Chapter IV: Introduction: I (3)

It is for this more than for any other error that Swedenborgs 'memorable relations' are tossed back to him as 'memorable fancies,' in a solemn parody of his own manner; that his mill and vault and cave are taken from him and used against him; and that one once conversant with his heaven, and now weary of it, 'walks among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torments and insanity.' Blake shows us the energy of virtue breaking the Ten Commandments, and declares: 'Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.' Speaking through 'the voice of the Devil,' he proclaims that 'Energy is eternal delight,' and that 'Everything that lives is holy.' And, in a last flaming paradox, still mocking the manner of the analyst of heaven and hell, he bids us: 'Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together, in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well. I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no.' The Bible of Hell is no doubt the Bible of Blake's new gospel, in which contraries are equally true. We may piece it together out of many fragments, of which the first perhaps is the sentence standing by itself at the bottom of the page: 'One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression.'

_The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ is loud with 'the clangor of the Arrows of Intellect,' each of the 'Proverbs of Hell' is a jewel of concentrated wisdom, the whole book is Blake's clearest and most vital statement of his new, his reawakened belief; it contains, as I have intimated, all Nietzsche; yet something restless, disturbed, uncouth, has come violently into this mind and art, wrenching it beyond all known limits, or setting alight in it an illuminating, devouring, and unquenchable flame. In common with Swedenborg, Blake is a mystic who enters into no tradition, such as that tradition of the Catholic Church which has a liturgy awaiting dreams. For Saint John of the Cross and for Saint Teresa the words of the vision are already there, perfectly translating ecstasy into familiar speech; they have but to look and to speak. But to Blake, as to Swedenborg, no tradition is sufficiently a matter of literal belief to be at hand with its forms; new forms have to be made, and something of the crudity of Swedenborg comes over him in his rejection of the compromise of mortal imagery.

_The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ may be called or not called a Prophetic Book, in the strict sense; with _The Visions of the Daughters of Albion_, engraved at Lambeth in 1793, the series perhaps more literally begins. Here the fine masculine prose of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ has given place to a metre vaguer than the metre of _The Book of Thel_, and to a substance from which the savor has not yet gone of the _Songs of Innocence_, in such lines as:

'The new washed lamb tinged with the village smoke, and the bright swan By the red earth of our immortal river.'

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

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

It is the gospel of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, and, as that proclaimed liberty for the mind, so this, with abundant rhetoric, but with vehement conviction, proclaims liberty for the body. In form it is still clear, its eloquence and imagery are partly biblical, and have little suggestion of the manner of the later Prophetic Books.

_America_, written in the same year, in the same measure as the _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_, is the most vehement, wild, and whirling of all Blake's prophecies. It is a prophecy of revolution, and it takes the revolt of America against England both literally and symbolically, with names of 'Washington, Franklin, Paine and Warren, Gates, Hancock and Green,' side by side with Orc and the Angel of Albion; it preaches every form of bodily and spiritual liberty in the terms of contemporary events, Boston's Angel, London's Guardian, and the like, in the midst of cataclysms of all nature, fires and thunders temporal and eternal. The world for a time is given into the power of Orc, unrestrained desire, which is to bring freedom through revolution and the destroying of the bonds of good and evil. He is called 'Antichrist, Hater of Dignities, lover of wild rebellion, and transgressor of God's Law.' He is the Satan of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, and he also proclaims:

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

As, in that book, Blake had seen 'the fiery limbs, the flaming hair' of the son of fire 'spurning the clouds written with curses, stamping the stony law to dust'; so, here, he hears the voice of Orc proclaiming:

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

Liberty comes in like a flood bursting all barriers:

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

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

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

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

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

Here the myth, though it is present throughout, is an undercurrent, and the crying of the message is what is chiefly heard. In _Europe_ (1794), which is written in lines broken up into frequent but not very significant irregularities, short lines alternating with long ones, in the manner of an irregular ode, the mythology is like a net or spiders web over the whole text. Names not used elsewhere, or not in the same form, are found: Manatha-Varcyon, Thiralatha, who in _Europe_ is Diralada. The whole poem is an allegory of the sleep of Nature during the eighteen hundred years of the Christian era, under bonds of narrow religions and barren moralities and tyrannous laws, and of the awakening to forgotten joy, when 'Nature felt through all her pores the enormous revelry,' and the fiery spirit of Ore, beholding the morning in the east, shot to the earth:

'And in the vineyards of red France appear'd the light of his fury.'

