William Blake: A Study of His Life and Art Work

DEATH’S DOOR: FROM BLAIR’S “GRAVE”

Engraved by L. Schiavonetti after Blake’s drawing.
Published 1808

As he states in a glorious passage in his prose essay of the Last Judgement: “Mental things are alone real: what is called corporeal nobody knows of; its dwelling-place is a fallacy, and its existence an imposture. Where is the existence out of mind, or thought? where is it but in the mind of a fool? Some people flatter themselves that there will be no Last Judgement, and that bad art will be adopted, and mixed with good art—that error or experiment will make a part of truth—and they boast that it is its foundation. These people flatter themselves; I will not flatter them. Error is created, truth is eternal. Error or creation will be burnt up, and then, and not till then, truth or eternity will appear. It is burned up the moment men cease to behold it.” (This is a mystical utterance, a spiritual discernment which will repay thoughtful consideration. It gives the Last Judgement—hitherto conceived of by the orthodox as a terribly material and mundane affair—an imaginative and esoteric significance very grateful and welcome to the spiritually sensitive.) “I assert for myself, that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. ‘What!’ it will be questioned, ‘when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?’ Oh! no! no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.’ I question not my corporeal eye, any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it.”

One of Blake’s most beautiful conceptions of God is as the universal “Poetic Genius,” and he was very fond of asserting that Art is Religion, which indeed it is when, like his own, it represents the forms of this world as the transparent media through which pulses the light of the universal Poetic Genius. Another belief of Blake’s must be quoted before I leave this part of our subject: “Men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory.

“The fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy; holiness is not the price of entrance into heaven. Those who are cast out are all those who, having no passions of their own, because no intellect, have spent their lives in curbing and governing other people’s by the various arts of poverty, and cruelty of all kinds. The modern Church crucifies Christ with the head downwards.” And again, “Many persons, such as Paine and Voltaire, with some of the ancient Greeks, say: “We will not converse concerning good and evil, we will live in Paradise and Liberty! You may do so in spirit, but not in the mortal body, as you pretend, till after the Last Judgment. For in Paradise they have no corporeal and mortal body: that originated with the Fall and was called Death, and cannot be removed but by a Last Judgment. While we are in the world of mortality, we must suffer—the whole Creation groans to be delivered....

“Forgiveness of sin is only at the judgment-seat of Jesus the Saviour, where the accuser is cast out, not because he sins, but because he torments the just, and makes them do what he condemns as sin, and what he knows is opposite to their own identity.”

And now I must gather together all the frayed ends of this diffuse but necessary chapter, and put the vital points, around which the seeming incongruities and strangenesses of Blake’s assertions arrange themselves, into a symmetrical if not an organic whole. The oneness of the Eternal Imagination, “Universal Poetic Genius,” or God the Spirit, was the golden background to Blake’s vision of life. And on this unity he saw contrasted the endless diversity of the spirit’s expression in phenomena. All error (not sin, which he did not believe to exist) came from the fall of the spirit (through Urizen the creator) into division and the sexual and generative life of man. This tended to a closing up of man into separate selfhoods, and each selfhood, in its effort to preserve its corporeal existence and separate character, was guilty of error, and gradually the inlets through which communication with the Universal Spirit was maintained became closed up, and were senses only available, in most men, for the uses of the natural world. This condition leads to spiritual negation, but is merely temporary, for when the body is destroyed at death, which is the Last Judgement, Urizen’s power is broken, and the soul, however attenuated (as long as not altogether atrophied), returns to its pristine union with the Universal Spirit, and, though completely merged in it, yet in some wonderful way it preserves its own identity, or essential quality, while the body, which is error, is “burnt up.” But even in the prison of the bodily life Humanity may be delivered from the cramping and negative effect of the selfhood, through Jesus Christ, who exists as the Human Divine in every heart, and who at the voice of the Universal Spirit rises from the grave of selfhood, and draws the Christian up into the life of that spirit where is no error nor negation.

