PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM
THE BRITISH MUSEUM COPY OF THE
“MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL,”
PRODUCED 1790

The aphorisms are followed by five “Memorable Fancies,” wild dreams full of paradoxes, and allegories both spiritual and grotesque. The designs to this book are very fine, but I cannot help thinking that this particular copy was not coloured by Blake’s hand. In comparison with the one formerly belonging to Lord Crewe, which in all respects is magnificent, the Library copy is coloured too crudely, to be in the least characteristic of Blake. Particularly unlike him are the heavy gray shadows disfiguring the nude figures. There is no impasto work here as in the Crewe copy, but the colour is put on with no uncertain or unpractised hand, though in a manner unlike Blake. Far more delightful are the renderings of several of these plates as seen in the small “Book of Designs.” They are worked up with the utmost care and finish, and the distinctive qualities of Blake’s colour, the unmistakable impress of his hand, are there exhibited in their highest manifestations. The sense of mystery, innate to their conception, is preserved, nay, accentuated! whereas the Library copy, through its unpleasant, and I cannot but think un-Blakean passages of colour, has lost in some places this romantic and inimitable quality. The title-page alive with leaping flames, a nude woman bathing, salamander-like, in fire, the heaving body of a patterned water-snake writhing in foamy water, and a male figure seated on a mound prophetic of the design presently to be consummated in “Death’s Door,” are among the most notable of the pictures in the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Many of the pages are faintly tinted, while delicate suggestive ornaments cling about the writing.

In 1791 Blake designed and engraved for Johnson six plates to “Tales for Children,” by Mary Wollstonecraft. The book is in the Print Room, somewhat yellow and musty. In no sense is it attractive, and it would find small favour with the modern child. The fact is that Blake worked in dire constraint when illustrating homely scenes of actual life. He had no pleasure in the invention of accessories. In his art all is left out that may be, and the bare, the sparse, the elemental, and the austerely beautiful alone receive his attention, but always adjusted to meet the requirements of his own rigid sense of harmony in composition.

Then again single vision, “the vision of Bacon and Newton,” concerned only with actual appearances, did not seem to him worth the transcribing. He could only work with freedom when the fact could be treated as merely the symbol of an idea. So that in these plates the homely domestic scenes he tries to represent have a cold and ghastly appearance. They are like nothing we have ever seen, because Blake was so curiously unobservant of details not interesting to him that he simply did not know about them when he came to draw them. His work is only of a high order when his imagination is excited. His spiritual insight not being called into play renders many of these engravings weak, dull and archaic-looking.

There are among them suggestions of the terrible, and of significances beyond this world however. They form grim and foreign accompaniments enough to the milk-and-water stories, and are about as suitable as the Orcagna frescoes in the Pisan Campo Santo would be to adorn the walls of a child’s nursery. We willingly shut up the book and turn to one produced two years later called the “Gates of Paradise.” The title-page says it was designed, engraved and published by Blake, but adds Johnson’s name too. But we know that the book is all Blake, and it is probable that Johnson gave his name to the venture through a kindly, perhaps pitying, desire to help Blake with the public.

“The Gates of Paradise” it is called, though no glory of colour, no beautiful angels, no city of gold, such as the title might lead us to expect, are displayed in its pages. Indeed, to some the first glance may bring disappointment.

These elemental and direct designs, sixteen in number, are very rough, even rudimentary, as engravings. But they are true art-work, for they concentrate and express conceptions and ideas of a rare order, and with a piercing directness that drives them home to our most intimate, most central consciousness.

Either you will feel their power and charm, and come under the subtle spell at once, or else you will glance through them unmoved, and perhaps contemptuously, and wonder what people can profess to see in this rude and Gothic draughtsmanship. If this latter is the case, then Blake has nothing to say to such an one, for it is no use to expect a literal and exact interpretation tacked on to all his designs. Blake must and will be discerned intuitively by his true lovers, and few words will suffice to indicate the track of his thoughts to such; to others, all the explanation in the world would never reveal him, for, to use his own phrase, “the doors of their perception” are not sufficiently cleansed to admit his conceptions.