It is another hymn of revolution, but this time an awakening more wholly mental, with only occasional contemporary allusions like that of the judge in Westminster whose wig grows to his scalp, and who is seen 'groveling along Great George Street through the Park gate.' 'Howlings and hissings, shrieks and groans, and voices of despair,' are heard throughout; we see thought change the infinite to a serpent:

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

The serpent temple shadows the whole island:

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

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

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

_The First Book of Urizen_ (1794) is a myth, shadowed in dark symbols, of the creation of mortal life and its severing from eternity; the birth of Time out of the void and self-contemplating shadow' of unimaginative Reason; the creation of the senses, each a limiting of eternity, and the closing of the tent of heavenly knowledge, so that Time and the creatures of Time behold eternity no more. We see the birth of Pity and of Desire, woman the shadow and desire the child of man. Reason despairs as it realizes that life lives upon death, and the cold pity of its despair forms into a chill shadow, which follows it like a spider's web, and freezes into the net of religion, or the restraint of the activities. Under this net the senses shrink inwards, and that creation which is 'the body of our death' and our stationing in time and space is finished:

'Six days they shrank up from existence, And on the seventh they rested And they bless'd the seventh day, in sick hope, And forgot their eternal life.'

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

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

But Fuzon, the spirit of fire, forsook the 'pendulous earth' with those children of Urizen who would still follow him.

Here, crystallized in the form of a myth, we see many of Blake's fundamental ideas. Some of them we have seen under other forms, as statement rather than as image, in _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ and _There is no Natural Religion._ We shall see them again, developed, elaborated, branching out into infinite side-issues, multiplying upon themselves, in the later Prophetic Books, partly as myth, partly as statement; we shall see them in many of the lyrical poems, transformed into song, but still never varying in their message; and we shall see them, in the polemical prose of all the remaining fragments, and in the private letters, and in the annotations of Swedenborg, and in Crabb Robinson's records of conversations. The _Book of Urizen_ is a sort of nucleus, the germ of a system.

Next to the _Book of Urizen_, if we may judge from the manner of its engraving, came _The Song of Los_ (1795), written in a manner of vivid declamation, the lines now lengthening, now shrinking, without fixed beat or measure. It is the song of Time, 'the Eternal Prophet,' and tells the course of inspiration as it passes from east to west, 'abstract philosophy' in Brahma, 'forms of dark delusion' to Moses on Mount Sinai, the mount of law; 'a gospel from wretched Theotormon' (distressed human love and pity) to Jesus, 'a man of sorrows'; the 'loose Bible' of Mahomet, setting free the senses,'Odin's 'code of war.'

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

'The vast of Nature' shrinks up before the 'shrunken eyes' of men, till it is finally enclosed in the 'philosophy of the five senses,' the philosophy of Newton and Locke. 'The Kings of Asia,' the cruelties of the heathen, the ancient powers of evil, call on 'famine from the heath, pestilence from the fen:'

'To turn man from his path, To restrain the child from the womb, To cut off the bread from the city, That the remnant may learn to obey, That the pride of the heart may fail, That the lust of the eyes may be quench'd, That the delicate ear in its infancy May be dull'd, and the nostrils clos'd up: To teach mortal worms the path That leads from the gates of the grave.'

But, in the darkness of their 'ancient woven dens,' they are startled by 'the thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of Orc'; and at their cry Urizen comes forth to meet and challenge the liberating spirit; he thunders against the pillar of fire that rises out of the darkness of Europe; and at the clash of their mutual onset 'the Grave shrieks aloud.' But 'Urizen wept,' the cold pity of reason which, as we have seen in the book named after him, freezes into nets of religion, 'twisted like to the human brain.'

_The Book of Los_ (also dated 1795) is written in the short lines of _Urizen_ and _Ahania_, a metre following a fixed, insistent beat, as of Los's hammer on his anvil. It begins with the lament of 'Eno, aged Mother,' over the liberty of old times:

'O Times remote! When Love and Joy were adoration, And none impure were deem'd. Not Eyeless Covet, Nor Thin-lip'd Envy, Nor Bristled Wrath, Nor Curled Wantonness;'

None of these, that is, yet turned to evil, but still unfallen energies. At this, flames of desire break out, 'living, intelligent,' and Los, the spirit of Inspiration, divides the flames, freezes them into solid darkness, and is imprisoned by them, and escapes, only in terror, and falls through ages into the void ('Truth has bounds, Error none'), until he has organized the void and brought into it a light which makes visible the form of the void. He sees it as the backbone of Urizen, the bony outlines of reason, and then begins, for the first time in the Prophetic Books, that building of furnaces, and wielding of hammer and anvil of which we are to hear so much in _Jerusalem._ He forges the sun, and chains cold intellect to vital heat, from whose torments:

'A twin Was completed, a Human Illusion In darkness and deep clouds involved.'

