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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of William Blake, by Irene Langridge
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: William Blake
+       A Study of His Life and Art Work
+
+Author: Irene Langridge
+
+Release Date: September 12, 2011 [EBook #37407]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM BLAKE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian
+Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM BLAKE
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: FROM BLAIR'S "GRAVE": THE LAST JUDGMENT
+
+Engraved by L. Schiavonetti after Blake's design. 1808]
+
+
+
+
+  WILLIAM BLAKE
+
+  A STUDY OF HIS LIFE AND ART WORK
+
+
+  BY IRENE LANGRIDGE
+
+
+  LONDON
+  GEORGE BELL AND SONS
+  1904
+
+
+
+
+  CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
+  TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Some years ago, I became deeply interested in William Blake, and made
+myself familiar with all that our public collections in London contain of
+his art-work. It seemed to me that this work was still so little known and
+appreciated by the public, that a short book might well be written to
+serve as a pointer to our national Blake treasures. The standard works on
+Blake--Gilchrist's Life, Mr. A. C. Swinburne's Critical Essay, Messrs.
+Ellis and Yeats' exhaustive volumes, and Mr. W. M. Rossetti's Aldine
+Essay--are of great literary excellence and high critical quality, and
+must ever remain the great authorities on the subject; but, owing to these
+works being either out of print, very lengthy, very expensive, or
+unillustrated, a want may be supplied by, and an opportunity of usefulness
+open to, such a book as the present one. Different in scope as it is from
+any other book on Blake, and modest in aim, it deals with the poet-artist
+as he is manifested in those works of his which are accessible to the
+public.
+
+In seeking to sketch again his artistic personality, I have been guided by
+the conclusions of his eminent biographers and critics wherever they
+coincided with my own intuitive convictions. But in the study of a
+character and work so out of the usual, so exotic and strange as those of
+Blake, unanimity of opinion and judgement is hardly to be hoped for, and
+the variety of points of view from which each new student sees him, may
+assist to the rounding and filling out of the portrait drawn in so
+masterly a manner in the first instance by Alexander Gilchrist.
+
+My best thanks are due to Mr. A. B. Langridge for reading my proofs and
+for the photographs which he took expressly to illustrate this volume.
+Also to Mr. Frederic Shields for numerous acts of kindness and the loan of
+original Blake drawings, to Sir Charles Dilke, to Messrs. Chatto and
+Windus, to Mr. Laurence Binyon, Mr. G. K. Fortescue, and to Dr. G. C.
+Williamson for help given to me in various ways.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                               PAGE
+
+     I. EARLY YEARS                                        1
+
+    II. LIFE AT FELPHAM                                   21
+
+   III. THE PROCESSION OF THE PILGRIMS                    32
+
+    IV. DECLINING YEARS                                   45
+
+     V. HIS RELIGIOUS VIEWS                               57
+
+    VI. HIS MYSTICAL NATURE                               72
+
+   VII. HIS ART WORK                                      80
+
+        Songs of Innocence.
+        Book of Thel.
+        Gates of Paradise.
+        Songs of Experience.
+        Tales for Children.
+
+  VIII. THE PROPHETIC BOOKS                              101
+
+        Vision of the Daughters of Albion.
+        America.
+        Europe.
+
+    IX. THE PROPHETIC BOOKS, continued                   116
+
+        Book of Urizen.
+        The Small Book of Designs.
+        The Large Book of Designs.
+        Song of Los.
+        Book of Los.
+        Jerusalem.
+        Milton.
+
+     X. WORK IN ILLUSTRATION                             136
+
+        Young's "Night Thoughts."
+        Blair's "Grave."
+        Thornton's "Pastorals."
+        The Book of Job.
+
+    XI. WORK IN THE EXHIBITION OF 1904                   159
+
+   XII. ENGRAVINGS AND DRAWINGS IN THE PRINT ROOM        176
+
+        The Canterbury Pilgrimage.
+        Dante.
+        Pencil Sketches.
+        Works in the National Gallery.
+
+  INDEX                                                  195
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                      TO FACE PAGE
+
+  THE LAST JUDGMENT (from Blair's "Grave")          _Frontispiece_
+
+  PORTRAIT OF BLAKE                                              1
+
+  THE LITTLE GIRL LOST (from "Songs of Experience")             12
+
+  THE DIVINE IMAGE (from "Songs of Innocence")                  16
+
+  "AMERICA," a page from                                        20
+
+  THE LAZAR HOUSE                                               22
+
+  "EUROPE," a page from                                         24
+
+  LOS, ENITHARMON, AND ORC (from "Urizen")                      26
+
+  THE RE-UNION OF THE SOUL AND THE BODY (from "The Grave")      32
+
+  THE PILGRIMAGE TO CANTERBURY (Stothard)                       36
+
+  CHAUCER'S "CANTERBURY PILGRIMS" (Blake)                       36
+
+  SATAN TORMENTING JOB                                          44
+
+  BLAKE'S ROOM IN FOUNTAIN COURT (F. J. Shields)                53
+
+  DEATH'S DOOR (from "The Grave")                               66
+
+  THE SHEPHERD (from "Songs of Innocence")                      80
+
+  FRONTISPIECE FROM "SONGS OF INNOCENCE"                        84
+
+  THE LAMB (from "Songs of Innocence")                          86
+
+  THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, a page from                  90
+
+  "I WANT, I WANT" (from "Gates of Paradise")                   94
+
+  THE DELUGE (after a Plate in "Gates of Paradise")             96
+
+  THE TYGER (from "Songs of Experience")                        98
+
+  INFANT JOY (from "Songs of Innocence")                       100
+
+  "VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION," a page from            106
+
+  "AMERICA," the Frontispiece to                               108
+
+  "AMERICA," a page from                                       110
+
+  "EUROPE," the Frontispiece to ("The Ancient of Days")        112
+
+  "EUROPE," the first page from                                114
+
+  "URIZEN," the title-page from                                116
+
+  "URIZEN," Plate VI from                                      118
+
+  "THE SMALL BOOK OF DESIGNS," Plate IX from                   120
+
+  THE ACCUSERS (from "The Large Book of Designs")              122
+
+  "JERUSALEM," page 33 from                                    128
+
+  ROBERT (from "Milton")                                       134
+
+  TIME SPEEDING AWAY (page 25 from "Night Thoughts")           138
+
+  DEATH OF THE STRONG WICKED MAN (from "The Grave")            140
+
+  THE SOUL RELUCTANTLY PARTING FROM THE BODY (from
+  "The Grave")                                                 144
+
+  THORNTON'S "VIRGIL'S PASTORALS," woodcuts from               146
+
+  "THE BOOK OF JOB," Plate II                                  150
+
+  "THE BOOK OF JOB," Plate V                                   152
+
+  "THE BOOK OF JOB," Plate XIV                                 154
+
+  THE NATIVITY                                                 162
+
+  THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT                                        168
+
+  OBERON, TITANIA, AND PUCK                                    170
+
+  VISION OF QUEEN KATHERINE                                    174
+
+  THE CIRCLE OF THE LUSTFUL (from "Dante")                     180
+
+  PENCIL SKETCH FOR "DEATH'S DOOR"                             184
+
+  HEAD OF AN OLD MAN                                           186
+
+  THE WHORE OF BABYLON                                         188
+
+  DAVID DELIVERED OUT OF DEEP WATERS                           190
+
+  THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF PITT GUIDING BEHEMOTH                  192
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS ON BLAKE
+
+
+BINYON, ROBERT LAURENCE. "William Blake: being all his woodcuts
+photographically reproduced in facsimile." London, 1902. 4o. [The Unicorn
+Press: Little Engravings, No. 2.]