The frontispiece gives us a reminiscence of Thel. A chrysalis, like a swaddled baby, lies on a leaf, while on the spray above a caterpillar—the emblem of motherhood—watches over it. Underneath is inscribed, significantly enough, the words, “What is man?” Blake’s thoughts were never long away from this subject. To find an answer to the question was his deepest preoccupation and concern, and the following designs are all variations on this one dominant theme. Plate No. 1 represents a woman gathering babies like flowers from among the clustering ivy at the foot of a tree. In glad haste she plucks up one more to put with the others already lying, like St. Elizabeth’s roses, in the folds of her apron. The child is found symbolically at the root of what Mr. Swinburne thinks is the tree of physical life, embedded in the earth from which all things issue, and to which all things return. The next four plates are embodiments of the four elements, which in Blake’s thoughts always teemed with “spiritual correspondences”—according to the Swedenborgian phrase. “Water” seems to be an emblem of folly and instability, and is embodied in the form of a man seated on the very roots of the tree of physical life, his feet set upon no firm earth, but upon the sand at the verge of the water. The foolish, helpless face, and hands spread out on knees, and the driving rain that descends with pitiless energy on all, go far to convey the idea of the perpetual flux and flow, the “unshapeableness” of the element “Water.” A gnome-like man in a crevice represents “Earth.” He is inclosed, bound down, weighted with clay. Sitting on a high white cloud amid the starry spaces of the sky, “Air” sits in form like a naked man, pressing his hands to his forehead in fear and giddiness at the vast immensity unrolled before his eyes.

“Blind in fire with shield and spear,” a man strides in Plate 5. Is this fire an emblem of the fierce elemental fires of Desire and Hatred—both of which are blind?

Plate 6 is entitled “At length for hatching ripe he breaks the shell,” and a delicious cherub having broken the egg proceeds to climb out of it into the sunlit air. Symbol of the material life which forms a concrete circumference around the soul of eternal man, the eggshell is broken, when “at length for hatching ripe,” the veil of death is rent by the liberated spirit.

“I WANT! I WANT!”

Engraving from the “Gates of Paradise,” 1793

In Plate 7 and its successors Blake takes us back again to incidents characteristic of the life of man on earth.—“Alas!” exhibits a boy wantonly catching and killing bright little loves, which flutter across his path like butterflies. Plate 8 is a youth throwing barbed darts at an old man who sits on ruins sword in hand.

“My son, my son, thou treatest me
But as I have instructed thee,”

writes Blake, suggesting the numerous cases of friction and cruel offence which must result from the education of the human soul in selfishness and vainglory.

There is nothing in the series to equal the colossal daring of “I want, I want.” Just a little cross-hatching, a little rough spluttering work with the burin, and we have this bit of marvellous irony. A group of tiny pigmies on a spit of land have reared an enormous ladder against the moon, and are about to start on their journey through star-bespread darkness to the pale crescent so far above them. Mr. Swinburne says that this was originally an ironical sketch satirizing the methods of Art study pursued by “amateurs and connoisseurs”—“scaling with ladders of logic the heaven of invention,” and presuming to measure, reach and gauge the intangible ideal. But in this series Blake has expanded the meaning of the design into the passionate yearning and aching desire of man after things spiritual.

Plate 10 is a study of the sea. A water-colour in washes of Indian ink of very similar composition is in existence, and was on exhibition at Ryder Street in 1904. The water-colour evidently suggested by this plate is the finer work, but it is a marvellous evidence of Blake’s power, that the tiny plate of the “Gates of Paradise” (1⅝ in. by 2 in. only in size) should be capable of representing so infinite a waste of stormy waters. One frantic arm reaches up to Heaven from out the foamy crest of the waves, a minute later to be submerged,—“In Time’s ocean falling, drowned.” That is its significance! No cries of “Help!” will be heard; Man must be overwhelmed by Time.

In the eleventh plate an old man in spectacles ruthlessly clips the wings of a bright boy who wrestles and struggles under the cruel hands. Thus does Age, full of worldly experience and material philosophy, clip the wings of the aspiring soul of Youth.

Walled in by the divisions and materialisms into which Man has fallen through the creation of the generative nature, we see human souls despairing, and full of lassitude, enclosed in depths of icy dungeons, in the twelfth plate. This plate was afterwards taken as the basis of the design Blake made of Count Ugolino and his sons in the tower at Pisa in his Dante series.

In Plate 13 comes the promise of life. A man stretched on his bed with his family watching beside him, suddenly has a vision of “The Immortal Man that cannot die.” After that all is different, and in Plate 14 “the traveller hasteth in the evening” of life to his journey’s end, serenely cheerful, even anxious to shake off mortality, that he may realize his glorious vision the sooner.

