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 Another Random Document on
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was purely lyrical, and when this evanescent endowment forsook
him, devoid as he was of all plastic literary power, he had no Oenone
or Ulysses to replace his Claribels and Eleanores. His verse became a
mere accompaniment of his pictorial art, and harmonising with its
vagueness and obscurity, necessarily lacked the symmetry with
which a colourist can dispense, but which is essential to a poet. Even
more remarkable than the music of Blake’s early verses, unparalleled
in their age, is the fact, vouched for by J. T. Smith, the biographer of
Nollekens and Keeper of Prints at the British Museum, that he had
composed tunes for them, which he could only repeat by ear from
his ignorance of musical notation. Some of these, Smith says, were
exquisitely beautiful.
At the appearance of the Poetical Sketches (1783), Blake had for a
year been a married man, and was actively striving to make a living
as an engraver. Most of his work of this nature at this time was
executed after Stothard. It cannot be disputed that this graceful
artist largely influenced Blake’s style in its more idyllic aspects;
whether, as he was afterwards inclined to assert, Stothard’s
invention owed something to him is not easy to determine. In 1784
he lost his father, a mild, pious man, who had well performed his
duty to his son. Blake’s elder brother James took his business, and
the artist, who had probably inherited some little property, returned
from Green Street to Broad Street, and, establishing himself next
door to his brother, launched into speculation as a print-seller in
partnership with a former fellow apprentice named Parker, taking his
brother Robert as a gratuitous pupil. In 1785 he sent four drawings
to the Academy. Three, illustrative of the story of Joseph, were
shown in the International Exhibition of 1862, and are described by
Gilchrist as “full of soft tranquil beauty, specimens of Blake’s earlier
style; a very different one from that of his later and better-known
works.” This is probably as much as to say that he then wrought
much under the influence of Stothard, after whom he engraved the
subject from David Simple given here; for the earlier design
illustrative of the passage in Romeo and Juliet is characteristically
Blakean. Mr. Gilchrist adds, “the design is correct and blameless, not
to say tame (for Blake), the colour full, harmonious and sober.” Mr.
Rossetti says that the figure of Joseph, in the third drawing, “is
especially pure and impulsive.”