It naturally follows that to Blake the one important point was to keep the senses, “the chief inlet of soul,” perpetually cleansed and open, that he might descry the Great Reality of which Nature and all her phenomena are but a symbol or shadow.

In fact, Blake’s hope for man lay in the contrary of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy. The continuous evolution into new divisions and organisms, separate selfhoods and particles, was to him the falling of Urizen, head downwards, and bound with the snake of materiality, deeper and deeper into the abyss. By union, not division, by aspiring into the universal life, by conquering the selfhood and cleaving to the divine element (Jesus Christ) which exists in every human heart, Blake conceived that man might, if he would, find salvation, true vision, and everlasting life. His own vision was always double or symbolic, and he prayed to be delivered from “single vision” and “Newton’s sleep.” For the preoccupation with Nature as an end in itself and an object worthy of study was to him the great error, a sign of the horror of great darkness that clouded the human intelligence.

In moments of a special inrush of spiritual apprehension his vision was “threefold,” and sometimes “fourfold,” which suggests that vista behind vista unrolled itself, revealing untellable truth and beauty to his keen etherealized sight.

These things, not being matters of common experience, must be received and understood intuitively, and not Blake himself can always make them comprehensible to us. His language and visions recall the language and visions of the Prophet Ezekiel, whose writings were read and re-read by him till they created a frenzy of excitement in his sensitive brain.

His opinion of women, far from being in accordance with our modern emancipated views, was somewhat oriental, though among his poems we may find many instances of sweet and spiritual femininity.

When Urizen created Man and walled him up in his separate organism with five senses, like five small chinks in a cavern to let in the outside light, he gave him a dual nature, male and female, so that he was at first a hermaphrodite. “The female portion of man trying to get the ascendency of the male portion caused inward strife,” so a further subdivision occurred, and Man cast out his female portion, which became woman, and was a mere “emanation” of man. “There is no such thing in eternity as a female will,” writes Blake oracularly, his happy experience being based doubtless on the beautiful subjection of Catherine Blake to his own overmastering personality. Yet he is bound to exclaim in “Jerusalem,” “What may man be? Who can tell? But what may woman be, to have power over man from cradle to corruptible grave.” We may fairly say that the inferior shadowy nature which he imputes to woman was one of those opinions which he chose to adopt, though his real and unconscious belief regarding her was possibly very different. Be that as it may, he often makes her serve as a symbol for material existence, obviously an infelicitous parallel.

Having very briefly indicated the nature of Blake’s religious and mystical opinions, it remains for us to say a word about his mythology.

In a letter written to Mr. Butts while Blake was at Felpham, these lines occur among some verses, and will I think help us:

For a double vision is always with me.
With my inward eye, ’tis an old man gray;
With my outward, a thistle across the way.

The personification and nomenclature of these double visions of his seem to suggest the genesis of this mythology. He has peopled a twilight mental world with a dim shadowy population of personified states and conditions. They bear strange mouth-filling names, such as Orc, Fuzon, Rintrah, Palamabron, Enitharmon, Oothoon and Ololon. What each symbolizes must be determined by the reader for himself. No explanation of their separate functions will be attempted in this book. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have carried explanation and analytic criticism as far as it can be carried, and the reader who is interested in the literary matter of the prophetic books should consult their learned work as well as Mr. Swinburne’s highly-suggestive critical essay.

CHAPTER VI

To raise the veil, to look forth on the cause of phenomena, on the visions of eternal imagination, to strain to the uttermost that he might hear the reverberations of the unmeasured mighty stream of Divine power, to bathe within that stream, and let it bear him onward as it would—these were to him the real purposes of life, and being so, formed other reasons why the world, all engrossed as it is with wealth and position, and “here” and “now,” looked at him askance.

To-day, however, there is an undercurrent of popular opinion—a small stream, but strong—that recognizes him for what he is, and his name is sacred as that of the great High Priest of Spiritual Art, to those who compose it.

