 To Rem-

William

brandt, too, all things were visions, but they -were visions
that he saw with unflinching eyes ; he saw them with his
hands ; he saw them with the faces and forms of men, and
with the lines of earthly habitations.

And, above all, Rembrandt, all the greatest painters, saw
a picture as a whole, composed every picture consciously,
giving it unity by his way of arranging what he saw. Blake
was too humble towards vision to allow himself to compose
or arrange what he saw, and he saw in detail, with an un-
paralleled fixity and clearness. Every picture of Blake,
quite apart from its meaning to the intelligence, is built up
in detail like a piece of decoration; and, widely remote
as are both intention and result, I am inclined to think he
composed as Japanese artists compose, bit by bit, as he
saw his picture come piece by piece before him. In every
picture there is a mental idea, and there is also a pictorial
conception, working visually and apart from the mental
idea. In the greatest pictures (in the tremendous invention,
for instance, of the soldiers on Calvary casting lots for the
garments of Christ), the two are fused, with overwhelming
effect ; but it happens frequently that the two fail to unite,
and we see the picture, and also the idea, but not the idea
embodied in the picture.

Blake's passion for detail, and his refusal to subordinate
any detail for any purpose, is to be seen in all his figures,
of which the bodies seem to be copied from living Statues,
and in which the faces are wrung into masks of moods which
they are too urgent to interpret. A world of conventional
patterns, in which all natural things are artificial and yet
expressive, is peopled by giants and dolls, muscular and
foolish, in whom strength becomes an insane gesture and
beauty a formal prettiness.' Not a flower or beast has

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reality, as our eyes see it, yet every flower and beast is in-
formed by an almost human soul, not the mere vitality of
animal or vegetable, but a consciousness of its own lovely
or evil shape. His snakes are not only wonderful in their
coils and colours, but each has his individual soul, visible
in his eyes, and interpreting those coils and colours. And
every leaf, unnatural yet alive, and always a piece of decora-
tion, peers with some meaning of its own out of every
corner, not content to be forgotten, and so uneasily alive
that it draws the eye to follow it. " As poetry," he said,
" admits not a letter that is insignificant, so painting admits
not a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant much
less an insignificant blur or mark." The stones with which
Achan has been martyred live each with a separate and evil
life of its own, not less vivid and violent than the clenched
hands raised to hurl other stones ; there is menacing gesture
in the cloud of dust that rises behind them. And these
human beings and these angels, and God (sometimes an old
bowed Jew, fitted into a square or lozenge of winged heads)
are full of the.energy of a life which is betrayed by their bodies.
Sometimes they are mere child's toys, like a Lucifer of bright
baubles, painted chromatically, with pink hair and blushing
wings, hung with bursting stars that spill out animalculae.
Sometimes the whole man is a gesture and convulses the
sky ; or he runs, and the earth vanishes under him. But
the gesture devours the man also ; his force as a cipher
annihilates his very being.

In greatness of conception Blake must be compared with
the greatest among artists, but the difference between Blake
and Michelangelo is the difference between the artist in
whom imagination overpowers technique, as awe overpowers
the senses, and the artist in whom imagination gives new life

William

to technique. No one, as we have seen, was more conscious
of the identity which exists in the work of the greatest
artists between conception and execution. But in speaking
of invention and execution as equal, he is assuming, as he
came to do, the identity of art and inspiration, the sufficiency
of first thoughts in art. " Be assured," he writes to Mr.
Butts from Felpham, * e that there is not one touch in those
drawings and pictures but what came from my head and
heart in unison. ... If I were to do them over again, they
would lose as much as they gained, because they were done
in the heat of my spirit." He was an inershaustible fountain
of first thoughts, and to him first thoughts only were of
importance. The one draughtsman of the soul, he drew,
no doubt, what he saw as he saw it; but he lacked the
patience which is a part of all supreme genius. Having
seen his vision, he is in haste to record what he has seen
hastily ; and he leaves the first rough draft as it stands, not
correcting it by a deliberate seeing over again from the
beginning, and a scrupulous translation of the terms of
eternity into the terms of time. I was once showing Rodin
some facsimiles of Blake's drawings, and telling him about
Blake, I said : " He used to literally see these figures ; they
are not mere inventions." " Yes," said Rodin, " he saw
them once ; he should have seen them three or four times."
There, it seems to me, is the fundamental truth about the
art of Blake : it is a record of vision which has not been
thoroughly mastered even as vision. "No man," said
Blake, * e can improve an original invention ; nor can an
original invention exist without execution organised, de-
lineated, and articulated, either by God or man." And he
said also : " He who does not imagine in stronger and
better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his