+
+CUNNINGHAM, ALLAN. "The Lives of the most eminent British Painters,
+Sculptors and Architects." London, 1829-33. 12o. [Part of "The Family
+Library," 6 vols.] Note: a second edition of this work was published in
+1830-37, in 16o, 6 vols.
+
+ELLIS, E. J., and YEATS, W. B. "The works of William Blake, poetic,
+symbolic, and critical." Edited with lithographs of the illustrated
+"Prophetic Books," and a memoir and interpretation. London, B. Quaritch,
+1893. 8o. 3 vols.
+
+GARNETT (SIR) RICHARD. "William Blake, Painter and Poet." London, 1895. 80
+pp. folio. ["The Portfolio Monographs," No. 22.]
+
+GILCHRIST, ALEXANDER. "The Life of W. Blake, 'Pictor Ignotus.'" With
+selections from his poems and other writings. Edited by Anne Gilchrist,
+with the assistance of D. G. and W. M. Rossetti. London, 1863. 8o. 2 vols.
+Note: a second enlarged edition was published in 1880. London, Macmillan &
+Co. 8o. 2 vols.
+
+MALKIN, THOMAS W. "A Father's Memoirs of his Child." London, 1806. 8o.
+
+ROSSETTI, W. M. "The Poetical Works of William Blake." Edited with a
+prefatory memoir. London, 1874. 8o. ["The Aldine Poets." George Bell &
+Sons.]
+
+SCOTT, WILLIAM BELL. "Exhibition of the Works of William Blake." With
+introductory memoir. London, The Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1876. 4o.
+
+SCOTT, WILLIAM BELL. "William Blake." Etchings from his works (with
+descriptive text). London, Chatto and Windus, 1878. Folio.
+
+SMETHAM, JAMES. "Essay on Blake." (Reprinted in Gilchrist's work, q.v.,
+from the "London Quarterly Review").
+
+SWINBURNE, A. C. "William Blake." A critical essay, with illustrations
+from Blake's designs in facsimile, coloured and plain. Second edition.
+London, 1868. 8o.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM BLAKE]
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM BLAKE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+EARLY YEARS
+
+
+The work of one of the greatest spirits that ever made Art his medium has
+yet its way to make among the general public. The world entertained the
+angel unawares, for three-quarters of a century have passed since the
+death of William Blake, and still his name and his work are but
+indifferently known. Yet to those that know them, the designs from his
+pencil, and the poems from his pen, are among the most precious things
+that Art has bequeathed to us.
+
+It is my purpose in the following pages to tell over again the main
+outlines of his life, quite shortly and simply, for the great biography on
+Blake (that of Alexander Gilchrist) can be consulted by all, and contains
+almost every detail known about him. To this monumental work, and to
+Messrs. Ellis and Yeats's more recently issued and exhaustive Commentary
+on Blake, I owe all my facts.
+
+A brief memoir is a necessary preface to the review I propose making of
+those engraved and painted books, pictures, drawings and engravings of
+Blake's which our National Collections possess.
+
+William Blake was one of those unique beings who live above this actual
+world, in the high places of imagination. At four years old he saw his
+first vision, as his wife reminded him in old age, in the presence of Mr.
+Crabb Robinson: "You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you
+were four years old, and He put His head to the window and set you
+screaming." Quaintly, crudely, as the story is told by Mrs. Blake, it
+bears testimony to the fact that the visionary faculty was developed in
+Blake from the beginning. Imagination claimed him definitely as her child
+from that early day when, having rambled far afield into the country (as
+it was his pastime to do throughout life), he saw, in a meadow near
+Dulwich, a tree amongst whose branches glistening angels clustered and
+sang. It may be, as one of Blake's critics suggests, that Nature was
+herself the basis of the supernatural beauty he saw, though he was all
+unwitting of it. Standing beneath a tree laden with delicate pink blossom,
+and gazing up into the rosy gloom, Blake may well have translated this
+pulsating beauty into a miracle. Above among the greenery he may have
+seemed to catch glimpses of aspiring hands and faces among the crowding
+wings of flame and rose and sun-kissed gold. A little breeze would set
+angelic wings and garments all a-moving and a-fluttering, and a thrush's
+voice suddenly cleaving the silence seem an angel's song indeed, too
+exquisite to be endured without tears, to the quivering, spell-bound
+wanderer. Such _may_ have been the explanation of this early vision, but
+Blake himself never attributed any natural cause to such spiritual
+manifestations. Everything was alive to him with a strange inner life: the
+"vegetable world," as he called it, was but the shadow of the real world
+of imagination, whose spiritual population was more clearly discernible to
+his highly-wrought consciousness, than natural phenomena themselves.
+Narrowly did he escape a whipping from his father, the worthy hosier, for
+what that matter-of-fact man could not but consider a most impudent
+invention on the child's part. The incident was a foreshadowing of the
+poet-painter's life. The mysterious regions in which his spirit wandered
+so fearlessly, and which his poems and his drawings represented to the
+world, had but scanty attraction for his time. It would be truer perhaps
+to say that they were more often regarded with fear and repulsion. The
+mortal who dares to raise even the corner of the veil that so discreetly
+hides from our material world the many other existent conditions of
+consciousness, the great Beyond of Spirit Life, does so at his own risk,
+and with the certainty of earning his fellow men's distrust and
+disapproval. The outlook on that immensity has a tendency, it is true, to
+endanger the perfect mental equilibrium; but though the age--professing
+faith in a set of decent religious formulae, but in reality sceptical of
+all spiritual life and destiny--called Blake mad, he was recognized by a
+few chosen spirits as a great master and seer. The story of his life
+contains but few incidents, but through these incidents we see a soul
+travelling.
+
+William Blake was born in 1757 at 28, Broad Street, Carnaby Market, Soho.