But the way to Immortality is through the Gate of the Grave. So in Plate 15 we have the picture of Death’s Door, to which our traveller has arrived at last. This early design embodying Blake’s favourite conception was destined to be enlarged and sublimed into one of the most magnificent inventions of Christian Art. This is the first hint of the perfect final work, and on that account, as well as for its own intrinsic significance here, of the greatest interest.

Death’s Door being opened, the Worm is seen at work in Plate 16. Who shall say how Blake has contrived to make the pale, hooded woman under the tree-roots so symbolic an image of the Worm? There is that about her at which the recoiling flesh shudders and sickens.

THE DELUGE

From W. B. Scott’s Etching of Blake’s
undated Indian Ink Drawing, by kind
permission of Messrs. Chatto and Windus

Yet here, below the dim, twisted roots of the Tree of Physical Being, whence the embryo Man was plucked like a mandrake, is the house of the worm. “I have said to the worm, thou art my mother and my sister,” quotes Blake enigmatically, beneath this leprous dream of mortality. But the enigma has a solution, for the worm at least destroys that body of generative and divided nature to which it is itself so nearly akin, and which has cramped and imprisoned eternal Man while on earth. So that we may be grateful to the worm in the end, for

Weaving to dreams the sexual strife,
And weeping over the web of life.

I have quoted an illuminating phrase here and there from the lines which Blake wrote and called the Keys of the Gates of Paradise. These, however, are but fugitive hints and thoughts suggested by the plates, and not in any real sense “keys” at all. Blake leaves each man to unlock the innermost mystery of those designs for himself. They are steeped all through in his own peculiar hues of thought, subjective to the very verge of the subjectivity allowable to art, but each of them exhibits that pictorial sense without which, however poetical and rare the meaning expressed, they could have no raison d’être—no artistic right to exist. They induce the mood which assists us to their sympathetic comprehension.

After the “Gates of Paradise,” Blake began the production of the London “Prophetic Books,” but we will consider these in the next chapter, and will conclude this early phase of Blake’s work in book making by the consideration of the “Songs of Experience,” which appeared in 1794—five years later than the “Songs of Innocence.”

Again we take up the little book which was the first we handled in the Print Room, for the “Songs of Experience” are bound with the “Songs of Innocence.” The Museum copy bears the double title on the first page as well as the two separate ones, which occur appropriately before each book. Into this first plate, with its kindling title flashing across the page—“Songs of Innocence and Experience showing two contrary states of the human soul”—Blake has wrought some of that intense and passionate feeling which makes the work so valuable as much psychologically as artistically.

Two energetic and expressive figures, a male and a female, symbolize Innocence and Experience, while flames of Desire and Aspiration burn fiercely around them, leaping up to lick the letters of the title, which lie on a ground of flickering and fainting colour.

In the “Songs of Innocence,” the marriage of the poems and designs was complete, and matter and form (poetic and artistic) attained an almost complete identity.

Here, however, the case is somewhat different, the task to be accomplished not being so easily achievable, for the mood is less lyrical and more mystic.

Experience is a hard teacher concerned only with this material life and its limited conditions, and sets itself against the Innocence which retains, in Plato’s phrase, “recollections of things seen” by eternal man before generation here. Experience has nothing to do with vision, but only with facts, and it deals with the results of concrete experiment; never with the flashing spark of heaven-sent inspiration.

Thus the “Songs of Experience” are of far less simple mood and single utterance than their bright forerunners. Something of the remorselessness of experience has passed into these lyrics—for lyrics they still are, though Blake has lost the spontaneity and felicitous gush of melody which came from him so naturally, so rightly, six years previously.

PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM
“SONGS OF EXPERIENCE,” 1794

Of one—not spontaneous certainly, but created little bit by little bit with unerring judgement and rich fancy, struck out like the embossed design on a shield, each blow, each delicately graduated tap and touch, bringing out in clearer relief the magnificence of the heraldic images—of this poem, “The Tyger,” it is impossible to speak too enthusiastically. It is a grand piece of chased metal work, and Blake has done nothing better. The fierce swift rhythm, imitative of the padding footfalls,

Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,

called out Lamb’s critical admiration, and no one was ever better qualified than Lamb to appreciate our painter and poet. It is matter for regret that he came across so little of Blake’s work in either kind, though we shall find him presently with something to say anent the engraving of the “Canterbury Pilgrimage.”

One wishes (profanely no doubt) that our artist had seen fit to make the tiger that illustrates the British Museum copy, yellow and black, rather than blue and bistre and red, which colours seem to have no natural relation to the animal. Is it possible that this page was coloured by Mrs. Blake’s hand in these weird parti-hues?