In _The Book of Los_ almost all relationship to poetry has vanished; the myth is cloudier and more abstract. Scarcely less so is _The Book of Ahania_ (1795), written in the same short lines, hut in a manner occasionally more concrete and realizable. Like _Urizen_, it is almost all myth. It follows Fuzon, 'son of Urizen's silent burnings,' in his fiery revolt against:

'This cloudy God seated on waters, Now seen, now obscured, king of Sorrows.'

From the stricken and divided Urizen is born Ahania ('so name his parted soul'), who is 'his invisible lust,' whom he loves, hides, and calls Sin.

'She fell down, a faint shadow wandering, In chaos, and circling dark Urizen, As the moon anguished circles the earth, Hopeless, abhorred, a death shadow, Unseen, unbodied, unknown, The mother of Pestilence.'

But Urizen, recovering his strength, seizes the bright son of fire, his energy or passion, and nails him to the dark 'religious' 'Tree of Mystery,' from under whose shade comes the voice of Ahania, 'weeping upon the void,' lamenting her lost joys of love, and the days when:

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

In _The Four Zoas_ Ahania is called 'the feminine indolent bliss, the indulgent self of weariness.' 'One final glimpse,' says Mr. Swinburne, 'we may take of Ahania after her division--the love of God, as it were, parted from God, impotent therefore and a shadow, if not rather a plague and blight; mercy severed from justice, and thus made a worse thing than useless.' And her lament ends in this despair:

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

The mythology, of which parts are developed in each of these books, is thrown together, in something more approaching a whole, hut without apparent cohesion or consistency, in _The Four Zoas_, which probably dates from 1797 and which exists in seventy sheets of manuscript, of uncertain order, almost certainly in an unfinished state, perhaps never intended for publication, but rather as a storehouse of ideas. This manuscript, much altered, arranged in a conjectural order, and printed with extreme incorrectness, was published by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats in the third volume of their book on Blake, under the first, rejected, title of _Vala._[3] They describe it as being in itself a sort of compound of all Blake's other books, except _Milton_ and _Jerusalem_, which are enriched by scraps taken from _Vala_, but are not summarized in it. In the uncertain state in which we have it, it is impossible to take it as a wholly authentic text; but it is both full of incidental beauty and of considerable assistance in unravelling many of the mysteries in _Milton_ and _Jerusalem_, the books written at Felpham, both dated 1804, in which we find the final development of the myth, or as much of that final development as has come to us in the absence of the manuscripts destroyed or disposed of by Tatham. Those two books indeed seem to presuppose in their readers an acquaintance with many matters told or explained in this, from which passages are taken bodily, but with little apparent method. As it stands, _Vala_ is much more of a poem than either _Milton_ or _Jerusalem_; the cipher comes in at times, but between there are broad spaces of cloudy but not wholly unlighted imagery. Blake still remembers that he is writing a poem, earthly beauty is still divine beauty to him, and the message is not yet so stringent as to forbid all lingering by the way.

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

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

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

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

There are descriptions of feasts, of flames, of last judgments, of the new Eden, which are full of color and splendor, passing without warning into the 'material sublime' of Fuseli, as in the picture of Urizen 'stonied upon his throne' in the eighth 'Night.' In the passages which we possess in the earlier and later version we see the myth of Blake gradually crystallizing, the transposition of every intelligible symbol into the secret cipher. Thus we find 'Mount Gilead' changed into 'Mount Snowdon,' 'Beth Peor' into 'Cosway Vale,' and a plain image such as this:

'The Mountain called out to the Mountain, Awake, oh brother Mountain,'

Is translated backwards into:

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

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

VI

The first statement by Blake of his aims and principles in art is to be found in some letters to George Cumberland and to Dr. Trusler, contained in the Cumberland Papers in the British Museum. These letters were first printed by Dr. Garnett in the _Hampstead Annual_ of 1903, but with many mistakes and omissions.[4] I have recopied from the originals the text of such letters as I quote. It appears that in the year 1799 Blake undertook, at the suggestion of Cumberland, to do some drawings for a book by Dr. Trusler, a sort of quack writer and publisher, who may be perhaps sufficiently defined by the quotation of the title of one of his books, which is _The Way to be Rich and Respectable._ On August 16, Blake writes to say: 'I find more and more that my Style of Designing is a Species by itself, and in this which I send you have been compelled by my Genius or Angel to follow where he led; if I were to act otherwise it would not fulfill the purpose for which alone I live, which is in conjunction with such men as my friend Cumberland to renew the lost Art of the Greeks.' He tells him that he has attempted to 'follow his Dictate' every morning for a fortnight, but 'it was out of my power!' He then describes what he has done, and says: 'If you approve of my manner, and it is agreeable to you, I would rather Paint Pictures in oil of the same dimensions than make Drawings, and on the same terms. By this means you will have a number of Cabinet pictures, which I flatter myself will not be unworthy of a Scholar of Rembrandt and Teniers, whom I have Studied no less than Rafael and Michaelangelo.' The next letter, which I will give in full, for it is a document of great importance, is dated a week later, and the nature of the reply which it answers can be gathered from Blake's comment on the matter to Cumberland, three days later still. 'I have made him,' he says, 'a Drawing in my best manner: he has sent it back with a Letter full of Criticisms, in which he says It accords not with his Intentions, which are, to Reject all Fancy from his Work. How far he expects to please, I cannot tell. But as I cannot paint Dirty rags and old Shoes where I ought to place Naked Beauty or simple ornament, I despair of ever pleasing one Class of Men.' 'I could not help smiling,' he says later, 'at the difference between the doctrines of Dr. Trusler and those of Christ.' Here, then, is the letter in which Blake accounts for himself to the quack doctor (who has docketed it: 'Blake, Dimd with superstition'), as if to posterity:--

REVD. SIR,

I really am sorry that you are fallen out with the Spiritual World, Especially if I should have to answer for it. I feel very sorry that your Ideas and Mine on Moral Painting differ so much as to have made you angry with my method of study. If I am wrong I am wrong in good company. I had hoped your plan comprehended All Species of this Art, and Especially that you would not regret that Species which gives Existence to Every other, namely, Visions of Eternity. You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that what is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Ideot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considered what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Esop, Homer, Plato.

But as you have favored me with your remarks on my Design, permit me in return to defend it against a mistaken one, which is, That I have supposed Malevolence without a Cause. Is not Merit in one a Cause of Envy in another, and Serenity and Happiness and Beauty a Cause of Malevolence? But Want of Money and the Distress of a Thief can never be alleged as the Cause of his Thievery, for many honest people endure greater hardships with Fortitude. We must therefore seek the Cause elsewhere than in the want of Money, for that is the Miser's passion, not the Thief's.

I have therefore proved your Reasonings I'll proportioned, which you can never prove my figures to be. They are those of Michael Angelo, Rafael and the Antique, and of the best living Models. I perceive that your Eye is perverted by Caricature Prints, which ought not to abound so much as they do. Fun I love, but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than Fun, and Happiness is better than Mirth. I feel that a Man may be happy in This World, and I know that This World is a World of Imagination and Vision. I see Everything I paint In This World: but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule and Deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a Man is, so he sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly Mistake when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination, and I feel Flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil, and Milton in so high a rank of Art? Why is the Bible more Entertaining and Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation, and but mediately to the Understanding or Reason? Such is True Painting, and such was alone valued by the Greeks and the best modern Artists. Consider what Lord Bacon says--'Sense sends over to Imagination before Reason have judged, and Reason sends over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted.' See _Advancement of Learning_, Part 2, P. 47, of first Edition.

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

To Engrave after another Painter is infinitely more laborious than to Engrave one's own Inventions. And of the size you require my price has been Thirty Guineas, and I cannot afford to do it for less. I had Twelve for the Head I sent you as a Specimen; but after my own designs I could do at least Six times the quantity of labour in the same time, which will account for the difference in price, as also that Chalk Engraving is at least Six times as laborious as Aqua tinta. I have no objection to Engraving after another Artist. Engraving is the profession I was apprenticed to, and I should never have attempted to live by any thing else If orders had not come in for my Designs and Paintings, which I have the pleasure to tell you are Increasing Every Day. Thus If I am a Painter it is not to be attributed to Seeking after. But I am contented whether I live by Painting or Engraving.