+The old house still stands, but looks very dirty and depressing, like the
+street, which, since Blake played in it, has suffered a dingy declension.
+Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, who have added some biographical details to
+Gilchrist's Life, state that William's father, the hosier, James Blake,
+was the son of an Irishman, one John O'Neil. John O'Neil married a girl
+from Rathmines, Dublin, called Ellen Blake, and as he soon afterwards got
+into debt and trouble of one sort and another, he dropped his name of
+O'Neil and adopted his wife's maiden name. This fact, if established
+beyond doubt, would seem to be of singular importance, as the presence of
+Irish blood in William Blake would account for several strange
+characteristics which are not otherwise understandable. The Kelts are
+always particularly sensitive and open to spiritual experience.
+Imagination, second sight, and acute psychic consciousness, seem to be
+the peculiar attributes of the race; and these gifts are seldom to be
+found in a pure Anglo-Saxon. There were four other children, James, of
+whom we shall hear again, Robert, our artist's beloved younger brother,
+John, a ne'er-do-weel, and a girl of whom not much is known.
+
+Very early William developed a taste for art, and his father, with more
+sense than usually characterizes the parents of great men, allowed him to
+follow his bent, and sent him, from the age of ten to fourteen, to the
+drawing class of one Pars, in the Strand. We read of his attending picture
+sales and occasionally buying drawings and prints after Raphael, Michael
+Angelo, Albert Duerer, and other old masters at prices which would make the
+modern collector green with envy. But we do not hear of Blake's attending
+any other school either before or after leaving Pars for the purpose of
+furthering his general education. All the knowledge that he acquired
+outside Art was self-chosen and self-taught. A sound general education is
+the firmest basis on which to build a tower of observation from which the
+world and life may be surveyed with judgement. Blake's beautiful and
+fantastic house of thought, however, was erected on no such foundation.
+Perhaps instinct guided his choice of mental food: certain it is that the
+peculiar education he gave himself enabled him to preserve his own
+personality in all its vital energy. Pars appears to have been the
+Squarcione of that generation. He had been sent to Greece by the
+Dilettante Society to study ruined temples and broken statues. On his
+return to England he set up a school in the Strand to teach drawing from
+plaster casts after the antique.
+
+When he was fourteen, with a view to getting a trade by which he could
+earn his daily bread, Blake's father determined to apprentice him to an
+engraver. He took him first to Rylands, an eminent engraver with a Court
+appointment, but the boy said after the interview, "Father, I do not like
+that man's face. He looks as if he would live to be hanged." Strange
+forecast this proved to be, for in 1783 Rylands was indeed hanged for
+forgery. Blake was finally apprenticed to Basire, a sound craftsman, but
+of a somewhat hard and dry manner. Basire's style as an engraver set its
+stamp on Blake, there is no doubt. It would have hampered most men
+severely, rendering their work formal and immobile, but Blake turned it to
+a strange account, and it became expressive in his hands. When in his
+later years he found that he had outgrown it, he modified it to suit his
+new requirements, but it had been a laborious and useful servant, if not a
+gracious one. During his apprenticeship Basire set him to draw all the
+mediaeval tombs and monuments in Westminster Abbey and other churches for
+a certain publication to be brought out by the firm. In doing this Blake
+imbibed large draughts of the intense and fervent Gothic spirit. Its deep
+innerness, its passionate aspiration, its whimsicality, and its quaint
+decorative exuberance, expressed alike in angels and gargoyles, found and
+touched a vibrating chord in his heart. Gothic art entered into him and
+became part of him. Its influence was strong, though it took a
+characteristically Blakeian expression always, and those long mornings
+spent among the slanting sunbeams and the whispering silence of the
+chapels around the King Confessor's tomb, were among the truly eventful
+incidents of his life.
+
+In many of his designs a Gothic church with spires and buttresses like
+Westminster,--often a mere symbol sufficient to recall it, occasionally
+carefully and elaborately drawn in--stands as an embodiment of Blake's
+idea of worship.
+
+Strange thoughts must have come to him among those forests of slender
+pillars and arches! Some hint of them is conveyed by an engraving he did
+during the period of drawing in the Abbey. It is after a drawing (probably
+one bought by him cheap at a sale room) by Michael Angelo, and has the
+imaginative inscription written on it by Blake, "Joseph of Arimathea among
+the Rocks of Albion. This is one of the Gothic artists who built the
+cathedrals in what we call the dark ages, wandering about in sheepskin and
+goatskin, of whom the world was not worthy." Joseph of Arimathea, it will
+be remembered, is supposed to have come to Glastonbury in 63 A.D. and
+built the first Christian Church.
+
+He did not always work in the Abbey in quiet. There is a story told by
+Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, of how he was plagued by the Westminster boys
+till he laid his grievance before the Dean, who thereupon deprived the
+boys of the right to wander about the Abbey at their pleasure, a right
+denied to them to this day.
+
+At twenty, Blake's apprenticeship to Basire being ended, he attended the
+Academy schools and drew from the antique under Keeper Moser, picking out
+for his chief delight and most ardent study the drawings of Michael Angelo
+and Raphael--a very barbaric choice it was considered, according to the
+decadent taste of the period. Moser recommended him to give up poring over
+"those old hard, stiff, dry, unfinished works of art," and to turn his
+attention to Le Brun and Rubens, some of whose drawings he fetched out for
+Blake's inspection. Blake, however, who was never able to conceal his
+thoughts, nor to express them in anything but forcible terms, burst out,
+"These things that you call finished, are not even begun; how then can
+they be finished?" and comments on the incident, which he relates in his
+MS. notes on "Reynolds' Discourses," made in his old age, "that the man
+who does not know the beginning, cannot know the end of art." By this he
+meant, that to be preoccupied as were Rubens and Le Brun, with the merely
+faithful representation of the beauty of the body, to dwell as an end in
+itself on the wonder of white shoulders, tapering fingers, and too
+luscious flesh, to linger in the folds and intricacies of silk and velvet
+robes, and to spend strength and power on these things, was mere
+foolishness and blundering.
+
+Physical beauty, splendour of colour, only thrilled and arrested him when
+he recognized in them the symbols of an idea, when they seemed to hint of
+things rarer and more excellent than any purely natural or intrinsic
+attribute. If he could discriminate its eternal inner message, and could
+make it visible to the world, then was physical beauty worthy of
+reproduction. But he seldom dwelt on beauty for its own sake, but only
+when it was spiritually significant; so it is easy to see why he was
+inaccessible to the influence of such artists as Rubens and Le Brun.
+
+At the Academy Schools he had the opportunity of drawing from the living
+model, and profited by it to a certain limited extent. But he always had
+an aversion to it, declaring that to his whimsical nature it "smelt of
+mortality." However he might and did justify his negligence of this
+important branch of technique, his art was necessarily weakened by it.