Illustration from “David Simple.” Engraved by

W. Blake after T. Stothard, R.A.

In 1787 Blake’s experiment in print-selling came to an end,

through disagreements, it is said, with his partner; but as neither
appears to have afterwards pursued the calling, it is probable that it
had never been profitable. Parker obtained some distinction as an
engraver, chiefly after Stothard, and died in 1805. In February, 1787,
Blake had sustained a severe loss in the death of his brother and
pupil Robert. Blake himself nursed the patient for some weeks, and
when at last the end came, it is not surprising that he should have
beheld his brother’s spirit “arise and clap its hands for joy.” Not long
after, as he asserted, the spirit appeared to him in a dream, and
revealed to him that process of printing from copper plates which, as
we shall see, had the most decisive influence upon his work as an
artist. Writing to Hayley in 1800, he says, “Thirteen years ago I lost
a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit,
and see him in remembrance in the regions of my imagination. I
hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate.” “The ruins of
Time,” he finely subjoins, “build mansions in Eternity.”
From this time Blake’s sole assistant was his wife, whom he
carefully instructed, and who tinted many of the coloured drawings
which henceforth form the more characteristic portion of his work.
After giving up his business as a print-seller, he removed from Broad
Street to 28, Poland Street. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats conjecture that
this may have been to escape the blighting influence of his
commercial brother next door, but it is more probable that his
venture had impoverished him, and that he was obliged to give up
housekeeping.
 CHAPTER II
Blake’s Technical Methods—“Songs of Innocence” and
“Songs of Experience”—Life in Poland Street and in
Lambeth—Mystical Poetry and Art.
It was during his residence in Poland Street that Blake first
appeared in that mingled character of poet and painter which marks
him off so conspicuously from other painters and other poets.
Painting has often been made the handmaid of poetry; it was Blake’s
idea, without infringing upon this relationship, to make poetry no
less the handmaid of painting by employing his verse, engraved and
beautified with colour, to enhance the artistic value of his designs, as
well as to provide them with the needful basis of subject. The same
principle may probably be recognised in those Oriental scrolls where
the graceful labour of the scribe is as distinctly a work of art as the
illustration of the miniaturist; but of these Blake can have known
nothing. Necessity was with him the mother of invention. Since the
appearance of Poetical Sketches he had written much that he
desired to publish—but how to pay for printing? So severely had he
suffered by his unfortunate commercial adventure that when at
length, as he firmly believed, the new process by which his song and
his design could be facsimiled together was revealed by his brother’s
spirit in a dream, a half-crown was the only coin his wife and he
possessed between them in the world. One shilling and tenpence of
this was laid out in providing the necessary materials.
The technical method to which Blake now resorted is thus
described by Mr. Gilchrist: “It was quite an original one. It consisted
of a species of engraving in relief, both words and designs. 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 facsimiles; 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. He ground and
mixed his water-colours himself on a piece of statuary marble, after
a method of his own, with common carpenter’s glue diluted. The
colours he used were few and simple: indigo, cobalt, gamboge,
vermilion, Frankfort-black freely, ultramarine rarely, chrome not at
all. These he applied with a camel’s-hair brush, not with a sable,
which he disliked. He taught Mrs. Blake to take off the impressions
with care and delicacy, which such plates signally needed; and also
to help in tinting them from his drawings with right artistic feeling; in
all of which tasks she, to her honour, much delighted. The size of the
plates was small, for the sake of economising copper, something
under five inches by three. The number of engraved pages in the
Songs of Innocence alone was twenty-seven. They were done up in
boards by Mrs. Blake’s hand, forming a small octavo; 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.”

The Lamb. Infant Joy. From Blake’s “Songs

of Innocence.”
 The total effect of this process is tersely expressed by Mr. Rossetti,
“The art is made to permeate the poetry.” It resulted in the
publication of Songs of Innocence in 1789, two years after its
discovery or revelation. Other productions, of that weird and
symbolic character in which Blake came more and more to delight,
followed in quick succession. These will claim copious notice, but for
the present we may pass on to Songs of Experience, produced in
1794, so much of a companion volume to Songs of Innocence that
the two are usually found within the same cover. Neither attracted
much attention at the time. Charles Lamb says: “I have heard of his
poems, but have never seen them.” He is, however, acquainted with
“Tiger, tiger,” which he pronounces “glorious.” The price of the two
sets when issued together was from thirty shillings to two guineas—
an illustration of the material service which Art can render to Poetry
when it is considered that, published simply as poems, they would in
that age have found no purchasers at eighteenpence. This price was
nevertheless absurdly below their real value, and was enhanced
even during the artist’s lifetime. It came to be five guineas, and late
in his life friends, from the munificent Sir Thomas Lawrence
downwards, would commission sets tinted by himself at from ten to
twenty guineas as a veiled charity.
Of the poems and illustrations in Songs of Innocence and Songs of
Experience Gilchrist justly declares that their warp and woof are
formed in one texture, and that to treat of them separately is like
pulling up a daisy by the roots out of the green sward in which it
springs. One essential characteristic inspires them both, and may be
defined as childish fearlessness, the innocent courage of the infant
who puts his hand upon the serpent and the cockatrice. Any one but
Blake would have feared to publish designs and verses apparently so
verging upon the trivial, and which indeed would have been trivial—
and worse, affected—if the emanation of almost any other brain, or
the execution of almost any other hand. Being his, their sincerity is
beyond question, and they are a valuable psychological document as
establishing the possibility of a man of genius and passion reaching
thirty with the simplicity of a child. Hardly anything else in literature
or art, unless some thought in Shakespeare, so powerfully conveys
the impression of a pure elemental force, something absolutely
spontaneous, innocent of all contact with and all influence from the
refinements of culture. They certainly are not as a rule powerful, and
contrast forcibly with the lurid and gigantic conceptions which if we
did not remember that the same Dante depicted The Tower of
Famine and Matilda gathering Flowers, we could scarcely believe to
have proceeded from the same mind. Their impressiveness proceeds
from a different source; their primitive innocence and simplicity, and
the rebuke which they seem to administer to artifice and refinement.
Even great artists and inspired poets, suddenly confronted with such
pure unassuming nature, may be supposed to feel as the disciples
must have felt when the Master set the little child among them. No
more characteristic examples could have been given than “The
Lamb” and “Infant Joy” from Songs of Innocence, and “The Fly” and
“The Tiger” from Songs of Experience selected for reproduction here
from an uncoloured copy in the library of the British Museum. There
is frequently a great difference in the colouring of the copies. That in
the Museum Print Room is in full rich colour, while others are very
lightly and delicately tinted.
 From a coloured copy of the “Songs of
Innocence and Experience.” British Museum.