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perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all." But
Blake's imagination is in rebellion, not only against the
limits of reality, but against the only means by which he
can make vision visible to others. And thus he allows
himself to be mastered by that against which he rebels :
that power of the hand by which art begins where vision
leaves off.

IX

NOTHING is known of Blake's life between 1809,
the date of his exhibition, and 1818, when he met
the chief friend and helper of his later years, John
Linnell. Everything leads us to believe that those nine
years were years of poverty and negleft. Between 1815
and 1817 we find him doing engraver's task-work for Flax-
man's Hestod, and for articles, probably written by Flaxman,
on Armour and Sculpture in Rees's Encyclopedia. GilchriSl
tells a Story, on the authority of Tatham, of Blake copying
the cast of the Laocoon among the Students at the Royal
Academy, and of Fuseli, then the keeper, coming up with
the just and pleasant remark that it was they who should
learn of him, not he of them. The Milton and the Jerusalem,
both dated 1804, were printed at some time during this
period. Gilchrist suggests that the reason why Blake issued
no more engraved books from his press was probably his
inability to pay for the coppet required in engraving ; and
his suggestion is confirmed in a letter to Daws on Turner,
a Norfolk antiquary, dated June 9, 1818, a few days before
the meeting with Linnell. Blake writes : " I send you a
list of the different works you have done me the honour to
inquire after. They are unprofitable enough to me, though
expensive to the buyer. Those I printed for Mr. Humphry
are a selection from the different books of such as could
be printed without the writing, though to the loss of some
of the best things ; for they, when printed perfect, accompany

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poetical personifications and a<5ts, without which poems
they never could have been executed :

j. d.

America, 18 prints folio, . . . 5 5 o

Europe, 17 do. do., . . . -550

Visions, 8 do. do., . . . . .330
Thel, 6 do. quarto, . . . .220
Songs of Innocence, 28 prints octavo, . -330
Songs of Experience, 26 do. octavo, . . -330
Urizen, 28 prints quarto, . . . 5 5 o

Milton, 50 do. do., . . . . . 10 10 o
12 large prints, size of each about 2 ft. by i \ ft.,
historical and poetical, printed in colours, each 550

The last twelve prints are unaccompanied by any writing.
The few I have printed and sold are sufficient to have gained
me great reputation as an artist, which .was the chief thing
intended. But I have never been able to produce a sufficient
number for general sale by means of a regular publisher.
It is therefore necessary to me that any person wishing
to have any or all of them should send me their order to
print them on the above terms, and I will take care that
they shall be done at least as well as any I have yet produced."
If we compare this lift with the printed lift of twenty-five
years back (see p. 38) we shall see that the prices are now half
as many guineas as they were once shillings ; in a letter
to Cumberland, nine years later, they have gone up by one,
two, or three guineas apiece, and Blake tells Cumberland
that " having none remaining of all that I had printed, I
cannot print more except at a great loss. For at the time
I printed these things I had a little house to range in. Now
I am shut up in a corner, therefore I am forced to ask a
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price for them that I can scarce expert to get from a Granger.
I am now printing a set of the Songs of Innocence and Experience
for a friend at ten guineas, which I cannot do under six
months consistent with my other work, so that I have little
hope of doing any more of such things. The last work is
a poem entitled Jerusalem, the 'Emanation of the Giant Albion,
but find that to print it will cost my time to the value of
twenty guineas. One I have finished. It contains 100
plates, but it is not likely that I shall get a customer for it." *
Gilchrist tells us, by an error which was pointed out
in the life of Palmer by his son, in 1892, that Blake met
Linnell in 1813. It was in 1818, and the first entry relating
to Blake in LinnelTs journal is dated June 24. In a letter
communicated to me by Mr. Sampson, Mr. John Linnell
junior states that his father took in October or November
1817 the greater part of a house at 38 Rathbone Place, where
he lived till the end of 1818 ; he then took a house at Ciren-
cester Place, Fitzroy Square. Mr. Linnell gives the following
extrad from his father's autobiographical notes : " At
Rathbone Place, 1818 . . . here I first became acquainted
with William Blake, to whom I paid a visit in company with
the younger Mr. Cumberland. Blake lived then in South
Molton Street, Oxford Street, second floor. We soon
became intimate, and I employed him to help me with an
engraving of my portrait of Mr. Upton, a Baptist preacher,
which he was glad to do, having scarcely enough employment
to live by at the prices he could obtain ; everything in Art
was at a low ebb then. ... I soon encountered Bkke's pecu-
liarities, and somewhat taken aback by the boldness of some
of his assertions, I never saw anything the least like madness,