+Technique is the language of art, and is only to be obtained by frequent
+and laboriously faithful reference to nature. It is true that Blake's
+strong power of generalizing, along with his marvellous gift of recalling
+at desire things discriminated by him, made the achievement of technique
+through methods of life study a less urgent necessity to him than to other
+men who had no such retentive artistic memories. Essential lines Blake
+never failed to give, but by intention rather than from any inability he
+seldom gives more than these essential lines in the figures he drew and
+painted.
+
+After all it is possible that his power of delineating swift movement, and
+the great range of emotions that correspond to that, might have been
+injured or lost by too close an application to the artificially posed
+human figure. We have seen much life lost in the too close study of life,
+as in the otherwise exquisite work of Lord Leighton.
+
+Blake believed that to draw from the typical forms seen by him in vision
+was his true purpose and aim, and the study of individual human forms
+filled his eye with confusion, for, as he was for ever asserting, Nature
+seemed to him but a faint and garbled version of the grand originals seen
+in imagination, that is, in truth.
+
+While Blake was educating himself in art, he had to earn his livelihood by
+engraver's work, and between 1779 and 1782 one or two booksellers employed
+him to engrave designs after various artists. Among these artists was
+Stothard, to whom, in 1782, Blake was introduced. Stothard brought Flaxman
+and Blake together, and the three became warm friends. It was only after
+many years, and then through the machinations of an evil man (the
+publisher Cromek), that Blake became estranged from Stothard, and
+partially also from Flaxman.
+
+In 1780 Blake exhibited his first picture in the Academy, "The Death of
+Earl Godwin." It was only the twelfth exhibition of the institution, and
+the first to be held at Somerset House. How curiously do its four hundred
+and eighty-seven exhibits (including wax work and a design for a fan)
+contrast with our mammoth Academies of to-day! Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mary
+Moser, Gainsborough, Angelica Kauffman, Cosway and Fuseli, were all
+contributors in the year of grace 1780. Blake was in sympathy with none of
+them save Fuseli, who, although a man greatly overrated in his day, had a
+real sense of the potency of the invisible world, mainly, however, of
+that portion of it concerned with arch-fiends, witches, demons, and
+baleful omens.
+
+In 1782 Blake married Catherine Bouchier, and set up housekeeping in Green
+Street. It appears that he had been much in love with a girl called Pollie
+Wood, who had jilted him. Going to stay at Richmond in a state of deep
+depression, he made the acquaintance of Catherine Bouchier. Messrs. Ellis
+and Yeats have added this detail to the first biographer's story. When she
+first entered the room where he sat, she was overcome by such intense
+emotion that she had to withdraw for awhile. She afterwards admitted that
+at that moment she became suddenly aware that she was in the presence of
+her future husband.
+
+Small wonder that Blake felt an irresistible affinity for this charming
+dark-eyed girl whose fervent susceptible spirit responded so mysteriously
+to his own. No marriage was ever more happy. Catherine was of humble
+origin, and practically no education, for at the time of her marriage she
+was unable to read or write, but nevertheless she possessed the rare and
+delicate qualities necessary for the mate of a man like Blake. She early
+realized that the man she had married was no ordinary one, and to be of
+service to her dear "Mr. Blake" (as she always called him with quaint
+reverence), to enter into his thoughts, to smooth the path of his material
+life, and to conform her young and unlessoned girlhood to his difficult
+standard of plain living and high thinking, became her one absorbing
+object.
+
+There were a few rough passages in the early days of married life, which
+Gilchrist indicates, but they soon disappeared. It was merely the friction
+and heat given off, before the two strong natures were fused into a
+perfect union. Catherine's nature appears to have been a compound of
+ardent worship and pregnant sympathy. Never did a woman so forget herself
+in reverencing, nigh worshipping, the man she had chosen to marry.
+
+During an unusually long, and in many respects a peculiarly isolated life,
+these two lived together, the one master mind and purpose informing both.
+
+No words could do full justice to the beautiful life of Catherine Blake.
+It is true that no ordinary man could have drawn such harmony from the
+vivacious, impulsive, passionate nature of the girl. All the generous love
+that her nature possessed she lavished on Blake, and her complete
+absorption in him seems to have satisfied the maternal cravings which were
+to have no other satisfaction, for William and Catherine had no children.
+The work of caring for the few rooms which were all that Blake's means
+allowed, and his ambition desired, for the housing of their bodies, this
+Catherine did with the thoroughness of the true aesthete. She cooked,
+sewed, swept, dusted, and washed, and yet found time to learn from her
+husband how to read and write, the use of the graver, and even to colour
+with neat and precise hand some of the prints he made. Added to this she
+was soon able to read with intelligence the books he praised, and listened
+wondering to the songs he made, finding them of a heavenly significance
+and beauty; and when his tense nerves and superabundant physical energy
+drove Blake forth to stretch his limbs and cool his brain in long country
+walks of thirty, and occasionally forty miles at a stretch, Catherine went
+with him, and cheerfully tramped along beside him, silent or responsive as
+he set the mood.
+
+Again, when in the night time visions appeared to his teeming
+ever-inventive brain, and he must needs get up and write or draw while the
+divine "mania" was upon him, then Catherine arose softly and sat beside
+that wondrous husband in her white nightgown, her whole consciousness
+hanging upon his least movement or utterance, and her whole being
+thrilling sympathetically to those invisible presences which moved his
+spirit. Like Mary, "she kept all these things in her heart and pondered
+them."
+
+Speaking of his wife, one cannot but recall that in Blake's mysterious and
+unorthodox creed the doctrine of free love was a very favourite one, on
+which in his poetry he was never tired of insisting. Yet he seems to have
+desired freedom, only, as Mr. Swinburne finely shows, "for the soul's
+sake." If love is bound, he argued, what merit is there in faithfulness?
+Love, to be what love in perfect development should be,--to be what Love
+in its very essence predicates,--must be free. Such a creed, proclaimed by
+the lips of the most austere of men in matters sensual, seems to shadow
+forth one dimly apprehended aspect of a truth, which may be realized
+perhaps, in a future and more perfect state of society.
+
+"In a myrtle shade," and "William Bond," are two among the poems in
+Blake's MS. book, which have their origin in thoughts about free love.
+
+The year after his marriage, 1782-83, Blake had to turn to engraving in
+real earnest to pay for the necessities of the modest _menage_ in Green
+Street. We find him engaged mainly in engraving plates after Stothard's
+refined and graceful designs. In after years, when he was estranged from
+Stothard, Blake used to say that many of these same designs contained
+ideas stolen from himself. There can be small doubt that Stothard did owe
+something to Blake's influence. Fuseli frankly declared that "Blake is
+damned good to steal from," and accordingly adopted his ideas, and in one
+instance, at least, a complete design.