It is of course much easier to convey an idea of the merits of

Blake’s verse than of his painting, for the former loses nothing by
transcription, and the latter everything. The merit of the latter, too,
is a variable quantity, depending much upon the execution of the
coloured plates. The uncoloured are but phantoms of Blake’s ideas.
The general characteristics of his art in these books may be
described as caressing tenderness and gentle grace, evinced in
elegant human figures, frequently drooping like willows or
recumbent like river deities, and in sinuous stems and delicate
sprays, often as profuse as delicate. The foliated ornament in “On
Another’s Sorrow,” for instance, seems like a living thing, and would
almost speak without the aid of the accompanying verse. The figures
usually are too small to impress by themselves, and rather seem
subsidiary parts of the general design than the dominant factors.
They mingle with the inanimate nature portrayed, as one note of a
multitudinous concert blends with another. Yet “The Little Girl Found”
tells its story by itself powerfully enough; and the innocent
Bacchanalianism of the chorus in the “Laughing Song” is conveyed
with truly Lyæan spirit and energy.
The prevalent cheerfulness of the Songs of Innocence is of course
modified in Songs of Experience. The keynote of the former is
admirably struck in the introductory poem:—
Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me.

“Pipe a song about a Lamb!”

So I piped with merry cheer.
“Piper, pipe that song again.”
So I piped; he wept to hear.

“Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;

Sing thy songs of happy cheer!”
So I sang the same again.
While he wept with joy to hear.

“Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read.”
So he vanished from my sight;
And I plucked a hollow reed.

And I made a rural pen,

And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.
 Frontispiece of Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Stories.”

This incarnate enigma among men could manifestly be as

transparent as crystal when he knew exactly what he wished to say
—a remark which may not be useless to the student of his mystical
and prophetical writings. The character of Songs of Experience,
published in 1794, when he had attained the age so often fatal to
men of genius, is conveyed more symbolically, yet intelligibly, in “The
Angel”:—
 I dreamt a dream! What can it mean?
And that I was a maiden Queen
Guarded by an Angel mild:
Witless woe was ne’er beguiled!

And I wept both night and day,

And he wiped my tears away;
And I wept both day and night,
And hid from him my heart’s delight.

So he took his wings and fled;

Then the man blushed very red.
I dried my tears and armed my fears
With ten thousand shields and spears.

Soon my Angel came again;

I was armed, he came in vain;
For the time of youth was fled,
And gray hairs were on my head.

The Fly. The Tyger. From Blake’s “Songs

of Experience.”

Generally speaking, the Songs of Experience may be said to

answer to their title. They exhibit an awakening of thought and an
occupation with metaphysical problems alien to the Songs of
Innocence. Such a stanza as this shows that Blake’s mind had been
busy:—

Nought loves another as itself

Nor venerates another so;
Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know.