The “Songs of Experience” are pitted like a dark contrast against the sun-kissed radiance of the “Songs of Innocence.”

One state of mind opposes itself aggressively against the contrary state of mind. One set of impressions is recorded in opposition to the impressions of sometimes the same things, sometimes their correlatives taken from a widely divergent stand-point. Thus the Lamb in the “Songs of Innocence” finds its contrast in the Tiger of the “Songs of Experience.” Infant Joy is set against Infant Sorrow, the ordered beauty and sweetness of one Holy Thursday is the reverse of the despairing cry of pain uttered in the other Holy Thursday. The Divine Image emits its celestial radiance against the cynical brilliance of the Human Abstract, and that other distorted Divine Image.

It is interesting to know that Blake issued the “Songs of Innocence and Experience” at the modest price of from thirty shillings to two guineas at first. Later in life he received four guineas for each copy, and during his last years Sir Thomas Lawrence insisted on paying twelve guineas and Sir Francis Chantrey twenty for copies.

At Messrs. Sotheby’s sale of the Crewe Collection of Blake’s works on March 31st of last year (1903) the price reached for a very perfect copy containing the four title-pages, was £300. The sum would have been wealth to Blake, but it is the world’s way, consecrated now by immemorial tradition, to lay its laurels of reward and appreciation only at the dead feet of its great men.

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

CHAPTER VIII

In the same “Memorable Fancy” from which I have already quoted, Blake continues, “Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He (Isaiah) replied, All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion moved mountains: but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.”

Blake, however, was. He had a fine contempt for argument and proof. Nothing mattered to him but the inner witness, the lively intuition of internal evidence. Convinced as he was of the cruelty of the fate that had chained eternal man into the bondage of the life of the senses and the division of the sexes; safe-guarding each self-hood from merging in the universal, by laws of restraint and prohibition, Blake took upon himself to proclaim a gospel of deliverance, to awaken man to the perception of the Infinite which lay without the clogged-up chinks of his senses.

He passionately advocated—Blake, the peaceful citizen, the faithful husband—the freedom of the senses, that all natural impulses should be enjoyed to the utmost limit and with the frankest delight. The body is but the accident of this life, and its free natural impulses may be trusted, for everything that tends to freedom belongs to eternal life, he thought.

Christ was the supreme Saviour, but to his eyes the Christ of orthodox religion was the God of this world, and therefore Christ needed to be held up again before men and exhibited as He really is, before He could be worshipped in truth.

And Jehovah was no other than Urizen, the cruel creator. In storm and excitement, in wrapt ecstasy and complete carelessness of consequence, Blake plunged into the sea of subjective mysticism, holding up from time to time out of the swaying waters lipped with raging foam, some treasure of thought, some broken image of speculative opinion for the world to gaze at. The pity is, that Blake who, in the “Songs of Innocence and Experience” and in his early poems, had so just, though instinctive and irrational, a sense of the relation of poetic form to matter, as to weave his lyrics into “a unity of effect, like that of a single strain of music,” should, in the “Prophetic Books” have suddenly lost, as it would seem, all perception of the claims of his subject-matter to any body of poetic form at all. The absence of almost all orderly sequence of thought, and this total disregard of the paramount artistic obligations of form, are the distinguishing characteristics of the mystic writings.

It must, however, be recorded in extenuation, that they were composed for the intrinsic benefit which Blake himself derived from their creation. Hints, symbols, rags of ideas set fluttering on the wind of his ever-inventive imagination, suggested so complete a sequence of thought and action to him, that he failed, in his passionate excitement and hot pursuit of them, to reflect that he had forgotten to state for our enlightenment that sequence which seemed to him so obvious. He was not concerned to make his ideas or visions intelligible to the world (the world must learn to decipher them for itself), for were they not fearfully intelligible to himself, absorbing all his life and consciousness?