i I take the text of this letter, not from Mr. Russell's edition, but from
the fuller text printed by Mr. Ellis in

William

for I never opposed him spitefully, as many did, but being
eally anxious to fathom, if possible, the amount of truth
which might be in his moSl Startling assertions, generally
met with a sufficiently rational explanation in the moSt really
friendly and conciliatory tone."

From 1818 Linnell became, in his own independent way,
the chief friend and disciple of Blake. Himself a man of
narrow but Strong individuality, he realised and accepted
Blake for what he was, worked with him and for him, intro-
duced him to rich and appreciative buyers like Sir Thomas
Lawrence, and gave him, out of his own carefully controlled
purse, a Steady price for his work, which was at least enough
for Blake to live on. There are notes in his journal of visits
to pifture-galleries together; to the Academy, the British
Gallery, the Water-Colour Exhibition, the Spring Gardens
Exhibition ; " went with Mr. Blake to see Harlow's copy
of the Transfiguration " (August 20, 1819), " went with Mr.
Blake to British Museum to see prints " (April 4 and 24,
1823). In 1820 there are notes of two visits to Drury Lane
Theatre. It was probably early in 1819 that Linnell intro-
duced Blake to his friend John Varley, the water-colour
painter and astrologer, for whom Blake did the famous
"visionary heads." A vivid sketch of the two arguing,
drawn by Linnell, is given in Mr. Story's Life of Linnell.
Varley, though an astrologer on the mathematical side, was
no visionary. He persuaded Blake to do a series of drawings,
naming historical or legendary people to him, and carefully
writing down name and date of the imaginary portraits
which Blake willingly drew, and believing, it has been said,
in the reality of Blake's visions more than Blake himself.
Cunningham, in his farcical way, tells the Story as
he may have got it from Varley, for he claims in a letter
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William

to Linnell to have " received much valuable informa-
tion from Mm." But trie process has been described, more
simply, by Varley himself in his Treatise of Zodiacal Phy-
siognomy (1828), where the " Ghost of a Flea" and the
" Constellation Cancer " are reproduced in engraving. Some
of the heads are finely symbolical, and I should have thought
the ghost of a flea, in the sketch, an invention more wholly
outside nature if I had not seen, in Rome and in London,
a man in whom it is impossible not to recognise the type,
modified to humanity, but scarcely by a longer distance than
the men from the animals in Giovanni della Porta's " Fiso-
nomia dell' Huomo."

It was in 1 820, the year in which Bkke began his vast picture
of the " Last Judgment," only finished in the year of his
death, that he did the seventeen woodcuts to Thornton's
Virgil, certainly one of his greatest, his most wholly success-
ful achievements. The book was for boys' schools, and
we find Blake returning without an effort to the childlike
mood of the Songs of Innocence and Experience. The woodcuts
have all the natural joy of those early designs, an equal
simplicity, but with what added depth, what richness, what
passionate strength ! Bkke was now engraving on wood
for the first time, and he had to invent his own way of work-
ing. Just what he did has never been better defined than
in an article which appeared in the Affan&um of January
21, 1843, orie f tne ver 7 ^ ew intelligent references to Bkke
which can be found in print between the time of his death
and the date of Gilchrist's Life. " We hold it impossible/'
says the writer, " to get a genuine work of art, unless it
come pure and unadulterated from the mind that conceived
it. ... Still more Strongly is the author's meaning marked
in the few wood-engravings which that wonderful man