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

WILLIAM BLAKE.

13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,

_August_ 23, 1799.

Blake tells Cumberland the whole story quite cheerfully, and ends with these significant words, full of patience, courtesy, and sad humour: 'As to Myself, about whom you are so kindly Interested, I live by Miracle. I am Painting small Pictures from the Bible. For as to Engraving, in which art I cannot reproach myself with any neglect, yet I am laid by in a corner as if I did not exist, and since my Youngs Night Thoughts have been published, even Johnson and Fuseli have discarded my Graver. But as I know that He who works and has his health cannot starve, I laugh at Fortune and Go on and on. I think I foresee better Things than I have ever seen. My Work pleases my employer, and I have an order for Fifty small Pictures at One Guinea each, which is something better than mere copying after another artist. But above all I feel myself happy and contented, let what will come. Having passed now near twenty years in ups and downs, I am used to them, and perhaps a little practice in them may turn out to benefit. It is now exactly Twenty years since I was upon the ocean of business, and tho I laugh at Fortune, I am persuaded that She Alone is the Governor of Worldly Riches, and when it is Fit She will call on me. Till then I wait with Patience, in hopes that She is busied among my Friends.'

The employer is, no doubt, Mr. Butts, for whom Blake had already begun to work: we know some of the 'frescoes' and color-prints which belong to this time; among them, or only just after, the incomparable 'Crucifixion,' in which the soldiers cast lots in the foreground and the crosses are seen from the back, against a stormy sky and lances like Tintoretto's. But it was also the time of all but the latest Prophetic Books (or of all but the latest of those left to us), and we may pause here for a moment to consider some of the qualities that Blake was by this time fully displaying in his linear and colored inventions and 'Visions of Eternity.'

It is by his energy and nobility of creation that Blake takes rank among great artists, in a place apart from those who have been content to study, to observe, and to copy. His invention of living form is like nature's, unintermittent, but without the measure and order of nature, and without complete command over the material out of which it creates. In his youth he had sought after prints of such inventive work as especially appealed to him, Michelangelo, Raphael, Dürer; it is possible that, having had 'very early in life the ordinary opportunities,' as Dr. Malkin puts it, 'of seeing pictures in the houses of noblemen and gentlemen, and in the king's palaces,' he had seen either pictures, or prints after pictures, of the Italian Primitives, whose attitudes and composition he at times suggests; and, to the end, he worked with Dürer's 'Melancholia' on his work-table and Michelangelo's designs on his walls. It not infrequently happened that a memory of form created by one of these great draughtsmen presented itself as a sort of short cut to the statement of the form which he was seeing or creating in his own imagination. A Devil's Advocate has pointed out 'plagiarisms' in Blake's design, and would dismiss in consequence his reputation for originality. Blake had not sufficient mastery of technique to be always wholly original in design; and it is to his dependence on a technique not as flexible as his imagination was intense that we must attribute what is unsatisfying in such remarkable inventions as 'The House of Death' (Milton's lazar-house) in the Print Doom of the British Museum. Its appeal to the imagination is partly in spite of what is 'organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.' Death is a version of the Ancient of Days and of Urizen, only his eyes are turned to blind terror and his beard to forked flame; Despair, a statue of greenish bronze, is the Scofield of _Jerusalem_; the limbs and faces rigid with agony are types of strength and symbols of pain. Yet even here there is creation, there is the energy of life, there is a spiritual awe. And wherever Blake works freely, as in the regions of the Prophetic Books, wholly outside time and space, appropriate form multiplies under his creating hand, as it weaves a new creation of worlds and of spirits, monstrous and angelical.

Blake distinguished, as all great imaginative artists have distinguished, between allegory, which is but realism's excuse for existence, and symbol, which is none of the 'daughters of Memory,' but itself vision or inspiration. He wrote in the MS. book: 'Vision or imagination is a representation of what actually exists, really and unchangeably. Fable or allegory is formed by the daughters of Memory.' And thus in the designs which accompany the text of his Prophetic Books there is rarely the mere illustration of those pages. He does not copy in line what he has said in words, or explain in words what he has rendered in line; a creation probably contemporary is going on, and words and lines render between them, the one to the eyes, the other to the mind, the same image of spiritual things, apprehended by different organs of perception.