It is noticeable that none of those who were personally acquainted with him, save perhaps Crabb Robinson, ever gave credence to the prevailing notion that he was mad: strongly do they condemn such a verdict. He was eccentric, abnormally developed on the spiritual side, and undisciplined in thought and speech. The mystic in him finally all but destroyed the poet, though it never arrested the magnificent development of his artistic genius. Again, much that is strange and difficult of apprehension in Blake may be traced to the fact that his mind lacked the firm basis, the just and right power of thinking, that comes from a sound education. As a matter of fact, capriciously self-educated as he was, his ignorance of ordinary rudimentary knowledge was as extraordinary as his acquaintance with much that is caviar to the ordinary intellect.

“Celui qui a l’imagination sans érudition a des ailes et n’a pas de pieds.” And so it was with Blake. But it does not detract one iota from the illuminating quality of the thoughts which flash as it were from a heaven in his brain in times of creative inspiration. Blake on the wing has a strange beauty, a swift, direct and strenuous flight that thrills and awes the imaginative spectator. It is only when this wild wonderful creature is caught and entangled in theories and systems and human reasoning, that we may not give him our intellectual adherence.

Other causes which appear to give colour to the theory that he was mad are the following: Blake had no curious regard or nice care for words, but used them at random in speech, just as they came to hand, and as he cherished numerous violent prejudices it naturally followed that he often expressed them in very emphatic and often unreasonable language. Passionate partisan as he was of the world of imagination as against the world of fact, he assumed an attitude of defiance to natural science and its oldest established facts which seemed to those who had not the key to Blake’s mind simply insane or at the best puerile.

So accustomed was he to misunderstanding, that when strangers tried to draw him out he seems purposely to have indulged in exaggeration and symbolic language to baffle and mystify them. In ordinary intercourse, as in his art and poetry, he seems to have had no care to put his mind and his listeners or spectators en rapport with his own. That magical sympathy which some men know so well how to establish like a living current between their own and other minds before “speaking the truth that is in them,” was not one of Blake’s gifts. The sympathetic standpoint for observance or understanding he expected from those who would be at the pains to find out his meaning. “Let them that have ears, hear—if they can, and if they be not too tightly shut into their selfhoods, and their senses not clogged beyond cleansing with the dust and litter of materialism,” he would seem to say.

Examining into the vexed question of Blake’s visions, whether they were the apparitions of an unsound mind, the automatic picture-making of a vivid imagination, or the visual apprehension of supernatural appearances, we shall see that madness is not the key to them, though we shall have to admit a certain want of balance and proportion in his intellectual life.

Sometimes one is tempted to think that he had eyes that saw the visible loveliness and manifest images in which Plato supposes that Ideas exist in the spiritual universe. Which being so, it is not wonderful that he was called mad, for the Greek philosopher himself said that “this is the most excellent of all forms of enthusiasm (or possession), and that the lover who has a share of this madness is called a lover of the beautiful.” Our artist was a seer such as Plato meant, but his is a figurative rather than an actual description of the mental operations which suspend such visions before the prophet’s eye.

All the writers on Blake—Allan Cunningham, Alexander Gilchrist, James Smetham, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, Sir Richard Garnett—have discussed the subject, but I find the most illuminating passage in an article by James Smetham included in the second volume of Gilchrist’s “Life,” which I shall take leave to quote, for its matter could never be better stated: “Thought with Blake leaned largely to the side of imagery rather than to the side of organized philosophy, and we shall have to be on our guard, while reading the record of his views and opinions, against the dogmatism which was more frequently based on exalted fancies than on the rock of abiding reason and truth. The conceptive faculty working with a perception of facts singularly narrow and imperfect, projected every idea boldly into the sphere of the actual. What he thought, he saw, to all intents and purposes, and it was this sudden and sharp crystallization of inward notions into outward and visible signs which produced the impression on many beholders that reason was unseated.... We cannot but on the whole lean to the opinion that somewhere in the wonderful compound of flesh and spirit, somewhere in those recesses where the one runs into the other, he was ‘slightly touched,’ and by so doing we shall save ourselves the necessity of attempting to defend certain phases of his work” (such as much of the literary part of the prophetic books) “while maintaining an unqualified admiration for the mass and manner of his thoughts.” This seems a just opinion. The colloquialism “slightly touched” (just that and nothing but that) is the very phrase to express this elusive, almost indefinable condition of mind. In all mankind living in conditions of time and space, a certain adjustment of themselves to these conditions, and to each other, is a necessary function of existence. The failure to comply with such an adjustment was Blake’s strength and weakness—the defect of his quality.