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William

Blake cut himself for an edition of Thornton's Pattorals
of VirgL In token of our faith in the principle here an-
nounced, we have obtained the loan of one of Blake's original
blocks, from Mr. Linnell, who possesses the whole series,
to print, as an illustration of our argument., that, amid all
drawbacks, there exists a power in the work of the man of
genius, which no one but himself can utter fully. Side by
side we have printed a copy of an engraver's improved
version of the same subjeft. When Blake had produced
his cuts, which were, however, printed with an apology,
a shout of derision was raised by the wood-engravers.
' This will never do/ said they ; * we will show what it
ought to be ' that is, what the public taste would Hke
and they produced the above amendment ! The engravers
were quite right in their estimate of public taste ; and we
dare say many will agree with them even now : yet, to our
minds, Blake's rude work, utterly without pretension, too,
as an engraving the merest attempt of a fresh apprentice
is a work of genius ; whilst the latter is but a piece of
smooth, tame mechanism."

Blake lived at South Molton Street for seventeen years.
In 1821, " on his landlord's leaving off business, and retiring
to France," says Linnell, he removed to Fountain Court,
in the Strand, where he took the first floor of " a private
house kept by Mr. Banes, whose wife was a sister of Mrs.
Blake." Linnell tells us that he was at this time " in want
of employment," and, he says, " before I knew his distress
he had sold all his collection of old prints to Messrs. Col-
naghi and Co." Through Linnell's efforts, a donation of
25 was about the same time sent to him from the Royal
Academy.

Fountain Court (the name is still perpetuated on a metal
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slab) was called so until 1883, when the name was changed
to Southampton Buildings. It has all been pulled down and
rebuilt, but I remember it fifteen years ago, when there were
lodging-houses in it, by the side of the stage-door of Terry's
Theatre. It was a narrow slit between the Strand and the
river, and, when I knew it, was dark and comfortless, a blind
alley. Gilchrist describes the two rooms on the first floor,
front and back, the front room used as a reception-room ;
a smaller room opened out of it at the back, which was
workroom, bedroom, and kitchen in one. The side window
looked down through an opening between the houses, show-
ing the river and the hills beyond ; and Blake worked at
a table facing the window. There seems to be no doubt,
from the testimony of many friends, that Crabb Robinson's
description conveys the prejudiced view of a fastidious
person, and Palmer, roused by the word " squalor,"
wrote to Gilchrist, asserting "himself, his wife, and
his rooms, were clean and orderly ; everything was in
its place." Tatham says that "he fixed upon these
lodgings as being more congenial to his habits, as he was
very much accustomed to get out of his bed in the night
to write for hours, and return to bed for the rest of
the night." He rarely left the house, except to fetch his
pint of porter from the public-house at the corner of the
Strand, It was on one of these occasions that he is
said to have been cut by a Royal Academician whom he
had recently met in society. Had not the Royal Academy
been founded (J. T. Smith tells us in his Book for a Raixy
Day, under date 1768) by " members who had agreed to
withdraw themselves from various clubs, not only in order
to be more select as to talent, but perfecldy correct as to
gentlemanly conduft " ?

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William

It was about this time that Blake was discovered, admired,
and helped by one who has been described as " not merely
a poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a
writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante
of things delightful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinary
capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost
without rival in this or any age." This was Lamb's " kind,
light-hearted Wainewright," who in the intervals of his
Strange crimes found time to buy a fine copy of the Songs of
Innocence and to give a jaunty word of encouragement or
advertisement to Jerusalem. Palmer remembers Blake Stop-
ping before one of Wainewright' s pictures in the Academy
and saying, " Very fine."