And so in his pictures, what he gives us is not a picture after a mental idea; it is the literal delineation of an imaginative vision, of a conception of the imagination. He wrote: 'If you have not nature before you for every touch, you cannot paint portrait; and if you have nature before you at all, you cannot paint history.' There is a water-color of Christ in the carpenter's shop: Christ, a child, sets to the floor that compass which Blake saw more often in the hands of God the Father, stooping out of heaven; his mother and Joseph stand on each side of him, leaning towards him with the stiff elegance of guardian angels on a tomb. That is how Blake sees it, and not with the minute detail and the aim at local color with which the Pre-Raphaelites have seen it; it is not Holman Hunt's 'Bethlehem' nor the little Italian town of Giotto; it is rendered carefully after the visual imagination which the verses of the Bible awakened in his brain. In one of those variations which he did on the 'Flight into Egypt' (the 'Riposo,' as he called it), we have a lovely and surprising invention of landscape, minute and impossible, with a tree built up like a huge vegetable, and flowers growing out of the bare rock, and a red and flattened sun going down behind the hills; Joseph stands under the tree, nearly of the same height, but grave and kindly, and the Mother and Child are mild eighteenth-century types of innocence; the browsing donkey has an engaging rough homeliness of hide and aspect. It is all as unreal as you like, made up of elements not combined into any faultless pattern; art has gone back further than Giotto, and is careless of human individuality; but it is seen as it were with faith, and it conveys to you precisely what the painter meant to convey. So, in a lovely water-color of the creation of Eve, this blue-haired doll of obviously rounded flesh has in her something which is more as well as less than the appeal of bodily beauty, some suggestion to the imagination which the actual technical skill of Blake has put there. With less delicacy of color, and with drawing in parts actually misleading, there is a strange intensity of appeal, of realization not so much to the eyes as through them to the imagination, in another water-color of the raising of Lazarus, where the corpse swathed in grave-clothes floats sidelong upward from the grave, the weight of mortality as if taken off, and an unearthly lightness in its disimprisoned limbs, that have forgotten the laws of mortal gravity.

Yet, even in these renderings of what is certainly not meant for reality, how abundantly nature comes into the design: mere bright parrot-like birds in the branches of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the donkey of the 'Riposo,' the sheep's heads woven into the almost decorative border. Blake was constantly on his guard against the deceits of nature, the temptation of a 'facsimile representation of merely mortal and perishing substances.' His dread of nature was partly the recoil of his love; he feared to be entangled in the 'veils of Vala,' the seductive sights of the world of the senses; and his love of natural things is evident on every page of even the latest of the Prophetic Books. It is the natural world, the idols of Satan, that creep in at every corner and border, setting flowers to grow, and birds to fly, and snakes to glide harmlessly around the edges of these hard and impenetrable pages. The minute life of this 'vegetable world' is awake and in subtle motion in the midst of these cold abstractions. 'The Vegetable World opens like a flower from the Earth's centre, in which is Eternity,' and it is this outward flowering of eternity in the delicate living forms of time that goes on incessantly, as if by the mere accident of the creative impulse, as Blake or Los builds Golgonooza or the City of God out of the 'abstract void' and the 'indefiniteness of unimaginative existence.' It is, on every page, the visible outer part of what, in the words, can hut speak a language not even meant to be the language of the 'natural man.'

In these symbolic notations of nature, or double language of words and signs, these little figures of men and beasts that so strangely and incalculably decorate so many of Blake's pages, there is something Egyptian, which reminds me of those lovely riddles on papyri and funeral tablets, where the images of real things are used so decoratively, in the midst of a language itself all pictures, with colours never seen in the things themselves, but given to them for ornament. _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ is filled with what seem like the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian tomb or obelisk, little images which might well mean things as definite as the images of Egyptian writing. They are still visible, sometimes mere curves or twines, in the latest of the engraved work, and might exist equally for some symbolic life which they contain, or for that decorative life of design which makes them as expressive mosaics of pattern as the hieroglyphics. I cannot hut think that it was partly from what he had seen, in actual basalt, or in engravings after ancient monuments which must have been about him at Basire the engraver's, that Blake found the suggestion of his picture-writing in the Prophetic Books. He believed that all Greek art was but a pale copy of a lost art of Egypt, 'the greater works of the Asiatic Patriarchs,' Apotheoses of Persian, Hindu, and Egyptian antiquity.' In such pictures as 'The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth,' he professed to be but 'applying to modern heroes, on a smaller scale,' what he had seen in vision of these 'stupendous originals now lost, or perhaps buried till some happier age.' Is it not likely therefore that in his attempt to create the religious books of a new religion, 'the Everlasting Gospel' of 'the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord,' he should have turned to the then unintelligible forms in which the oldest of the religions had written itself down in a visible pictorial message?