As I have said before, he firmly believed in his own inspiration, and with reason. For a mood of trance-like absorption would come upon him, his soul would be rapt in an ecstasy, he was disturbed by no impressions of earthly persons or surroundings, but was for the time being alone with his quickening vision. At such moments his mind’s eye was but the retina on which God Himself projected the image. And he would permit no criticism, no questioning of work which seemed to him not his own, but produced through divine agency.

All creative genius must work in much the same way. The vision is granted, who shall say just how and whence, and its translation into any form of art must be accomplished by a power as it were outside, above, the artist. Vogl said of Schubert, that he composed in a state of clairvoyance. (That is the reason why the Unfinished Symphony was, and always will be, unfinished. Schubert transcribed the tormenting melody, the awful picture of Fate suddenly reaching a long arm from out the smiling heaven to arrest the blithe jigging mortal so gaily tripping along a flowery path. The overwhelming terror and pity of it all shake the soul. But the vision was withdrawn, the clairvoyant condition left Schubert, and so he wrote no more.)

Blake’s conceptions were projected in form instantaneously and with extraordinary vividness, and the vision seen with his mind’s eye seldom varied or faded till he had transferred its likeness to paper. In this he was indeed unlike those artists who, having but a vague mental conception, build up their designs from without, laboriously selecting and copying, not that which will merely help to perfect the realization of the inward conception, but those things which they conjecture will arrange themselves most successfully in the making of an eye-pleasing picture. Such artists are but little concerned with the innate and obligatory form with which an idea must necessarily clothe itself. Blake writes in the Descriptive Catalogue, “A spirit and a vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing: they are organized 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.”

At the same time in justice we must admit that Blake sometimes failed to make his vivid and living conceptions as clear to the world as he might have done, for the reason that he neglected to refer to Nature for the technique which after all is the language of Art. His art in this respect is somewhat like that of the Italian Trecenti, who uttered burning messages in a tongue which sometimes stammered. His impetuous soul never wholly achieved the mastery of material which only a prolonged and patient drudgery can give, but the images which hurtled from his imagination were so forceful and superabundant that mere fiery creation, the unburdening of the overloaded heart and brain, was the crying obligation which forced him ever onward, seeking relief often in the mere act of projection.

It is always a wonder that he makes so few mistakes, his technique being manifestly deficient. When his drawing is right it is heroically, magnificently so, and even when incorrect, it is always of amazing power and almost convincing strength.

“Execution,” says Blake, in his notes on Reynolds’ “Discourses,” “is the chariot of Genius,” and when he mounts into the chariot and takes the reins into his strong nervous hands, then, indeed, nothing can withstand the flashing glory of his course.

At such times the affinity between our artist and Michael Angelo is very apparent. Both had the grand simple manner in their treatment of the human form, both worked as it would seem “in a state of clairvoyance” and according to the direction of a divine daemon, both felt the body to be at best but the prison of the straining fluttering soul; but Blake’s conceptions glow with a whiter flame of spiritual intensity than do those of the Florentine, greater as the latter was at all other points. I think it is the presence of this mystic fire which forms one of the great difficulties in the way of a facile understanding of his art-work. We feel ourselves in the presence of an incommunicable overburdening spiritual intensity. It has seldom happened that a mystic should be also an artist translating those things which transcend human experience into the terms of an art which by its very nature is only concerned with the sensible creation.