In 1820 Blake had carried out his laSl commission from
Butts in a series of twenty-one drawings in illustration of
the Book of Job. In the following year Linnell commissioned
from him a duplicate set, and in September 1821 traced
them himself from Butts' s copies ; they were finished, and
in parts altered, by Blake. By an agreement dated March
25, 1823, Blake undertook to engrave the designs, which
were to be published by Linnell, who gave 100 for the
designs and copyright, with the promise of another 100
out of the profits on the sale. There were no profits, but
Linnell gave another 50, paying the whole sum of 150
in weekly sums of z or 3. The plates are dated March
8, 1825, but they were not published until the date given
on the cover, March 1826. GilchriSt intimates that " much
must be lost by the way " in the engraving of the water-
colour drawings ; but Mr. Russell, a better authority,
says that " marvellous as the original water-colour drawings
unquestionably were, they are in every case inferior to the
final version in the engraving." It is on these engravings
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that the fame of Blake as an artist rests most: solidly ; invention
and execution are here, as he declared that they must always
be in great art, equal ; imagination at its highest here finds
adequate expression, without even the lovely strangeness
of a defect. They have been finally praised and defined by
Rossetti, in the pages contributed to Gilchrist's Life (i. 3 30-
335), of which Mr. Swinburne has said, with little exaggera-
tion, that "Blake himself, had he undertaken to write
notes on his designs, must have done them less justice than
this."

Before Blake had finished engraving the designs to
" Job " he had already begun a new series of illustrations
to Dante, also a commission from linnell ; and, with that
passionate conscientiousness which was part of the founda-
tion of his genius, he set to work to learn enough Italian
to be able to follow the original with the help of Gary's
translation. Linnell not only let Blake do the work he
wanted to do, paying him for it as he did it, but he took him
to see people whom it might be useful for him to know, such
as the Aders, who had a house full of books and pictures,
and who entertained artists and men of letters. Mrs. Aders
had a small amateur talent of her own for painting, and
from a letter of Carlyle's, which is preserved among the
Crabb Robinson papers, seems to have had literary knowledge
as well. " Has not Mrs. Aders (the lady who lent me Wil-
helm Meifter) great skill in such things ? " he asks in a letter
full of minute inquiries into German novels. Lamb and
Coleridge went to the house, and it was there that Crabb
Robinson met Blake in December 1825. Mr. Story, in his
Life of Linnell, tells us that one of LinndTs ' most vivid
recollections of those days was of hearing Crabb Robinson
recite Blake's poem, ' The Tiger,' before a distinguished

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company gathered at Mrs. Aders's table. It was a most
impressive performance." We find Blake afterwards at
a supper-party at Crabb Robinson's, with Linnell, who notes
in his journal going with Blake to Lady Ford's, to see her
pictures ; in 1820 we find him at Lady Caroline Lamb's.

Along with this general society Blake now gathered
about him a certain number of friends and disciples, Linnell
being the Steadiest friend, and Samuel Palmer, Edward
Calvert, and George Richmond the chief disciples. To
these mut be added, in 1826, Frederick Tatham, a young
sculptor, who was to be the betrayer among the disciples.
They called Blake's house " the House of the Interpreter,"
and m speaking of it afterwards speak of it always as of
holy ground. Thus we hear of Richmond, finding his
invention flag, going to seek counsel, and how Blake, who
was sitting at tea with his wife, turned to her and said :
" What do we do, Kate, when the visions forsake us ? "
" We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake." It is Richmond
who records a profoundly significant saying of Blake : "I
can look at a knot in a piece of wood till I am frightened
at it." Palmer tells us that Blake and his wife would look
into the fire together and draw the figures they saw there,
hers quite unlike his, his often terrible. On Palmer's first
meeting with Blake, on O&ober 9, 1824, he tells us how
Blake fixed his eyes upon him and said : " Do you work
with fear and trembling ? " " Yes, indeed," was the reply.
" Then," said Blake, " you'll do."