But, whatever suggestions may have come to him from elsewhere, Blake's genius was essentially Gothic, and took form, I doubt not, during those six years of youth when he drew the monuments in Westminster Abbey, and in the old churches about London. He might have learned much from the tombs in the Abbey, and from the brasses, and from the carved angels in the chapels, and from the naïve groups on the screen in the chapel of Edward the Confessor, and from the draped figures round the sarcophagus of Aymer de Valence. There is often, in Blake's figures, something of the monumental stiffness of Gothic stone, as there is in the minute yet formal characterization of the faces. His rendering of terrible and evil things, the animal beings who typify the passions and fierce distortions of the soul, have the same childlike detail, content to be ludicrous if it can only be faithful to a distinct conception, of the carvers of gargoyles and of Last Judgments. Blake has, too, the same love of pattern for its own sake, the same exuberance of ornament, always living and organic, growing out of the structure of the design or out of the form of the page, not added to it from without. Gothic art taught him his hatred of vacant space, his love of twining and trailing foliage and flame and water; and his invention of ornament is as unlimited as theirs. A page of one of his illuminated books is like the carving on a Gothic capital. Lines uncoil from a hidden centre and spread like branches or burst into vast vegetation, emanating from leaf to limb, and growing upward into images of human and celestial existence. The snake is in all his designs; whether, in _Jerusalem_, rolled into chariot-wheels and into the harness of a chariot drawn by hoofed lions, and into the curled horns of the lions, and into the pointing fingers of the horns; or, in _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, a leviathan of the sea with open jaws, eyed and scaled with poisonous jewels of purple and blood-red and corroded gold, swelling visibly out of a dark sea that foams aside from its passage; or, curved above the limbs and wound about the head of a falling figure in lovely diminishing coils like a corkscrew which is a note of interrogation; or, in mere unterrifying beauty, trailed like a branch of a bending tree across the tops of pages; or, bitted and bridled and a thing of blithe gaiety, ridden by little, naked, long-legged girls and boys in the new paradise of an America of the future. The Gothic carvers loved snakes, but hardly with the strange passion of Blake. They carved the flames of hell and of earthly punishment with delight in the beauty of their soaring and twisting lines; but no one has ever made of fire such a plaything and ecstasy as Blake has made of it. In his paintings he invents new colors to show forth the very soul of fire, a soul angrier and more variable than opals; and in his drawings he shows us lines and nooses of fire rushing upward out of the ground, and fire drifting across the air like vapor, and fire consuming the world in the last chaos. And everywhere there are gentle and caressing tongues and trails of fire, hardly to be distinguished from branches of trees and blades of grass and stems and petals of flowers. Water, which the Gothic carvers represented in curving lines, as the Japanese do, is in Blake a not less frequent method of decoration; wrapping frail human figures in wet caverns under the depths of the sea, and destroying and creating worlds.

Blake's color is unearthly, and is used for the most part rather as a symbol of emotion than as a representation of fact. It is at one time prismatic, and radiates in broad bands of pure color; at another, and more often, is as inextricable as the veins in mineral, and seems more like a natural growth of the earth than the creation of a painter. In the smaller Book of Designs in the Print Room of the British Museum the colors have moldered away, and blotted themselves together in a sort of putrefaction which seems to carry the suggestions of poisonous decay further than Blake carried them. This will be seen by a comparison of the minutely drawn leviathan of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, with the colored print in the Book of Designs, in which the outline of the folds melts and crumbles into a mere chaos of horror. Color in Blake is never shaded, or, as he would have said, blotted and blurred; it is always pure energy. In the faint coloring of the _Book of Thel_ there is the very essence of gentleness; the color is a faultless interpretation of the faint and lovely monotony of the verse, and of its exquisite detail. Several of the plates recur in the Book of Designs, colored at a different and, no doubt, much later time; and while every line is the same the whole atmosphere and mood of the designs is changed. Bright rich color is built up in all the vacant spaces; and with the color there comes a new intensity; each design is seen over again, in a new way. Here, the mood is a wholly different mood, and this seeing by contraries is easier to understand than when, as in the splendid design on the fourth page of _The Book of Urizen_, repeated in the Book of Designs, we see a parallel, yet different, vision, a new, yet not contrary, aspect. In the one, the colors of the open book are like corroded iron or rusty minerals; in the other, sharp blues, like the wings of strange butterflies, glitter stormily under the red flashes of a sunset. The vision is the same, but every color of the thing seen is different.