It is this incongruity between the thought and the language in which it is conveyed—Blake’s thoughts often lying beyond the proper range of a graphic embodiment—which creates one of the great difficulties in the way of our right apprehension of him.

A few of his works, as we shall presently see, are perfect and flawless as Art can make them, such as the “Songs of Innocence” and the majestic series of designs to Job. In both of these, the thoughts, and their incarnation in form, are harmoniously complementary each to the other. But often the thought will not, cannot be inclosed: it outstrips the reach of his art. Hence many designs are tumultuous with leaping ideas, dimly apprehended suggestions, not one of which is caught and contained in its essence, but seems rather, as it were, to flutter, tantalizingly enough, just beyond the grasp.

Blake “hitched his waggon to the stars,” to use Emerson’s expressive phrase, and to the spiritually “elect” in art—those to whom ideas are the really precious things—he speaks winged words and with authority. The pity is that his art speaks thus clearly to the “initiated” only. The sense of freedom of the spirit, of the absence of all contractile elements in Blake’s work must however be obvious to all. It is his special charm, to be expansive, sublime, large. The great ethereal spaces of the sky have breathed their inspiration upon him, and he has reflected the colour and the mystery and the depth of the sea. To those who are spiritually homesick he comes as an emissary from beyond the Great Darkness, from where Life is found at its Source.

CHAPTER VII

PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM
“SONGS OF INNOCENCE,” 1789

In Blake’s time there was little hope of success for an artist who did not put himself under distinguished patronage and paint at the direction of some dilettante nobleman. According to the autobiography of B. R. Haydon the artist (a strange character if ever there were one!), who was in his heyday when Blake was a very old man, nobody could expect to get on without a large dependence on patrons, who would often dictate subjects and treatment, and advance large sums to the painter, to meet his necessarily large expenses (for great canvases cost great sums); and on the strength of this, bind his creative imagination to the yoke of their own petty slavery.

Blake, however, being conscious of his own high mission in art, and deeply sensible of the divine obligation he was under to paint what he must, had to forego the idea of working out his designs in large, for he was too poor to pay for the necessary materials. Hence most of his work is executed in very small space—in the leaves of the books we are about to examine, and in water-colours and “frescoes” of very limited dimensions. As we proceed it will be noted over and over again that designs some six or seven inches square, and often less, are grand enough to be expanded into large compositions and gallery pictures—indeed they would gain considerably by so doing—for so much vitality and splendid strength seems cramped in a confined area.

But that size in pictures is no test of conceptive artistic genius needs no demonstration, though it may be conceded to be a gauge of executive ability. And it is in conception that Blake is pre-eminent.

Going quietly on in his chosen path, he has his little laugh at the crowd of artists scrambling like chickens around the patrons, who mete out the maize to this favourite Cochin or that admired bantam.

We find this doggerel in his Note-book:

O dear Mother Outline, of wisdom most sage,
What’s the first part of painting? she said, Patronage.
And what is the second, to please and engage,
She frowned like a fury and said, “Patronage.”

Of patronage during his life Blake had but little, save from Mr. Butts, who, however, had nothing of the conventional patron about him. He merely bought with reverent appreciation whatever Blake pleased to paint, never suggesting alterations or improvements, never blaming or criticising, but merely receiving in faith and love. For which Blake, as we know, “never ceased to honour him.” But let no man think that poverty did not hamper Blake, though he chose it rather than the slavery that would have been the price he would have had to pay for even a moderate income. He himself writes in the Descriptive Catalogue: “Some people and not a few artists have asserted that the painter of this picture would not have done so well if he had been properly encouraged. Let those who think so reflect on the state of nations under poverty, and their incapability of art. Though art is above either, the argument is better for affluence than poverty and though he would not have been a greater artist, yet he would have produced greater works of art in proportion to his means.”