+
+A kind and appreciative couple, the Rev. Henry and Mrs. Mathew, received
+Blake in their drawing-room about this time, and gave him an honoured
+place among their guests. It was they who paid in part for the production
+of his "Poetical Sketches," and Flaxman, who had always a strong
+admiration of Blake's poetical genius, helped,--an act of beautiful
+generosity in a young artist with his own way to make.
+
+The "Poetical Sketches" are among the tenderest lyric notes uttered by
+Blake, and their bird-like spontaneity and lilt recall, says Dante Gabriel
+Rossetti, "the best period of English song-writing, whose rarest treasures
+lie scattered among the plays of our Elizabethan dramatists." These wild
+wood-notes gushing unselfconscious from a heart glad with youth and fair
+visions are in strange contrast to the artificial, trifling, and
+unsatisfying poetry of the age. Blake himself writes in the "Poem to the
+Muses":
+
+  How have you left the ancient love
+    That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
+  The languid strings do scarcely move,
+    The sound is forced, the notes are few.
+
+What can be said of that perfect lyric, written when Blake was but
+fourteen, "My silks and fine array," and that other which I shall surely
+be forgiven for quoting as it stands:
+
+  How sweet I roamed from field to field
+    And tasted all the summer's pride,
+  Till I the Prince of Love beheld
+    Who in the sunny beams did glide.
+
+  He show'd me lilies for my hair,
+    And blushing roses for my brow;
+  He led me through his gardens fair
+    Where all his golden pleasures grow.
+
+  With sweet Maydews my wings are wet,
+    And Phoebus fired my vocal rage;
+  He caught me in his silken net,
+    And shut me in his golden cage.
+
+  He loves to sit and hear me sing,
+    Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
+  Then stretches out my golden wing,
+    And mocks my loss of liberty.
+
+
+[Illustration: PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM "SONGS OF EXPERIENCE,"
+1794]
+
+
+To a poetically sensitive mind, verses like these remain like a beautiful
+echo in the memory, having a musical charm apart from the sense of the
+words. Although in this little book it is my purpose to dwell mainly on
+Blake's manifestation of himself as a designer and painter, I cannot avoid
+lingering sometimes on his poetical expression. For the creative impulse
+that clothed its thought in a garment of words is the same as that which
+is embodied in plastic forms and symbolic colouring. Blake's invention had
+two outlets, but was itself one stream of energy only.
+
+The lines to the Evening Star are incomparably sweet and haunting:
+
+  Thou fair-hair'd angel of the evening,
+    Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light
+  Thy brilliant torch of love; thy radiant crown
+    Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
+  Smile on our loves, and whilst thou drawest round
+    The curtains of the sky, scatter thy dew
+  On every flower that closes its sweet eyes
+    In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on
+  The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
+    And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon,
+  Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,
+    And then the lion glares through the dim forest,
+  The fleeces of our flocks are covered with
+    Thy sacred dew; protect them with thine influence.
+
+The lingering subtle and most musical sweetness of such lines as those
+quoted above, "Let thy west wind sleep on the lake; speak silence with thy
+glimmering eyes, and wash the dusk with silver," can be surpassed by none
+of the great masters of melody. So unaccustomed were the ears of the time
+to such perfectly natural bursts of song, that the Rev. Henry Mathew
+considered it necessary to apologize to the refined and fastidious for
+calling attention to them, "hoping their poetic originality merits some
+respite from oblivion." Blake might well seem strange to these _borne_
+people, for he was no other than the herald and forerunner of the poetic
+renaissance of the beginning of the nineteenth century.
+
+In the Mathew's drawing-room, surrounded by a wondering group of
+dilettanti, above whom he towered head and shoulders intellectually, he
+was encouraged to sing his "Songs of Innocence," which he had already
+written, though not produced, to his own music. Blake had then a mode of
+musical expression as well as an artistic and a literary one, though no
+record of it has been preserved. With these three keys he unlocked the
+doors of materialism outwards, on to the vistas of God-thrilled Eternity.
+
+In 1784 Blake exhibited two drawings in the Royal Academy, "War, unchained
+by an Angel--Fire, Pestilence and Famine following," and "A Breach in the
+City--the Morning after a Battle." It is obvious from these that his style
+was already formed in all its strength and almost terrifying
+individuality.
+
+During this year Blake's father died, and William and Catherine returned
+to Broad Street and took up their abode next to the paternal dwelling now
+occupied by the elder brother James. James, though a Swedenborgian and
+accounting himself a godly person, was also a busy seeker after this
+world's good things, and seems to have had little in common with William,
+though for some years friendly relations were maintained between them.
+Blake set up a shop as printseller and engraver in Broad Street in company
+with a man named Parker, whose acquaintance he had made in the old Basire
+days, but it was a short-lived affair, and soon came to an end.
+
+It was in this year that William's younger brother Robert became his
+pupil. Nothing much can be discovered about the personality of Robert, but
+from Blake's own writings and designs we are able to see how close a tie
+of affection existed between these two brothers.
+
+Robert only lived three years after becoming William's house-mate and
+pupil. In his final illness it was not Catherine but William who nursed
+him day and night untiringly, with passionate love and care; and when at
+last the end came, Blake saw his brother's soul fare forth, clapping its
+hands for joy, from the mortal tenement--a vision to bear fruit afterwards
+in his designs for Blair's "Grave." Then he was beset with sheer physical
+exhaustion, and going to bed, slept for three days and three nights. Many
+years after we find him going back into this period of personal sorrow, to
+extract therefrom comfort for Hayley, who had lost his son.
+
+"I know," he writes to him, "that our deceased friends are more really
+with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. 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. Forgive me for
+expressing to you my enthusiasm, which I wish all to partake of, since it
+is to me a source of immortal joy, even in this world. May you continue to
+be so more and more, and to be more and more persuaded that every mortal
+loss is an immortal gain. The ruins of time build mansions in
+Eternity":--from all of which it is easy to see that Robert's influence on
+the soul of William augmented after his death.
+
+In 1788 Blake removed from Broad Street to No. 28, Poland Street, which
+lies in its immediate neighbourhood. A coolness may have sprung up
+between James and William, for the brothers saw little of each other now.
+
+The following characteristic story, taken from Mr. Tatham's MS., and
+retold by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, helps to draw in Blake's psychological
+portrait.