To Blake, color is the soul rather than the body of his figures, and seems to clothe them like an emanation. What Behmen says of the world itself might be said of Blake's rendering of the aspects of the world and men. 'The whole outward visible World,' he tells us, 'with all its Being is a Signature, or Figure of the inward spiritual World; whatever is internally, and however its Operation is, so likewise it has its Character externally; like as the Spirit of each Creature sets forth and manifests the internal Form of its Birth, by its Body, so does the Eternal Being also.' Just as he gives us a naked Apollo for the 'spiritual form of Pitt' in the picture in the National Gallery, where Pitt is seen guiding Behemoth, or the hosts of evil, in a hell of glowing and obscure tumult, so he sees the soul of a thing or being with no relation to its normal earthly color. The colors of fire and of blood, an extra-lunar gold, putrescent vegetable colors, and the stains in rocks and sunsets, he sees everywhere, and renders with an ecstasy that no painter to whom color was valuable for its own sake has ever attained. It is difficult not to believe that he does not often use color with a definitely musical sense of its harmonies, and that colour did not literally sing to him, as it seems, at least in a permissible figure, to sing to us out of his pages.

VII

At the end of September 1800 Blake left Lambeth, and took a cottage at Felpham, near Bognor, at the suggestion of William Hayley, the feeblest poet of his period, who imagined, with foolish kindness, that he could become the patron of one whom he called 'my gentle visionary Blake.' Hayley was a rich man, and, as the author of _The Triumphs of Temper_, was looked upon as a person of literary importance. He did his best to give Blake opportunities of making money, by doing engraving and by painting miniatures of the neighbors. He read Greek with him and Klopstock. 'Blake is just become a Grecian, and literally learning the language,' he says in one letter, and in another: 'Read Klopstock into English to Blake.' The effect of Klopstock on Blake is to be seen in a poem of ribald magnificence, which no one has yet ventured to print in full. The effect of Blake on Hayley, and of Hayley on Blake, can be realized from a few passages in the letters. At first we read: 'Mr. Hayley acts like a prince.' Then: 'I find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery of business, and intimations that, if I do not confine myself to this, I shall not live.' Last: 'Mr. H. is as much averse to my poetry as he is to a chapter in the Bible. He knows that I have writ it, for I have shown it to him' (this is apparently the _Milton_ or the _Jerusalem_), and he has read part by his own desire, and has looked with sufficient contempt to enhance my opinion of it.... But Mr. H. approves of my designs as little as he does of my poems, and I have been forced to insist on his leaving me, in both, to my own self-will; for I am determined to be no longer pestered with his genteel ignorance and polite disapprobation. I know myself both poet and painter, and it is not his affected contempt that can move to anything but a more assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness I have brought down his affected loftiness, and he begins to think that I have some genius: as if genius and assurance were the same thing! But his imbecile attempts to depress me only deserve laughter.' What laughter they produced, while Blake was still suffering under them, can be seen by any one who turns to the epigrams on H. in the note-book. But the letter goes on, with indignant seriousness: 'But I was commanded by my spiritual friends to bear all and be silent, and to go through all without murmuring, and, in fine, hope till my three years shall be accomplished; at which time I was set at liberty to remonstrate against former conduct, and to demand justice and truth; which I have done in so effectual a manner that my antagonist is silenced completely, and I have compelled what should have been of freedom--my just right as an artist and as a man.'

In Blake's behavior towards Hayley, which has been criticized, we can test his sincerity to himself under all circumstances: his impeccable outward courtesy, his concessions, 'bearing insulting benevolence' meekly, his careful kindness towards Hayley and hard labour on his behalf, until the conviction was forced upon him from within that 'corporeal friends were spiritual enemies,' and that Hayley must be given up.

'Remembering the verses that Hayley sung When my heart knocked against the roof of my tongue.'

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

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

What least 'contention of friendship' would not have been too much for the 'triumphs of temper' of 'Felpham's eldest son'? what 'fire of thought' could ever have enlightened his comfortable darkness? And is it surprising that Blake should have written in final desperation:

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