The friends often met at HampStead, where Linnell had,
in 1824, taken Collins's Farm, at North End, now again
known by its old name of " Wyldes." Blake disliked
the air of Hampftead, which he said always made him ill ;
but he often went there to see Linnell, and loved the aspet
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from his cottage, and to sit and hear Mrs. Ubnell sing Scotch
songs, and would sometimes himself sing his own songs
to tunes of his own making. The children loved Timi^ and
would watch for him as he came, generally on foot, and
one of them says that she remembers " the cold winter nights
when Blake was wrapped up in an old shawl by Mrs, Linnell,
and sent on his homeward way, with the servant, lantern
in hand, lighting him across the heath to the main road."
It is Palmer's son who reports it, and he adds : " It is a
matter of regret that the record of these meetings and walks
and conversations is so imperfect, for in the words of one
of Blake's disciples, to walk with him was like c walking
with the Prophet Isaiah.' " Once when the Palmers were
Staying at Shoreham, the whole party went down into the
country in a carrier's van drawn by eight horses : Calvert
tells the Story, with picturesque details of Blake's second-
sight, and of the hunt with lanterns in Shoreham CaStle after
a ghoSt, who turned out to be a snail tapping on the broken
glass of the window.

From the end of 1825 Blake's health began to fail, and moSt
of his letters to Linnell contain apologies for not coming
to HampStead, as he is in bed, or is suffering from a cold
in the Stomach. It was the beginning of that sickness which
killed him, described as the mixing of the gall with the
blood. He worked persistently, whether he was well or
ill at the Dante drawings, which he made in a folio book
given him by Linnell. There were a hundred pages in the
book, and he did a drawing on every page, some completely
finished, some a mere outline ; of these he had only engraved
seven at the time of his death. He sat propped up in bed,
at work on his drawings, saying, " Dante goes on the better,
which is all I care about." In a letter to George Cumberland,

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William

on April 12, 1827, he writes : <f I have been very near the
gates of death, and have returned very weak and an old
man, feeble and tottering, but not in the spirit and life, not
in the real man, the imagination, which liveth for ever."
And indeed there is no sign of age or weakness in these
last great inventions of a dying man. " Flaxman is gone,"
he adds, " and we must soon follow, every one to his own
eternal house, leaving the delusive Goddess Nature to her
laws, to get into freedom from all law of the members,
into the mind, in which every one is king and priest in his
own house. God send it so on earth, as it is in heaven."
Blake died on August 12, 1827, and the ecstasy of his
death has been recorded by many witnesses. Tatham tells
us how, as he put the finishing touches to a design of " The
Ancient of Days " which he had been colouring for him,
he " threw it down suddenly and said : * Kate, you have
been a good wife ; I will draw your portrait.' She sat
near his bed, and he made a drawing which, though not a
likeness, is finely touched and expressed. He then threw
that down, after having drawn for an hour, and began to
sing Hallelujahs and songs of joy and triumph which Mrs.
Blake described as being truly sublime in music and in verse,"
Smith tells us that he said to his wife, as she stood to hear
him, " My beloved, they are not mine, no, they are not
mine." And a friend quoted by Gilchrist says : " He
died on Sunday night, at six o'clock, in a most glorious
manner. He said he was going to that country he had all
his life wished to see, and expressed himself happy, hoping
for salvation through Jesus Christ. Just before he died
his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened, and he
burst out into singing of the things he saw in heaven."
<c Perhaps," he had written not long before, " and I verily

William

believe it, every death is an improvement of the State of
the departed."

Blake was buried in Bunhill Fields, where all his family
had been buried before him, but with the rites of the Church
of England, and on August 17 his body was followed to
the grave by Calvert, Richmond, Tatham, and Tatham's
brother, a clergyman. The burial register reads : " Aug.
17 1827. William Blake. Age, 69 years. Brought
from Fountain Court, Strand. Grave, 9 feet ; E. & W.
77 : N. & S. 32. i9/-." The grave, being a " common
grave," was used again, and the bones scattered ; and this
was the world's last indignity against William Blake.