Like a man intent and fixed before a vast and ever-moving pageant, he throws out a quick word of explanation, an occasional exclamation of enthusiasm, to the blindfolded world at his side. So present is the reality to his senses, that he feels only impatient with the dull creature which requires so much explanation and description. “I have told you, and you did not listen,” he seems to say. But listen as we may, to the point of an anguished intensity, the marvellous Vision, Representation, mystic Something, which is being enacted before Blake, can, with the help of his jerky and disjointed speech, be but vaguely and painfully guessed at by us. Whatever virtue may reside in these dream-like books for the mystic and the occultist, their poetry is not a winged and triumphant spirit any more, but a poor, wan, and halting creature, creeping painfully upon the earth on all fours. Swinburne writes on the subject with poetic eloquence: “To pluck out the heart of Blake’s mystery is a task which every man must be left to attempt for himself, for this prophet is certainly not ‘easier to be played on than a pipe.’... The land lying before us bright with fiery blossom and fruit, musical with blowing branches and falling waters, is not to be seen or travelled in, save by help of such light as lies upon dissolving dreams, and dividing clouds. By moonrise, to the sound of wind at sunset, one may tread upon the limit of this land, and gather as with muffled apprehension, some soft remote sense of the singing of its birds, and flowering of its fields.”

Let these gentle and appropriate words smooth the literary path of the “Prophetic Books” for all who intend to read them. It will be a difficult one for those who would study them seriously, even with the light shed by Mr. Swinburne’s and Messrs. Ellis and Yeats’ pioneer lanterns, for the road is rough and rock-bound, and shrouded, for the most part, in mist.

If we are forced to admit that in the prophecies Blake’s power in the art of poetry was declining, we shall have, on the other hand, the satisfaction of seeing his art as draughtsman and colourist waxing in grandeur, freedom and nobility. More than ever in Blake’s strangely sensitive pictorial temperament we find—to quote Pater’s subtle phrase—that “all things whatever, all poetry, all ideas, however abstract or obscure, float up as visible scene or image.” To many of his lovers, the “Prophetic Books” are among his most precious gifts to us, not for their intrinsic poetic value (which will be estimated in divers manners by divers persons), but as being the vehicle of his finest art. The first one we take up is the “Vision of the Daughters of Albion.” (The daughters of Albion, by the way, have little enough to do with the poem, their office being merely like that of a Greek chorus, to hear the woes of the heroine Oothoon and echo back her cries.) I am here referring to the one in the Print Room, though the Library possesses an almost equally beautiful copy. The book consists of eleven quarto pages, and appeared in 1793, just five years later than “Thel,” to whose mysterious and delicate beauty it has a shadowy relationship. The thread of poetic suggestion running through it like a streak of sunlight is not so easy of following as the broad golden ray of “Thel.” We are met at the very entrance by dim, unreal forms, with strange names—Oothoon, the shadowy female around whom the story centres, Theotormon, her jealous lover, and Bromion, a looming phantasmal personage, not definite enough to be terrible, though he is the evil genius of the piece. So now we are at last introduced to some of the personages of Blake’s curious mythology. The argument—a page of the most delicate and energetic design, representing a radiant young woman “plucking Leutha’s flower,” which, in the form of a man, leaps from the blossom to her lips—contains in its two initial verses the clue to all the ensuing legend. Oothoon is, according to Mr. Swinburne, the spirit of the great western world, “born for freedom and rebellion, but half a slave and half a harlot.” Leutha is the spirit of sensual impulse and indulgence.

Theotormon, to whom Oothoon wings her way across the seas, is the strong, enslaved, convention-bound spirit of Europe. On her way, Oothoon is ravished by Bromion, who appears to be merely brute strength personified, and the jealous and revengeful Theotormon binds them back to back in a cave by the sea, and sits down in utter wretchedness near by. All the rest of the piece is occupied by the mournful wailing of Oothoon, who desires to justify herself, and the sad answers of Theotormon, which make a disquieting music like the wind among pine-trees.

Those who desire to know exactly what every vague phrase and unconnected thought may be ingeniously supposed to symbolize, must be referred to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, who have possibly alighted on the real meaning and intention of these wild fancies. No system, not even that of the Zoas, ingenious as it is, seems quite to convince one that it is the ground plan of Blake’s work. For my own part I shall not attempt systematic explanations of the “Prophetic Books,” for which task, indeed, I am entirely unfitted, but shall merely reserve to myself the right of making suggestions as to possible meanings when they occur to me.

The beauty of the designs is the real glory of this and the following books.

The Argument and a very notable bit of decorative design and colour, representing the Eagle of Theotormon in the act of descending and tearing the beautiful, abandoned, white body of Oothoon, lying on a billowy cloud, should be specially noticed.