Well, then: it was Blake’s poverty and independence that caused him to work mainly on a small scale, and it was the fact that he was poet as well as artist—his poetry springing from the same creative impulse as his plastic art—that led him to merge the two gifts into a perfect union in the creation of his beautiful and unique books. The process by which they were executed is thus described by Gilchrist: “The verse was written and the designs and marginal embellishments outlined on the copper with an impervious liquid, probably the ordinary stopping-out varnish of engravers. Then all the white parts or lights, the remainder of the plate that is, were eaten away with aquafortis or other acid, so that the outline of letter and design was left prominent, as in stereotype. From these plates he printed off in any tint, yellow, brown, blue, required to be the prevailing or ground colour in his fac-similes; red he used for the letterpress. The page was then coloured up by hand in imitation of the original drawing, with more or less variety of detail in the local hues.” To read this account when one has seen the product is like pondering the receipt for a miracle. Gilchrist goes on to say, “He taught Mrs. Blake to take off the impressions with care and delicacy.” After, they were done up in boards by her neat hands, “so that the poet and his wife did everything in making the book—writing, designing, printing, engraving—everything except manufacturing the paper: the very ink, or colour rather, they did make. Never before, surely, was a man so literally the author of his own book.”

For the convenience of classifying in some sort of rough way, this chapter will deal with the “Songs of Innocence,” the “Book of Thel,” the “Gates of Paradise,” the “Songs of Experience,” also touching lightly on a very different book, Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Tales for Children,” illustrated by Blake.

The small octavo volume entitled the “Songs of Innocence”—with which the “Songs of Experience,” produced some years later, are also bound—will be a revelation of beauty to all who have not seen it before, for there was nothing like it before, and there has been nothing like it since. The leaves of the Print Room copy, in all probability not a very early one, have become slightly yellowed with age, but the colours remain rare and delicate and iridescent as they were when they were first laid on, a happy accident, for this has not been the fate of all Blake’s coloured prints.

“Every page has the smell of April,” says Mr. Swinburne happily. Linger where you will, a gay and tender harmony pervades every leaf, the smile of an inspired child looks up at you and flashes something intuitive and precious into your soul. The colours are the colours of morning. The limpidness of the verses, the felicity of the designs, recall special morning moods in the morning of life. Hope, innocence, joy, and an all-pervading sense of Divine nearness, are the characteristic notes sounded. Both the draught and the song weave themselves into a spell, each one distinct, each having its own charm, its own perfume.

The words without the embracing design, beautiful as they are, seem to lose some of that delicate and aromatic fragrance diffused from them. And the design without the words is an effect without a cause, and thus loses its expressiveness. It is the union of the two that makes the celestial singing, and, like antiphonal music, one part catches up, transforms and augments the melody of the other, which, ringing silver clear, yet half-hid and half-announced its entire significance.

Our illustrations, in which perforce the colour is left out, are the palest, most spectral of shadows beside the glory of the original plates. They can but be reminders or suggestions, and must be accepted as such.

Plate 2, represents a Shepherd, pipe in hand, following a cherubic vision, his sheep in turn following him. The shepherd, be it remarked, has on a vestment peculiar to Blake. It is indicated only by a line round the ankles, wrists and neck, and a few rather realistic buttons, but it does not hide the muscles and the modeling of the body at all. It is a kind of glorified combination garment, but it is a matter of taste whether the shepherd would not look as well unclothed entirely. The garment, too much recalls the historic drawers which the outraged decency of the Vatican obliged Pontormo to paint on the figures of Michael Angelo’s “Last Judgement” in the Sistine.

Whatever reason Blake may have had for investing his shepherd in this apparel, we are sure at least that it was not because he worried himself about propriety! such a concern was far indeed from him.

PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM
“SONGS OF INNOCENCE,” 1789

After all, this matter of the combination garment is the merest quibble. The design has all the enchantment of the spring in its pale delicious tints, and the browsing sheep with the glint of gold on their fleeces bring something of Argonautic romance into this vision of April.

The flamboyant title-page of the “Songs of Innocence,” is a fine piece of decorative design and colour.

The keynote of the whole scheme is set in the perfectly simple song, and the page in which it is embodied, called “The Introduction.” The poem is written in brown, on a ground bright with tremulous colours which wane and wax in prismatic variation. Rose shoots, bent in and out, make a trellis up each side of the verses, and the result of the whole! well! you may call it a slight thing if you like, but it is as joyous as childhood, and strangely delightful! No songs ever written for children were as these songs; in especial, perhaps, “The Lamb,” of which the simplicity and tenderness are of so delicate a quality that the poem cannot be handled critically at all. It can only be felt.

The slightly richer and deeper tones of colour, and the premonitory note of mysticism in the “Little Black Boy,” afford a subtle charm:

And we are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

Who could have written this but Blake?

It is of lyrics such as this that Pater writes: “And the very perfection of such poetry often appears to depend, in part, on a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding, as in some of the most imaginative compositions of William Blake.”

“The Divine Image” is another equally lovely poem, with its sinuous growth of ribbon-like leaves, climbing among the verses. The unmistakeable figure of Christ at the root, raises a prostrate figure.

The verses, writ in golden brown, lie on a ground of palest blue, thrilling to Tyrian purple.

“Holy Thursday,” after the rainbow tints of many of the pages and the luxuriance of their designs, is a Quaker-like and unpretending affair altogether. It would seem to be the untouched impression as it was first stereotyped off the plate; and is interesting for that reason.

There is hardly anything in the book more delicious than Plate 25, “Infant Joy.” A typical (rather than botanically correct) flower with a flame-shaped bud, and a wind-tossed bloom, springs across a page dyed like a butterfly’s wing. In the cloven blossom a mother and her small baby sit enthroned while an angel with wings like a “White Admiral” stands entranced before the happy child.

“I have no name;
I am but two days old.”
What shall I call thee?
“I happy am,
Joy is my name.”
Sweet joy befall thee.

Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old.
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while;
Sweet joy befall thee.

These are the spontaneous, gushing notes of the bird in springtime, careless, unstudied but felicitously right, not to be corrected or even touched, for each word must lie where it fell, just so and no other way.

PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM
“SONGS OF INNOCENCE,” 1789

Plate 20, “Night,” with its graceful lady tree growing up beside the verses, is a beautiful shadowy design on a background in which blue and green merge and deepen in a veil of evening mist and the poem is another of those minute pieces of perfection, which, like delicate sea-shells, were cast up out of the stormy ocean of Blake’s mind.

In their own way, and with due regard to their special range and quality, the “Songs of Innocence” are the most perfect things Blake ever did, for he attempted no effect in song or design that his art was not adequate to express, and his imagination lies over all like the haze of spring sunshine. At that time the lyric poet in Blake was dominant, compelling him to sing, while the mystic was hardly yet consciously awake in him.

But in the next book, “The Book of Thel,” the mystic has stirred and breathes through the poem. The story is veiled in a shining mystery, but is still quite intelligible and pellucid in style, till just at the end, when the sphinx riddle of this life, the paradox of the senses, the wonder and terror of death, close round the consciousness of Thel, and dark sayings are uttered darkly. Thel is the youngest of the daughters of the Seraphim, but is herself a mortal. All her joy in her own beauty and that of the natural world is destroyed by the thought that she must die, the flowers must fade, the cloud will melt away, everything must change and decay. The Lily of the Valley answers her gentle lamentation, telling her that in this very change, the feeding of the lives of others with our own life, lies the secret of an endless and blessed immortality. She herself will hereafter “flourish in eternal vales.” Thel assents to this—

Thy breath doth nourish the innocent lamb: he smells thy milky garments,
He crops thy flowers, while thou sittest smiling in his face,
Wiping his mild and meekin mouth from all contagious taints.