These ideas, however, are always conveyed, as in the remainder

of the poem quoted, through the medium of a concrete fact
represented by the poet. Perhaps the finest example of this fusion of
imagination and thought is this stanza of the most striking and best
known of all the poems, “The Tiger”:—

When the stars threw down their spears

And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

An evident, though probably unconscious, reminiscence of “When

the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for
joy,” and like it for that extreme closeness to the inmost essence of
things which the author of the Book of Job enjoyed in virtue of the
primitive simplicity of his age and environment, and Blake through a
childlike temperament little short of preternatural in an age like ours.
It may be added, that although the pieces in Songs of Innocence
and Songs of Experience are of very unequal degrees of poetical
merit, none want the infallible mark of inspired poetry—
spontaneous, inimitable melody.
 Page of Young’s “Night Thoughts.” Illustrated by W. Blake.

Both the simplicity and the melody, however, are absent from the
remarkable works with which Blake had been occupying himself
during the interval between the publication of the two series of his
songs, which, with their successors, have given him a peculiar and
unique reputation in their own weird way, but could not by
themselves have given him the reputation of a poet. Blake’s plain
prose, as we shall see, is much more effective. In a strictly artistic
point of view, nevertheless, these compositions reveal higher
capacities than would have been inferred from the idyllic beauty of
the pictorial accompaniments of Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Before discussing these it will be convenient to relate the chief
circumstances of Blake’s life during the period of their production,
and up to the remarkable episode of his migration to Felpham. They
were not memorable or striking, but one of them had considerable
influence upon his development. In 1791 he was employed by
Johnson, the Liberal publisher of St. Paul’s Churchyard, and as such
a minor light of his time, to illustrate Mary Wollstonecraft’s Tales for
Children with six plates, both designed and engraved by him, one of
which accompanies this essay. They are much in the manner of
Stothard. This commission brought Blake as a guest to Johnson’s
house, where he became acquainted with a republican coterie—Mary
Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Paine, Holcroft, Fuseli—with whose political
opinions he harmonised well, though totally dissimilar in
temperament from all of them, except Fuseli, who gave him several
tokens of interest and friendship. These acquaintanceships, and the
excitement of the times, led Blake to indite, and, which is more
extraordinary, Johnson to publish, the first of an intended series of
seven poetical books on the French Revolution. This, Gilchrist tells
us, was a thin quarto, without illustrations, published without Blake’s
name, and priced at a shilling. Gilchrist probably derived this
information from a catalogue, for he carefully avoids claiming to
have seen the book, which seems to have also escaped the
researches of all Blake’s other biographers. It must be feared that it
is entirely lost. Gilchrist must, however, have known something more
of it if his assertion that the other six books were actually written but
not printed, “events taking a different turn from the anticipated one,”
is based upon anything besides conjecture.
 9 I want! I want! 10 Help! Help!