Tatham tells us that, during a marriage of forty-five years,
Mrs. Blake had never been separated from her husband
* c save for a period that would make altogether about five
weeks." He does not remind us, as Mr. Swinburne, on
the authority of Seymour Kirkup, reminds us, of Mrs,
Blake's one complaint, that her husband was incessantly
away "in Paradise." Tatham adds: "After the death
of her husband she resided for some time with the author
of this, whose domestic arrangements were entirely under-
taken by her, until such changes took place that rendered
it impossible for her Strength to continue in this voluntary
office of sincere affection and regard." Before going to
Tatham's she had spent nine months at LinnelFs house in
Cirencester Place, only leaving it in the summer of 1828,
when Linnell let the house. After leaving Tatham she took
lodgings in 17 Upper Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, where
she died at half-past seven on the morning of Oober 18,
1831, four years after the death of her husband, and within
three months of his age. Tatham says : " Her age not
being known but by calculation, sixty-five years were placed

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upon her coffin," and in the burial register at Bunhill Fields
we read: " Oft. 23, 1831. Catherine Sophia Blake.
Age, 65 yrs. Brought from Upper Charlotte Street, Fitzroy
Square. Grave, 12 feet; E. & W. 7 : N. & S. 31, 32.
i 55." She was born April 24, 1762, and was thus aged
sixty-nine years and six months.

Mr. Swinburne tells us, on the authority of Seymour
Kirkup, that, after Blake's death, a gift of 100 was sent to
his widow by the Princess Sophia, which she gratefully re-
turned, as not being in actual need of it. Many friends
bought copies of Blake's engraved books, some of which
Mrs. Blake coloured, with the help of Tatham. After her
death all the plates and manuscripts passed into Tatham's
hands, In his memoir Tatham says that Blake on his
death-bed " spoke of the writer of this as a likely person
to become the manager " of Mrs. Blake's affairs, and he
says that Mrs. Blake bequeathed to him " all of his works
that remained unsold at his death, being writings, paintings,
and a very great number of copperplates, of whom im-
pressions may be obtained." Linnell says that Tatham
never showed anything in proof of his assertion that they
had been left to him. Tatham had passed through various
religious phases, and from being a Baptist, had become
an " angel " of the Irvingite Church. He is supposed to
have destroyed the whole of the manuscripts and drawings
in his possession on account of religious scruples ; and
in the life of Calvert by his son we read : " Edward
Calvert, fearing some fatal denouement, went to Tatham
and implored him to reconsider the matter and spare the
good man's precious work ; notwithstanding which, blocks,
plates, drawings, and MSS., I understand, were destroyed."

Such is the received story, but is it strictly true ? Did
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Tatham really destroy these manuscripts for religious reasons,
or did he keep them and surreptitiously sell them for reasons
of quite another kind ? In the Rossetti Papers there is a
letter from Tatham to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, dated Nov. 6,
18^2, in which he says : "I have sold Mr. Blake's works
for thirty years " ; and a footnote to Dr. Garnett's mono-
graph on Blake in the Portfolio of 1895 relates a visit from
Tatham which took place about 1860. Dr. Garnert told
me that Tatham had said, without giving any explanation,
that he had destroyed some of Blake's manuscripts and kept
others by him, which he had sold from time to time. Is
there not therefore a possibility that some of these lost
manuscripts may Still exist ? whether or not they may turn
out to be, as Crabb Robinson tells us that Blake told him,
" six or seven epic poems as long as Homer, and twenty
tragedies as long as Macbeth"

X

THERE are people who Still ask seriously if Blake
was mad. If the mind of Lord Macaulay is the
one and only type of sanity, then Blake was mad.
If imagination, and ecstasy, and disregard of worldly things,
and absorption in the inner world of the mind, and a literal
belief in those things which the whole " Christian com-
munity " professes from the tip of its tongue ; if these are
signs and suspicions of madness, then Blake was certainly
mad. His place is where he saw Teresa, among " the
gentle souls who guide the great wine-press of Love " ; and,
like her, he was " drunk with intelle&ual vision." That
drunkenness illuminated him during his whole life, yet
without incapacitating him from any needful attention
to things by the way. He lived in poverty because he did
not need riches ; but he died without leaving a debt. He
was a Steady, not a fitful worker, and his wife said of him
that she never saw his hands Still unless he was reading
or asleep. He was gentle and sudden ; his whole nature
was in a Steady heat which could blaze at any moment into
a flame. " A saint amongst the infidels and a heretic with
the orthodox," he has been described by one who knew
him beSt in his later years, John Linnell ; and Palmer has
said of him : " His love of art was so great that he would
see nothing but art in anything he loved ; and so, as he
loved the ApoStles and their divine Head (for so I believe
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he did), he muSl needs say that they were all artists." " When
opposed by the superstitious, the crafty, or the proud,"
says Linnell again, " he outraged all common-sense and
rationality by the opinions he advanced " ; and Palmer
gives an instance of it : " Being irritated by the exclusively
scientific talk at a friend's house, which talk had turned on
the vaSlness of space, he cried out, ' It is false. I walked
the other evening to the end of the heath, and touched the
sky with my finger.* "