There is one extraordinarily fine plate worked in flat, even tints, representing Oothoon and Bromion bound back to back on the sea-shore, while Theotormon, with head buried in arms, sits on a rock above in the very abandon of stony grief. We have seen nothing of Blake’s yet, so bold, decisive, nervous. The massive modelling of the Bromion torso is happily contrasted with the shrinking white slenderness of Oothoon. Beyond this passion-torn group, a calm sea, under a mild afternoon sun, shines deeply blue. We shall come across this plate again in the large book of designs in the Print Room. There, it is heavy and opaque in colouring, and totally different in mood, being gloomy and sinister in the highest degree. The blood-red sun hangs like a lamp in stormy purple clouds. The sea is deeply green. All is ominous. Much more like this latter plate, in colour, than the one issued in the complete work in the Print Room, is another, printed off the same plate, of course, but laid on with an impasto. It was sold at Messrs. Hodgson’s on January 14th, 1904, for £29. Neither it nor that in the “Book of Designs” is so beautiful as the one from which our illustration is taken. The plate in the Library copy is another variation, being soft, mysterious and pale in colour. The clarity and brilliance of the colour, however, must be seen to be appreciated, and this of course, our plate lacks. The writing and printed outlines of this book are in dead beech brown.

BROMION AND OOTHOON BOUND BACK TO BACK
IN THE CAVE OF THEOTORMON

From “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” 1793.
A printed and coloured plate from the Print Room copy

The next book appearing in this year, 1793, is entitled “America,” a prophecy. It consists of eighteen plates. For richness of invention and design none of the books we have yet seen are equal to “America.” The Print Room copy is printed in a dull blue, with a very happy effect, while the duplicate in the Library is in deep sombre green. Gilchrist says that no one who has not seen a coloured copy can judge of the beauty and splendour that adorn its pages. It is a difficult matter to see a coloured copy, as the only one definitely known to exist for many years was Lord Crewe’s copy, which was sold last year at Sotheby’s for £295. However, another coloured copy has appeared from the hitherto unknown collection of a lady in Scotland, and this I had the rare good luck to see before it was sold at Messrs. Hodgson’s in January, 1904, for £207. Indeed it is beautiful, but with a quite other sort of beauty to that of the austere blue-printed copy in the Museum. The two are so different in mood and key as to seem like quite separate and distinct creations. Gilchrist says of the coloured copy which he saw—Lord Crewe’s—that so fair and open were its pages, as to simulate an increase of light on the retina.

That which I examined had the brightness and delicacy of Blake’s colour in the earlier books, combined with the richness and grandeur of the later ones, but happily without the opacity and heaviness that sometimes accompany these later qualities.

Dürer’s etching of “Melancholia” is the only thing in art to which the design on the first page of “America” may be likened, but, in Beethoven’s words: “Es ist mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei.” A great winged giant or Titan, with his despondent head bowed on his knees, and his face utterly shrouded by falling hair, sits chained on the ramparts of the City of Night. Seated on a stone below is a beautiful undraped woman with a little naked child in her arms, and another leaning against her thigh. Heavy clouds roll up behind the genii and the ramparts. The mood of the picture is unutterable. The winged figure is red Orc, who will presently release himself and shatter the religions of Urizen, bringing fire and pestilence and famine in his train. He is Orc, the deliverer, but, like his great prototype, he comes not “to bring peace, but a sword.”

In the wild clamorous poem Orc is described as the “serpent form’d who stands at the gate of Enitharmon to devour her children.” Now Enitharmon is a vast mythic being without any defined personality; she symbolizes sometimes Space and sometimes Nature, while another facet of her various character, as we shall presently discover, is Pity. She is the mother of Orc, of whom, however, she is terrified, and the woman with the children in the frontispiece represents, I think, the same Enitharmon.

FRONTISPIECE TO “AMERICA: A PROPHECY,” 1793

Printed in blue, from the Print Room copy

I cannot attempt to decipher the poem here. Before its roaring frenzy of excitement one is rendered dumb. There is no story properly so called. One merely gathers, that Orc releases himself in order to marry the shadowy daughter of Urthona,—Ah! shadowy indeed! After this, terrible things occur; in especial, that which may be supposed to symbolize the War of Independence between England and America. Whatever the prophecy contained in the poem, this much is clear, that Blake saw in the new world the home and harbinger of Freedom, the foe of spirit-crushing conventions, of shackling traditions and customs. Strangely do the names of Washington, Paine, and the King of England read in connection with “red Orc,” “Enitharmon,” and the mighty shadows of the Blakean mythology. With all his enthusiasm and patient sympathetic study even Mr. Swinburne has to admit of “America” that “it has more of thunder and less of lightning than former prophecies—more of sonorous cloud, and less of explicit fire.”