11 Aged Ignorance. 15 Death’s Door.

In 1793 Blake removed from Poland Street to Hercules Buildings,

Lambeth, then a row of suburban cottages with little gardens. Here
he engraved his friend Flaxman’s designs for the Odyssey, to replace
plates engraved by Piroli and lost in the voyage from Italy, whence
Flaxman had returned after seven years’ absence. In 1795 he
designed three illustrations for Stanley’s translation of Burger’s
“Lenore,” and in 1796 executed a much more important work, 537
drawings for an edition of Young’s Night Thoughts projected by a
publisher named Edwards. Forty-three were engraved and published
in 1797, but the undertaking was carried no further for want of
encouragement, and the designs, after remaining long in the
publisher’s family, eventually came into the hands of Mr. Bain of the
Haymarket, who is still the possessor. The most important are
described by Mr. Frederic Shields in the appendix to the second
volume of Gilchrist’s biography. Mr. Shields’ descriptions are so
fascinating[3] that from them alone one would be inclined to rate the
drawings very high: but Mr. Gilchrist thinks these ill adapted for the
special purpose of book illustration which they were destined to
subserve, and reminds us that the absence of colour is a grave loss.
Blake is said to have been paid only a guinea a plate for the forty-
three engravings, on which he worked for a year. The Lambeth
period, however, seems not to have been an unprosperous one, for
he had many pupils. Several curious anecdotes of it were related
after his death on the alleged authority of Mrs. Blake, but their truth
seems doubtful. It is certain that during this period he met with the
most constant of his patrons, Mr. Thomas Butts, who for nearly thirty
years continued a steady buyer of his drawings, and but for whom
he would probably have fallen into absolute distress.
It is now time to speak of the literary works—“pictured poesy,” like
the woven poesy of The Witch of Atlas—produced during this period.
In 1789, the year of publication of the Songs of Innocence, the
series opens with Thel. In 1790 comes The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell; in 1793, The Gates of Paradise, The Vision of the Daughters of
Albion, and America; in 1794, Europe, A Prophecy, and Urizen; in
1795, The Song of Los, and The Book of Ahaniah. In 1797 Blake
seems to have written, or to have begun to write, the mystical poem
ultimately entitled Vala, never published by him, and more than fifty
years after his death found in Linnell’s possession in such a state of
confusion that it took Messrs. Ellis and Yeats days to arrange the
MS., which they fondly deem to be now in proper order. It is printed
in the third volume of their work on Blake. Tiriel is undated, but
would seem to be nearly contemporary with Thel.
 The Gates of Paradise constitutes an exception to the general
spirit of the works of this period, the accompanying text, though
mystical enough, being lyrical and not epical. The seventeen
beautiful designs, emblematical of the incidents necessarily
associated with human nature, are well described by Allan
Cunningham as “a sort of devout dream, equally wild and lovely.”
The merits of this remarkable series of works will always be a
matter of controversy. “Whether,” as Blake himself says, “whether
this is Jerusalem or Babylon, we know not.” It must be so, for they
are purely subjective, there is no objective criterion; they admit of
comparison with nothing, and can be tested by no recognised rules.
In the whole compass of human creation there is perhaps hardly
anything so distinctively an emanation of the mind that gave it birth.
Visions they undoubtedly are, and, as Messrs. Ellis and Yeats well
say, they are manifestly not the production of a pretender to
visionary powers. Whatever Blake has here put down, pictorially or
poetically, is evidently a record of something actually discerned by
the inner eye. This, however, leaves the question of their value still
open. To the pictorial part, indeed, almost all are agreed in attaching
a certain value, though the warmth of appreciation is widely
graduated. But literary estimation is not only discrepant but hostile;
some deem them revelation, others rhapsody. The one thing certain
is the general tendency towards Pantheism which Mr. Swinburne has
made the theme of an elaborate essay. To us they seem an
exemplification of the truth that no man can serve two masters.
Blake had great gifts, both as poet and artist, and he aspired not
only to employ both, but to combine both in the same work. At first
this was practicable, but soon the artistic faculty grew while the
poetical dwindled. Not only did the visible speech of painting become
more important to him than the viewless accents of verse, but his
poetry became infected with the artistic method. He allowed a
latitude to his language which he ought to have reserved for his
form and colour, and became as hieroglyphic in a speech where
hieroglyphs are illegitimate as in one where they are permissible.
This is proved by the fact that the decline in the purity of poetical
form and in the perspicuity of poetical language proceed pari passu.
Thel, the earliest, is also both the most luminous and the most
musical of these pieces. Could Blake have schooled himself to have
written such blank verse as he had already produced in Edward the
Third and Samson, Thel would have been a very fine poem. Even as
it is its lax, rambling semi-prose is full of delicate modulations:

The daughters of the Seraphim led round their sunny flocks,

All but the youngest; she in paleness sought the secret air
To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day.
Down by the river of Adera her soft voice is heard,
And thus her gentle lamentation falls like morning dew.