+
+In Poland Street Blake's windows looked over Astley's Yard,--Astley of
+circus fame. One day on looking out he saw a boy limping up and down,
+dragging a heavy block chained to his foot. It was a hobble used for
+horses, and Blake, with his brain on fire and pity and rage tearing at his
+heart, was soon down in the yard among the circus company. He gave them a
+passionate speech on liberty, appealed to them as true men and Britons not
+to punish a fellow-countryman in a manner that would degrade a slave, and
+finally saw the crowd yield to his eloquence, and his point was gained.
+The boy was loosed, and Blake returned to his own world of work and
+vision.
+
+Some hours after, Mr. Astley, who had been out during the incident
+related, called on Blake, and stormed and raved at what he called his
+interference. At first Blake was as angry as Astley, his blood was up, and
+there seemed every prospect of a very violent quarrel. But suddenly, in
+the midst of his anger, Blake remembered that the amelioration of the
+boy's condition was his first object, and, quickly changing his tactics,
+he so worked on the higher moral nature which Astley evidently possessed,
+that he completely won him over to his views, and the two men
+parted--friends. Ever after, however, as Messrs. Ellis and Yeats point
+out, the chain remained with Blake as the symbol of cruel oppression and
+slavery, and we shall see him using it in his designs again and again as
+such.
+
+
+[Illustration: PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM "SONGS OF INNOCENCE," 1789]
+
+
+In 1790 he produced the "Songs of Innocence," printed and published, as
+well as designed, engraved, and composed by himself. In the long and
+romantic history of art, nothing is more strange than the story of how
+this little book came into being. Blake was unknown to the world and had
+no credit with publishers, nor had he the wherewithal to publish at his
+own expense the poems which he had written and called "Songs of
+Innocence." Yet he greatly desired to see them set forth in a book with
+appropriate and significant designs. But how was this to be accomplished?
+He pondered the matter long, till at last light and leading came. In the
+silence of one midnight his dead brother Robert appeared to him and
+instructed him as to the method--an entirely original one--which he should
+use. The very next day, Blake being urgent to begin his work, his wife
+went out early with half-a-crown (all the money they had in the world),
+and laid out one and tenpence on the necessary material. And in faith and
+gladness, relying on that mystical power in himself which took and used
+his hand and eye and brain almost without his will, he began to make the
+first of his lovely engraved and painted books. This is the alpha of a
+long series of engraved books which issued from his hand at intervals for
+some years. While in Poland Street he wrote, but did not publish till long
+after, the "Ghost of Abel," in 1789 the "Book of Thel," in 1790 the
+"Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and in 1791 a poem, the first of a
+projected series of seven books, called "The French Revolution."
+
+This so-called poem owed its birth to the fact that about this period
+Blake became one of a literary, artistic, and political set who met at the
+house of Johnson the publisher. At these gatherings Mary Wollstonecraft
+arrayed her charms to storm the citadel of Fuseli's cynical heart,
+unavailingly. Among other guests were Tom Paine, author of "The Rights of
+Man," whom eventually Blake was the means of saving, by a timely word of
+warning, from arrest in England. He judiciously advised his flight to
+France, at the right moment for his safety. Godwin and Holcroft and
+several revolutionary dreamers were members of this _coterie_. Blake's
+enthusiasm was set all aglow by a philosophy which saw in the French
+Revolution a great renovating process,--the fire to burn up the ignorance
+and superstition and class boundaries of the ancient order, the
+introduction of a new reign of righteousness and peace.
+
+In effect, this new philosophy which fired the imagination of Blake had a
+basis of materialism and violence which would have found no answering
+response in his soul, had he sought to investigate it. His sympathy with
+the group was intellectual, and with the higher manifestations of its
+creed alone. It led to no political action. He had far other work to do
+than that of a political agitator, but all expansive doctrines which made
+for liberty and individuality fired the imagination and fed the intellect
+of Blake. Democracy was his ideal, and democratic virtues won his
+admiration; indeed, he dared to flaunt the "_bonnet rouge_" of liberty in
+London streets in this agitated period, but after the Days of Terror in
+'92 he tore off the white cockade and never again donned the Cap of
+Liberty. But if his work was not to be in the political arena, he was in
+his own way hastening the coming of that better and more immaterial
+kingdom which these young liberators only half conceived.
+
+In 1792 died the great leader of English art, Sir Joshua Reynolds. His
+work, concerned as it was with the exquisite graces of this passing world,
+had nothing to say to Blake, who regarded it in the light of his own
+artistic standpoint, with positive aversion. It often happens that a man
+who feels it his burning mission to work out and reveal some hitherto
+neglected or unseen aspect of truth, does so at the cost of a
+one-sidedness which is a necessary defect of his quality. Blake could no
+more appreciate Sir Joshua--at least at this stage of his being--than Sir
+Joshua could appreciate Blake. The veteran Reynolds once told him, when a
+young man, "to work with less extravagance and more simplicity, and to
+correct his drawing." Blake never got over that. We can imagine the
+suppressed heat with which he listened choking to the advice of the
+popular artist who was so utterly ignorant of his aims and ideals. To us,
+who may enter into the soul of each, it is given to realize that they, and
+all the company of the world's great artists, have furthered the true work
+of art; have all helped, and are helping, according to their gifts and in
+their degree, to rear the walls and set with windows and crown with
+battlements and towers, the palace of beauty for the soul of man to dwell
+in with delight and worship. That the workers have not always recognized
+each other is matter for regret, though it is scarcely perhaps to be
+wondered at, seeing that each is set on emphasizing and relieving against
+its background the one point which seems to him necessary and valuable.
+
+The characteristic notes which Blake appended to Reynolds' "Discourses"
+many years later, express much of his dislike. Truly, it is easy to
+conceive of a mind offering nothing but delight and admiration to
+Reynolds' practice, yet excited to a grave disapproval by much of his
+theory, or what he states as his theory. For Reynolds actually taught that
+genius--such as his own, for instance--was a state to be inducted into by
+precept, and evolved through study, instead of being a thing of fire, a
+tongue of flame from on high, set on a man as a seal, from which he cannot
+escape. I am reminded of Rossetti here, who quite sincerely told Mr. Hall
+Caine, "I paint by a set of unwritten but clearly-defined rules, which I
+could teach to any man as systematically as you could teach arithmetic."
+Ah! that such genius _might_ thus be taught!
+
+However, Reynolds, his practice and theory alike, were by Blake swept into
+a limbo of unconditional condemnation, though occasionally, in spite of
+the prejudice he nursed against Sir Joshua, he flashed out notes of
+emphatic approval, on certain utterances in the great man's "Discourses."