But a far other verdict must be passed on the designs, of which our illustrations afford a very good idea, at least of the British Museum copy. From the first mysterious print to the last, every page is instinct with vigour and invention, and the disposition of the writing and the design on each page is in accordance with the most exacting and sensitive feeling for composition and decorative effect. Blake had the gift of decoration as Mozart had that of melody. He simply could not help being decorative, though preoccupation with decoration as an end in itself was a thing utterly foreign to his earnest and high artistic aims. In “America” Blake’s outlines are put in with a thick strong line, a singularly happy method of expressing the bold designs. Plate 6, is specially interesting as being evidently his first feeling out after the top part of the design called Death’s Door, which afterwards appeared in its perfected embodiment in Blair’s “Grave.” The lower part of the same design which we saw first in the “Gates of Paradise,” is again repeated with differences in Plate 12 of the “America.” The idea was a favourite one with Blake, and in its various representations is always vigorously and poetically treated.

Plate 7, coming after so much that is alarming, exciting, or of sustained grandeur, comforts the eye and heart with its delicate pastoral tenderness.

A tree, with willowy bending sprays such as only Blake could draw, arches over a green sward, whereon a ram with woolly fleece and heraldically curly horns, lies sleeping. Beside him, on the grass, a naked child lies, relaxed in slumber, while another, cushioned on the ram’s soft back, sleeps too, in joyous ease. In the coloured copy this page appeared particularly rich and satisfying. It has a brilliant iridescent background after the style of the first few pages of the “Songs of Innocence,” but less vernal, more autumnal, in its richness of colour.

In what strange dreams did Blake see the pale woman of Plate 13 lying on the bed of ocean. Quick moving fishes flash around her body in the dim blue twilight, and a sea snake is coiled about her legs. On the top of the same page the body floating on waves is being torn by a vulture.

Many of the plates are quivering with flames which shoot up in spiral tongues to play about the letters of the writing. Incidentally, the writing used in “America” is more fluent—running into dainty pennons and fluttering streamers of decoration—than any used before.

At the sale of Messrs. Hodgson’s before mentioned, a single loose coloured plate of the frontispiece to “America” (Orc chained by the wrists) sold for £20 10s.

We close “America” regretfully, for a wild enchantment emanates from its pages, and entering into the spectator’s mind makes him realize that indeed “everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.”

PAGE FROM “AMERICA: A PROPHECY,” 1793

Printed in blue, from the Print Room copy

In 1794 appeared “Europe, a prophecy.” It has fifteen large plates, but before dwelling on them a word must be said about the prophecy itself. The prelude is the lament of a nameless shadowy female, who rises from out the breast of Orc. She is also daughter to Enitharmon. Her complaint is often musical enough if we could but know what it was all about:

I wrap my turban of thick clouds around my lab’ring head,
And fold the sheety waters as a mantle round my limbs,
Yet the red sun and moon,
And all the overflowing stars, rain down prolific pains.

Blake would seem to have got fairly drunk with the excitement of wild words and musical phrases. There is little or no sequence of ideas, and the prophecy which follows the prelude comes storming forth, full of sonorous sound, but “without form and void.”

All that can be made out from the din of frenetic words is that Enitharmon calls upon her son Orc, “the horrent demon,” to arise and bring with him his brothers and sisters. But in the middle of her speech she falls into a primaeval doze of some eighteen hundred years. Patient and painstaking as the reader may be, an incident of this kind taxes his temper somewhat too severely, more especially as it seems a gratuitously irritating freak on Blake’s part, without any apparent sense or reason to justify it. Persevering, we find that while she is asleep all kinds of dire affliction come upon the race of man, and the wild pelter of words and ideas hither and thither continues to increase in fury. It is like the dancing of the Dervishes—faster and faster, furious and more furious, higher and higher, so quick at last that the eye cannot follow the movements,—and then comes the breaking out of the wild demoniac cries, and the convulsive excitement, which is finally satisfied with nothing but the letting of blood.

After all this incoherent clash of words, full of “flames of Orc, howlings and hissings, shrieks and groans, and voices of despair,” Enitharmon calmly awakes, “nor knew that she had slept, and eighteen hundred years had fled,” and proceeds with the roll call of her sons and daughters as if nothing had happened.

Rintrah, Palamabron, Elynittria Albion’s Angel, Ethinthus, Manatha-Varcyon, Leutha, Antamon, Sotha, Thiralatha and Urizen are the names of some of the spectral shadows which pass before the spectator.