That is all very well, she seems to say, you help to revive and nourish many creatures, but what do I do? I shall fade away like a little shining cloud. The lily then calls down a cloud, which appears in the bright likeness of a radiant youth in mid-air. The cloud tells her that when he passes away in an hour’s time, “It is to manifold life, to love, and peace and raptures holy.” He will wed the Dew, and linked together in a golden band they will “bear food to all our tender flowers.”

But Thel complains that she does nothing for any living thing,

Without a use this shining woman lived,
Or did she only live to be at death the food of worms.

Then the “cloud reclined upon his airy throne” tells her that even that would prove her of great use and blessing, for

Everything that lives
Lives not alone nor for itself,

and in token of the truth of what he says he calls the helpless worm, which appears to Thel as “an infant wrapped in the Lily’s leaf.”

This lowest form of created life is cradled in a mother’s love to Thel’s surprise. The Clod of Clay appears to comfort its weeping babe and tells the wondering “beauty of the Vales of Har,” that being herself the meanest of all things, yet nevertheless she is the bride of Him “who loves the lowly,” and is the mother of all his children.

Whereat Thel weeps to find life and love everywhere, even where she expected nothing but coldness and horror. Then “matron Clay,” invites Thel to enter her house, saying that it is given her to enter and to return. So Thel entered into the secret regions of the grave, and passed on “till to her grave-plot she came and there she sat down, and heard a voice of sorrow” speak from out it. It is a wild blood-stilling cry that rises to her terrified ears, shrieking of the senses, their limits, their precious and their poisoning gifts—these only avenues through which life may be enjoyed, and by which eternity must be coloured.

Nothing answers! there is no answer? It is the old Faust riddle that has occupied the minds of thinkers since the beginning of time. It fretted Blake into a state of painful excitement. “The Virgin started from her seat, and with a shriek fled back unhindered till she came into the Vales of Har.”

The designs, of which there are but five, have still the serene and delicate air which belongs to Blake’s youthful work. The colour is pure and thin, the outlines printed in faint Italian pink, and the effect of all is of things seen through a haze, which the sunshine is beginning to penetrate.

A delightful impression of rain-washed, wind-swept morning is given by the frontispiece, in which Thel—a motive of perfect poetic grace—contemplates the wooing of the fairy Dew, whose home is in the calyx of the flowers, by the Cloud. Above their heads is a patch of blue sky, across which the title is written, while birds and angels wing their happy flight in the ethereal expanse. Exquisite also is the pale vision of the lily of the valley bowing before Thel. And the cloud, and the clod of the earth bending over Baby Worm, are alive with Blake’s peculiar quality of imagination. The tail-piece represents a serpent of pale green hue coiling and rearing across the page. One naked infant drives him with reins, while two more ride joyously upon his back.

About the same time Blake wrote a poem called “Tiriel,” which will be found in the Aldine edition of his poetical works. It was never engraved in a book by him, and has little poetic beauty, being for the most part full of clamorous rage, dire slaughterings and cruel revenge, but he made some water-colour drawings illustrating the text.

The Print Room does not possess a copy of the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” which appeared in 1790, but the Reading Room has one which can be viewed in the large room set apart for rare books.

None of Blake’s prose writings, in sustained thought and power, are equal to it. It is an armoury containing flashing rapiers, whose thrusts reach home as suddenly as they are withdrawn again. The glitter of steel in sunlight is suggested by many of its aphorisms. I cannot forbear quoting one or two, in reading which one would seem to hear the very voice of Blake:

“He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.”

“The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.”

“Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.”

“He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.”

“How do you know but ev’ry bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five.”

“Damn braces; bless relaxes.”

“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”

“All deities reside in the human breast.”

“Joys impregnate, sorrows bring forth.”

“Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.”

“To create a little flower is the labour of ages.”

“Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.”