+
+
+[Illustration: PAGE FROM "AMERICA, A PROPHECY," 1793
+
+Printed in blue, from the Print Room copy]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+LIFE AT FELPHAM
+
+
+In 1793 Blake removed across the river to Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,
+where he lived for seven years of great mental and spiritual vitality,
+seeing visions and dreaming dreams and embodying them in beautiful
+designs. He was a tireless worker, never resting, and sleeping much less
+than other men. These Lambeth days were days of comparative prosperity
+with the Blakes, whose wants were so simple and few. The little house in
+which they lived possessed rustic charms--a garden with a summer-house,
+and a vine climbing over the back of the house, whose leaves made a
+pleasant rustling in summer. A view of the river, too, could not have
+failed to add a significant charm to the place. On its shining surface
+might be descried ships like souls faring to the world's great
+market-place, to barter and to receive merchandise; while others, with
+white sails set, slipped quietly down the river and out to the wide
+mysterious sea. Blake had a few pupils, too, and at this period he made
+the acquaintance of Mr. Butts, who was a staunch friend and true
+appreciator for thirty years. During all that time he was a constant buyer
+of our artist's work, and bought sometimes at the rate of one drawing a
+week. In time Mr. Butts' spacious house in Fitzroy Square became a regular
+Blake Gallery. The average price he paid was L1 to 30_s._ a design or
+picture. To Mr. Butts' great honour be it said that he never assumed the
+airs of a patron, never tried to bind or hamper Blake's genius, or to
+dictate or direct his choice of subjects or treatment of them. He seems to
+have realized that this man was "a prince in Israel," and the lordship of
+his ideas not to be questioned, but accepted humbly and with gratitude.
+
+In a future chapter I hope to deal with the Blake drawings and easel
+pictures done for Mr. Butts, which were available to the public in the
+Exhibition at Messrs. Carfax's Rooms in Ryder Street, held in 1904.
+
+Blake seems to have enjoyed a little wave of recognition at
+Lambeth--popularity it can hardly be called--but it was not long-lived. At
+one time he was even suggested as drawing-master to the Royal Family, but
+declined the position, not from modesty, but from devotion to his true
+_metier_--the preservation and expression of spiritual ideas--with which
+such a post would probably have interfered.
+
+Two acts of secret and most munificent generosity are recorded by Tatham,
+and quoted by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, concerning Blake while at Lambeth.
+
+He gave L40 (he seldom after had half as much money beside him) to a
+friend in distress, and his deep sympathetic heart being moved by the
+sight of a sick young man, an artist, who daily passed their door, he and
+his Kate made the young man's acquaintance, and for the love of Christ and
+in memory of brother Robert, finally took him into their house and tended
+him till his death some months later.
+
+While at Lambeth he made three large and important
+drawings--"Nebuchadnezzar," an enlarged edition of the bearded figure on
+hands and knees which occurs in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"; "The
+Lazar House" and "The Elohim creating Adam." He also made designs for
+Young's "Night Thoughts." There were 537 designs made, and Blake only took
+a year to do them. A selected few were engraved. While at Lambeth he
+printed also his "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," "America,"
+"Europe," "Urizen," "The Gates of Paradise," "The Book of Los," "The Song
+of Los," and "Ahania." The list implies steady application, and untiring
+intellectual and spiritual energy.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE LAZAR HOUSE, FROM MILTON
+
+Water-colour, 1795]
+
+
+The introduction of our painter, in 1800, by his old friend Flaxman, to
+Hayley, poetaster and dilettante, marks the beginning of a new epoch in
+his life.
+
+Hayley, the friend of Gibbon and, later, of Cowper (whose biography he
+wrote), was a characteristic product of the last quarter of the eighteenth
+century,--that age of complaisant preoccupation with trifles.
+
+This poetically barren interval before the birth of the wonderful new
+school of poetry had, since the best days of Cowper, but one star above
+its horizon--or was it a will-o'-the-wisp?--the _soi-disant_ poet Hayley.
+Complaisantly he twinkled on his admiring world, and, striking the lyre
+with gracious hand, sang with modest satisfaction "The Triumphs of
+Temper." This now forgotten work earned him the position of "greatest of
+living poets," and he assumed his high seat in the literary world with
+bustling alacrity. Above all things he aspired to culture, not at the
+expense of a very continuous effort or strain, it is true, but he loved to
+collect around him artists and men of letters to whom he could play the
+part of a somewhat undersized Lorenzo de' Medici. That they would respond
+gracefully, and take their parts becomingly in this garden-comedy, was all
+that he required of his court.
+
+It will be remembered that Romney was one of his artist friends, and that
+the connection proved in a way economically disastrous to the painter, for
+Hayley was an extravagant man, though he professed simple tastes, and
+encouraged poor Romney in his mania for building and other lavish
+expenditure.
+
+His influence, such as it was, was stimulating to none of his friends,
+though he meant well and kindly enough. He affected the part of the
+country gentleman, as well as that of the high priest of culture, and
+delighted in patronage.
+
+Soon after his acquaintance with Blake began, his old friend Cowper died
+under tragic conditions, and a week later Hayley's only child (an
+illegitimate son) died also. The boy was a youth of promise, and had been
+a pupil of Flaxman. So he had gratified as well as filled the poor
+father's heart. Hayley's trouble called forth a letter from Blake, which I
+quoted when writing on the death of Robert, and it seems to have touched,
+perhaps comforted, Hayley, who even in his deep affliction assumed a pose
+not natural or spontaneous.
+
+Blake was recommended by Flaxman as an engraver and designer (if the
+latter should be required), and Hayley proposed that the Blakes should
+come and live at Felpham, near his own place of Eartham in Sussex, in
+order that his new _protege_ might engrave the illustrations to the life
+of Cowper which he was now about to write, under Hayley's own eye.
+
+The idea pleased Blake, while Mrs. Blake, he wrote, "is like a flame of
+many colours of precious jewels, whenever she hears it named." As a matter
+of fact, Hayley did not live at Eartham now, as the place was an expensive
+one to keep up, but had built himself a wonderful turretted marine
+"cottage," with a library and covered court for equestrian exercise at
+Felpham.
+
+
+[Illustration: PLATE FROM "EUROPE," PRINTED 1794
+
+Coloured by hand]
+
+
+In the September of 1800, Blake being then forty-three years old, the
+husband and wife took up their abode in a pretty little cottage by the sea
+at Felpham, and began a new manner of life. If Hercules Buildings,
+Lambeth, had afforded Blake hints and types of spiritual life and
+light, how much larger a vista must have opened to him at Felpham. He used
+to wander musing along the seashore, and more than once saw the yellow
+sands peopled by a host of souls long since departed from this
+earth--Moses and the Prophets, Homer, Dante, Milton: "all," Blake said,
+"majestic shadows, gray but luminous, and superior to the common height of
+men." Many visions came to him at first. It is not wonderful that this
+should have been so, for there was nothing that did not teem with
+suggestions to his subjective mind, and when he received a new influx of
+spiritual light, as he seemed to have had at Felpham, then, indeed, were
+blossoms, stars and stones, nay, the very air he breathed, alive with a
+strange, sentient, crowding population, to whose spiritual utterances he
+listened, whose forms he strained his mental sight to realize.