In every succeeding production, however, there is less of metrical

beauty, and thought and expression grow continually more and more
amorphous. Blake may not improbably have been influenced by
Ossian, whose supposed poems were popular in his day, and from
whom some of his proper names, such as Usthona, seem to have
been adopted. Many then deemed that Ossian had demonstrated
form to be a mere accident of poetry instead of, as in truth it is, an
indissoluble portion of its essence. There is certainly a strong family
resemblance between Blake’s shadowy conceptions and Ossian’s
misty sublimities. On the other hand, he may be credited with
having made a distinguished disciple in Walt Whitman, who would
not, we think, have written as he did if Blake had never existed.
What was pardonable in one so utterly devoid of the sentiment of
beautiful form as Whitman, was less so in one so exquisitely gifted
as Blake. Both derive some advantages from their laxity, especially
the poet of Democracy, but both suffer from the inability of poetry,
divorced from metrical form, to take a serious hold upon the
memory. One reads and admires, and by and by the sensation is of
the passage of a great procession of horsemen and footmen and
banners, but no distinct impression of a single countenance.
The general effect of these strange works upon the average mind
is correctly expressed by Gilchrist, when he says, speaking of
Europe: “It is hard to trace out any distinct subject, any plan or
purpose, or to determine whether it mainly relates to the past, the
present, or things to come. And yet its incoherence has a grandeur
about it as of the utterance of a man whose eyes are fixed on
strange and awful sights, invisible to bystanders.” What, then, did
Blake suppose himself to behold? Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have
devoted an entire volume of their three-volume work on Blake to the
exposition of his visions. Their comment is often highly suggestive,
but it is seldom convincing. When the right interpretation of a
symbol has been found, it is usually self-evident. Not so with their
explanations, which appear neither demonstrably wrong nor
demonstrably right. Not that Blake talked aimless nonsense; we are
conscious of a general drift of thought in some particular direction
which seems to us to offer a general affinity to the thought of the
ancient Gnostics. It would be interesting if some competent person
would endeavour to determine whether the resemblance goes any
deeper than externals. Blake certainly knew nothing of the Gnostics
at first hand, nor is it probable that he could have gained any
knowledge of them from the mystical writers he did study, Behmen
and Swedenborg. But similar tendencies will frequently incarnate
themselves in individuals at widely remote periods of the world’s
history without evidence of direct filiation. Even so exceptional a
personage as Blake cannot be considered apart from his age, and his
age, among its other aspects, was one of mesmerism and
illuminism. The superficial resemblance of his writings to those of
the Gnostics is certainly remarkable. Both embody their imaginations
in concrete forms; both construct elaborate cosmogonies and
obscure myths; both create hierarchies of principalities and powers,
and equip their spiritual potentates with sonorous appellations; both
disparage matter and its Demiurgus. “I fear,” said Blake to Robinson,
“that Wordsworth loves nature, and nature is the work of the devil.
The devil is in us as far as we are nature.” The chief visible
difference, that the Gnostics’ philosophy tends to asceticism, and
Blake’s to enjoyment, may perhaps be explained by the
consideration that he was a poet, and that they were philosophers
and divines. Perhaps the best preparation for any student of Blake
who might wish to investigate this subject further would be to read
the article in the Dictionary of Christian Biography upon the Pistis
Sophia, the only Gnostic book that has come down to us, and one
which Blake would have delighted in illustrating. The Gnostic belief
in the all-importance of the transcendent knowledge which comes of
immediate perception (γνῶσις) reappears in him with singular
intensity. “Men are admitted into heaven,” he says, “not because
they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions,
but because they have cultivated their understandings. The fool shall
not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy.” Nothing in Blake,
perhaps, is so Gnostic as the strange poem, The Everlasting Gospel,
first published by Mr. Rossetti, though many things in it would have
shocked the Gnostics.

TITLE PAGE FROM THE

BOOK OF THEL.