It is a dream of Walpurgis Nacht, obscure and vague; its warrings being no more than the dissolving shadows of fighting men partially discerned on a dark wall.

But if Blake can no longer take us with him into the infinite on the wings of his poetry, he can with his pencil create on a sheet of paper a world of imagination, which in relation to this actual world is evanescent and to some impalpable. But Blake’s magic has caught and held it, as Peleus caught and held the silver-footed Thetis, though she changed from one form to another hoping to frighten him into letting her go, till tired of his persistence she revealed herself to him in her own wondrous form. Even so, Blake caught and held that which his imagination discriminated, undismayed by conditions which cause some men’s heads to reel, until he succeeded in committing it to outline and colour.

The first plate represents “The Ancient of Days setting a compass upon the face of the earth.” (See Proverbs, viii. 27.) The Museum copy has a passage from “Paradise Lost” written, or rather scrawled, in black ink underneath the picture. One wonders whose could have been the irreverent pen to deface in this way a page of the Master’s work. The design itself is one of the finest that ever came from Blake’s hand. The thing is tremendous! Involuntarily the mind seeks for its like only on the roof of the Sistine. Blake’s art owns no master, links itself to no predecessor, save Michael Angelo.

THE ANCIENT OF DAYS SETTING A COMPASS
UPON THE FACE OF THE EARTH.
(See Proverbs, viii. 27)

Frontispiece to “Europe: a Prophecy,” printed 1794
Print coloured by hand

This was the last design to be repeated by his hand. On his deathbed he executed it for his young friend Mr. Tatham. The latter refers to the incident in a letter published in 1803, in the “Rossetti Papers”:

“The Ancient of Days with the compasses was the subject that Blake finished for me on his deathbed. He threw it down and said, ‘There, I hope Mr. Tatham will like it,’ and then said, ‘Kate, I will draw your portrait; you have been a good wife to me.’ And he made a frenzied sketch of her, which, when done, he sang himself joyously and most happily—literally with songs—into the arms of the grim enemy, and yielded up his sweet spirit.”

The conception is of sublimity and boldness, and in the execution of this particular plate the colour is laid on with great care, being shaded and stippled to a high degree of finish. The attitude of the Architect of the Universe is heroic, and is characteristic of Blake in his best manner. Leaning far out from the centre of the sun itself, a grand male figure, with hair and beard streaming in the wind of cosmic motion, measures the space below him with a compass, indicating the orbit on which the world is to travel.

The Museum possesses another edition, as a separate drawing, in one of the portfolios, which we shall examine later. Mr. Sydney Morse possesses yet another, which was on view at Messrs. Carfax’s Gallery; and a fourth, probably the finest of all these different renderings, was sold with the title-page and three plates of “Europe,” at Messrs. Hodgson’s sale for £80.

The frontispiece to “Europe” has a magnificent evil-looking snake on the centre of the page, blue hills and distance seen through its mottled coils.

“The Pilgrim,” some verses by Ann Radcliffe, are scrawled on the blank reverse of the leaf. The first and last time it may be supposed that Ann Radcliffe found herself in such august company! All of the plates in this book are defaced by the same handwriting.

Blake’s writing and the engraved outlines are of a bluish green colour.

“Red Orc” is seen in the second plate climbing up the sky and about to take his station on a bank of cloud outlined boldly against the blue. Below him, in a limbo of darkness, three naked passions in the form of demons are struggling together and falling down into the nether heavens.

On the page entitled “a Prophecy” a lovely angel takes her despairing flight through the sky. Her wings merge from white and mauve to a deep blue like that of a pigeon’s neck, her beautiful feet gleam white against the rosy cloud behind, and her hair falls over her face in abandon of grief or fear or despair—we know not which. All the different and delicate shades in an hydrangea are to be found in this plate, and would seem to have suggested its subtle colour harmonies.

For pure melody of line the next plate surpasses it, however. Enitharmon, fierce, beautiful, nude, descends in a cloud to awaken Orc, who lies face downward on the earth, the outline of his figure suggesting a young love-god rather than the fierce personality of the terrible Orc. Even the flames about his head might be those of love. The colour is very delicate and transparent.

Then follow two full-page interiors, which, in spite of the fine drawing and colour, oppress, with the uncomfortable sensation of confinement, airlessness! The fact is, that we are so accustomed to Blake’s open air windy wilds, and broad spaces of sky and cloud, that we do not feel at home with him when he takes us within doors.