It was of the essence of Blake's sanity that he could always
touch the sky with his finger. " To justify the soul's
frequent joy in what cannot be defined to the intellectual
part, or to calculation " : that, which is Walt Whitman's
definition of his own aim, defines Blake's. Where others
doubted he knew ; and he saw where others looked vaguely
into the darkness. He saw so much further than others
into what we call reality, that others doubted his report,
not being able to check it for themselves ; and when he

saw truth naked he did not turn aside his eyes. Nor had he

the common notion of what truth is, or why it is to be
regarded. He said : " When I tell a 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 his criterion of
truth was the inward certainty of inStinft or intuition, not
the outward certainty of fact. "God forbid," he said,
" that Truth should be confined to mathematical demon-
stration. He who does not know Truth at sight is un-
worthy of her notice." And he said : " Error is created,
truth is eternal. Error or creation will be burned up, and
then, not till then, truth or eternity will appear. It is burned
up the moment men cease to behold it."
It was this private certainty in regard to truth and all

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things that Bkke shared with the greatest minds of the world,
and men doubted him partly because he was content to possess
that certainty and had no desire to use it for any pra&ical
purpose, leat of all to convince others. He asked to be
believed when he spoke, told the truth, and was not concerned
with argument or experiment, which seemed to him ways
of evasion. He said :

* c It is easy to acknowledge a man to be great and good, while we
Derogate from him in the trifles and small articles of that goodness,
Those alone are his friends who admire his minutest powers."

He spoke naturally in terms of wisdom, and made no explana-
tions, bridged none of the gulfs which it seemed to him
so easy to fly over. Thus when he said that Ossian and
Rowley were authentic, and that what Macpherson and
Chatterton said was ancient was so, he did not mean it in a
stri&ly literal sense, but in the sense in which ancient meant
authentic : true to ancient truth. Is a thing true as poetry ?
then it is true in the minutest because the most essential
sense. On the other hand, in saying that part of Words-
worth's Preface was written by another hand, he was merely
expressing in a bold figure a sane critical opinion. Is a
thing false among many true things ? then it is not the
true man who is writing it, but some false se&ion of his
brain. It may be dangerous praftically to judge all things
at an inner tribunal ; but it is only by such judgments that
truth moves.

And truth has moved, or we have. After Zarathuftra,
Jerusalem no longer seems a wild heresy. People were
frightened because they were told that Blake was mad,
or a blasphemer. Nietzsche, who has cleared away so
many obstructions from thought, has shamed us from hiding

158-

William

behind these treacherous and unavailing defences. We have
come to realise, what Rossetti pointed out long ago, that,
as a poet, Blake's charaaeriStic is above all things that of
"jpure perfection in writing verse" We no longer praise
his _ painting for its qualities as literature, or forget that his
design has greatness as design. And of that unique creation
of an art out of the mingling of many arts which we see in
the " iUuminated printing " of the engraved hooks, we have
come to realise what Palmer meant when he said long ago :
"As a pidure has been said to be something between a
thing and a thought, so, in some of these type books over
which Blake had long brooded with his brooding of fire,
the very paper seems to come to life as you gaze upon it
not with a mortal life, but an indeStruftible life." And
we have come to realise what Blake meant by the humble
and arrogant things which he said about himself. "I
doubt not yet," he writes in one of those gaieties of speech
which illuminate his letters, " to make a figure in the great
dance of life that shall amuse the spe&ators in the sky.'*
If there are indeed spectators there, amused by our motions,
what dancer among us are they more likely to have approved
than this joyous, untired, and undiftra&ed dancer to the
eternal rhythm ?

END

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