The strictly literary criticism of Blake’s mystical books may be

almost confined to the Book of Thel, for this alone possesses
sufficient symmetry to allow a judgment to be formed upon it as a
whole. The others are like quagmires occasionally gay with brilliant
flowers; but Thel, though its purpose may be obscure, is at all
events coherent, with a beginning and an end. Thel, “youngest
daughter of the Seraphim,” roves through the lower world lamenting
the mortality of beautiful things, including her own. All things with
which she discourses offer her consolation, but to no purpose. At
last she enters the realm of Death himself.

The eternal gates’ terrific porter lifted the northern bar;

Thel entered in and saw the secrets of the land unknown.
She saw the couches of the dead, and where the fibrous root
Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists:
A land of sorrows and of tears, where never a smile was seen.

She wandered in the land of clouds, through valleys dark

listening
Dolours and lamentations; waiting oft beside a dewy grave
She stood in silence, listening to the voices of the ground,
Till to her own grave-plot she came, and there she sat down,
And heard this voice of sorrow breathed from the hollow pit.

The effect of the voice of sorrow upon Thel is answerable to that

of the spider upon little Miss Muffet. This abrupt conclusion injures
the effect of a piece which otherwise may be compared to a strain of
soothing music, suggestive of many things, but giving definite
expression to none. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, however, have no
difficulty in assigning a meaning. Thel, according to them, is “the
pure spiritual essence,” her grief is the dread of incarnation, and her
ultimate flight is a return “to the land of pure unembodied innocence
from whence she came.” Yet her forsaking this land is represented as
her own act, and it is difficult to see how she could have “led round
her sunny flocks” in it if she had not been embodied while she
inhabited it. At the same time, if Messrs. Ellis and Yeats are right, no
interpretation of Blake can be disproved by any inconsistency that it
may seem to involve. “The surface,” they say, “is perpetually, as it
were, giving way before one, and revealing another surface below it,
and that again dissolves when we try to study it. The making of
religions melts into the making of the earth, and that fades away
into some allegory of the rising and the setting of the sun. It is all
like a great cloud full of stars and shapes, through which the eye
seeks a boundary in vain.”

Design from the “Book of Urizen.” By W. Blake.

Mr. Yeats, putting his interpretation of Blake’s symbolism more

tersely into the preface to his excellent edition of the Poetical Works,
describes it as shadowing forth the endless conflict between the
Imagination and the Reason, which, we may add, the Gnostics
would have expressed as the strife between the Supreme Deity and
the god of this world, the very phrase which Mr. Yeats himself uses
in describing Urizen, Blake’s Evil Genius, “the maker of dead law and
blind negation,” contrasted as the Gnostics would have contrasted
him with Los, the deity of the living world. Blake, therefore, has
points of contact with the representatives of the French Revolution
on one side, and with Coleridge on the other. Mr. Yeats’s
interpretation is in itself coherent and plausible, but the question
whether it can be fairly deduced from Blake himself is one on which
few are entitled to pronounce, and the causes of Blake’s obscurity
are not so visible as its consequences. To us, as already said, much
of it appears to arise from his imperfect discrimination between the
provinces of speech and of painting. His discourse frequently seems
a hieroglyphic which would have been more intelligible if it could
have been expressed in the manner proper to hieroglyphics by
pictorial representation. As Mr. Smetham says of some of the
designs, “Thought cannot fathom the secret of their power, and yet
the power is there.” It seems evident that the poem, when a
complete lyric, generally preceded the picture in Blake’s mind, and
that the latter must usually be taken as a gloss, in which he seeks to
illustrate by means of visible representation what he was conscious
of having left obscure by verbal expression. The exquisite song of
the Sunflower, for example, certainly existed before the very slight
accompanying illustration.

Ah Sunflower, weary of time,

Who counted the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done.

Where the youth, pined away with desire,

And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire
Where my sunflower wishes to go.

The first of these stanzas is perfectly clear: the second requires no

interpretation to a poetical mind, but will not bear construing strictly,
and its comprehension is certainly assisted by the slight fugitive
design lightly traced around the border. Generally the pictorial
illustration of Blake’s thought is much more elaborate, but in Songs
of Innocence and Experience it almost always seems to have grown
out of the poem. In the less inspired Prophetical Books, on the other
hand, the pictorial representation, even when present only to the
artist’s mind, seems to have frequently suggested or modified the
text. An example may be adduced from The Book of Thel.

Why an ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?

Blake had noted the external likeness of the convolutions of the

ear to the convolutions of a whirlpool; therefore the ear shall be
described as actually being what it superficially resembles, and
because the whirlpool sucks in ships, the ear shall suck in creations.
It must also be remembered that Blake’s belief that his works were
given him by inspiration prevented his revising them, and that they
were stereotyped by the method of their publication. No
considerable productions of the human mind, it is probable, so
nearly approach the character of absolutely extemporaneous
utterances.
Before passing from the literary to the artistic expression of
Blake’s genius in these books, something must be said of the
remarkable appendix to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell entitled
Proverbs of Hell. These are a number of aphoristic sayings,
impregnated with Blake’s peculiarities of thought and expression, but
for the most part so shrewd and pithy as to demonstrate the
author’s sanity, at least at this time of his life. The following are
some of the more striking:—
 Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to
learn of the crow.
The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.
He who has suffered you to impose on him, knows you.
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
One law for the lion and ox is oppression.
The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.

These are not the scintillations of reason which may occasionally

illumine the chaos of a madman’s brain, but bespeak a core of good
sense quite inconsistent with general mental disturbance, though
sufficiently compatible with delusion on particular subjects. With
incomparable art, Shakespeare has imparted a touch of wildness to
Hamlet’s shrewdest sayings; but Blake speaks rather as Polonius
would have spoken if it had been possible for Polonius to speak in
tropes.

FINAL PAGE FROM THE

BOOK OF THEL.
 From the difficult subject of the interpretation of Blake’s mystical
designs we pass with satisfaction to the artistic qualities of the
designs themselves. On this point there is an approximation to
unanimity. To some the sublime, to others the grotesque, may seem
to preponderate, but all will allow them to be among the most
remarkable and original series of conceptions that ever emanated
from a mortal brain. To whatever exceptions they may be liable, it
enlarges one’s apprehension of the compass of human faculties to
know that human faculties have been adequate to their production.
They may be ranked with the most imaginative passages of Paradise
Lost, and of Byron’s Cain as an endeavour of the mind to project
itself beyond the visible and tangible, and to create for itself new
worlds of grandeur and of gloom in height and abyss and interstellar
space. Wonderful indeed is the range of imagination displayed, even
though we cannot shut our eyes to some palpable repetitions. In the
opinion, however, of even so sympathetic a critic as Dr. Wilkinson,
Blake deserves censure for having degenerated into mere
monstrosity. “Of the worst aspect of Blake’s genius,” he says, “it is
painful to speak. In his Prophecies of America, his Visions of the
Daughters of Albion, and a host of unpublished drawings, earth-born
might has banished the heavenlier elements of art, and exists
combined with all that is monstrous and diabolical. The effect of
these delineations is greatly heightened by the antiquity which is
engraven on the faces of those who do and suffer in them. We have
the impression that we are looking down into the hells of the ancient
people, the Anakim, the Nephilim, and the Rephaim. Their human
forms are gigantic petrifactions, from which the fires of lust and
intense selfish passion have long dissipated what was animal and
vital, leaving stony limbs and countenances expressive of despair
and stupid cruelty.” We, on the other hand, should rather criticise
Blake for having failed to be as appalling as he meant to be. His
power, as it seems to us, consisted rather in the vivid imagination
than in the actual rendering of scenes of awe and horror. Far inferior
artists have produced more thrilling effects of this sort with much
simpler means. It would be wrong to say that his visions appear
unreal, but they do appear at a remove from reality, a world seen
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