+
+In a letter to Flaxman, beginning, "Dear Sculptor of Eternity," Blake
+writes in the first effervescence of delight: "Felpham is a sweet place
+for study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on
+all sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours;
+voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms
+more distinctly seen."
+
+For a while all went very well indeed, and the first part of his sojourn
+at Felpham was a sort of charmed circle in his life. "Mr. Hayley acts like
+a prince," "Felpham is the sweetest spot on earth," "work will go on here
+with God-speed," "Find that I can work with greater pleasure than ever,"
+are phrases which occur in the enthusiastic letters of the period. But
+gradually Hayley's constant companionship, his amiable but fatuous and
+gushing friendship, acted like the hated chain of slavery on Blake's
+electric and expansive temperament. Hayley's mind was set on little
+things, trivial business and futile undertakings, and his vanity and
+self-satisfaction about all his doings came at last to be exasperating to
+Blake. In spite of his generosity, his lavish but undiscerning praise, and
+the commissions for engraving and designs with which he supplied our
+artist, Blake little by little found himself goaded to madness by the
+ever-flowing stream of Hayley's conventionality and watery enthusiasms.
+Hayley attempted to enlarge Blake's education by reading to him Klopstock
+and translating as he went along--a proceeding that must have bored our
+fiery genius to tears. He also, with the kindest intentions in the world,
+obtained commissions for Blake to paint miniatures--hardly, one would
+think, a congenial form of art to him, but one which at the beginning
+appears to have interested him nevertheless.
+
+A couplet he wrote in the Note-book at the time evidences the irritated
+nerves that Hayley's unspiritual contact set on edge:
+
+  Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache.
+  Do be my enemy for friendship's sake.
+
+The letters, too, to Mr. Butts give direct insight into his state of mind,
+and the points of sharp disagreement and intellectual misunderstanding
+between the two men are easily traced.
+
+It appears that "Hayley was as much averse to a page of Blake's poetry as
+to a chapter in the Bible."
+
+Blake the creator and artist was unintelligible and foreign to Hayley,
+who, always satisfied with his own judgement, sought to turn Blake from
+designing and to chain him to the hack work of engraving.
+
+
+[Illustration: LOS, ENITHARMON AND ORC
+
+Colour-print from "Urizen," 1794]
+
+
+By degrees the visions that had so often and radiantly appeared to Blake
+on his first coming to Felpham seemed to forsake him. As he became
+involved in Hayley's pursuits, and sought to work out Hayley's plans for
+him, the visions even appeared to be angry with him. Then, indeed, it
+seemed that he was in danger of "bartering his birthright for a mess of
+pottage." He writes to Mr. Butts:
+
+"My unhappiness has arisen from a source which, if explored too narrowly,
+might hurt my pecuniary circumstances, as my dependence is on engraving at
+present, and particularly the engravings I have in hand for Mr. H., and I
+find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere
+drudgery of business, and intimations that if I do not confine myself to
+this, I shall not live. This has always pursued me.... This from Johnson
+and Fuseli brought me down here, and this from Mr. H. will bring me back
+again. For that I cannot live without doing my duty to lay up treasures in
+heaven, is certain and determined, and to this I have long made up my
+mind.... But," he goes on to say, "if we fear to do the dictates of our
+angels, and tremble at the tasks set before us; if we refuse to do
+spiritual acts because of natural fears and natural desires, who can
+describe the dismal torments of such a state? I too well remember the
+threats I heard" (_i.e._, in vision). "If you, who are organized by Divine
+Providence for spiritual commission, refuse and bury your talents in the
+earth, even though you should want natural bread--sorrow and desperation
+pursue you through life, and after death shame and confusion of face to
+eternity. Everyone in eternity will leave you, aghast at the man who was
+crowned with glory and honour by his brethren and betrayed their cause to
+their enemies. You will be called the base Judas who betrayed his friend."
+
+Blake was the apostle and martyr of this devotion to the high spiritual
+mission of Art. He would make no compromise with the world.
+
+In a letter to Mr. Butts dated April 25th, 1803, he writes:
+
+"I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoyed, and that I
+may converse with my friends in Eternity, see visions, dream dreams, and
+prophesy and speak parables, unobserved, and at liberty from the doubts
+of other mortals, perhaps doubts proceeding from kindness, but doubts are
+always pernicious, especially when we doubt our friends. Christ is very
+decided on this point: 'He who is not with me is against me;' there is no
+medium or middle state; and if a man is the enemy of my spiritual life,
+while he pretends to be the friend of my corporeal, he is a real enemy;
+but the man may be the friend of my spiritual life while he seems the
+enemy of my corporeal, though not _vice versa_."
+
+This enemy to Blake's spiritual life is certainly Hayley.
+
+He writes with unmistakable frankness of the Hermit of Eartham in a later
+letter:
+
+"Mr. H. approves of my designs as little as he does of my poems, and I
+have been forced to insist on his leaving me, in both, to my own
+self-will; I am determined to be no longer pestered with his genteel
+ignorance and polite disapprobation. I know myself both Poet and Painter,
+and it is not his affected contempt that can move to anything but a more
+assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness I have brought
+down his affected loftiness, and he begins to think I have some genius, as
+if genius and assurance were the same thing! But his imbecile attempts to
+depress me only deserve laughter." He goes on to say that he will
+relinquish all engagements to design for Hayley, "unless altogether left
+to my own judgement, as you, my dear friend, have always left me; for
+which I shall never cease to honour and respect you." And for which, we
+may add, posterity also has good reason to laud and acclaim Mr. Butts.
+
+Blake was not the man to be the creature of any patron, spending his time
+and all his magnificent powers as the servant of another man's
+brain--especially when that brain was Hayley's.
+
+If the engravings and designs done for his patron had earned him
+thousands instead of a mere competence, such work could not have tempted
+him from his chosen path of spiritual art. Finally, in 1803, he threw off
+the yoke decisively, turned his back on patronage, and returned with his
+faithful Kate to the liberty and poverty of rooms in South Molton Street,
+London, after a three years' rural seclusion. Just before leaving Felpham
+Blake became involved in a very disagreeable affair with a drunken soldier
+named Schofield, which resulted in a trial for sedition. The soldier, who
+was forcibly removed by Blake from his cottage garden, where he was
+trespassing, trumped up in revenge a set of ridiculous charges against
+him, saying he had used seditious language against the king and
+government. In the practical difficulties that all this gave rise to,
+Hayley came forward to Blake's assistance, and putting all the weight of
+his local position and popularity on the artist's side, materially helped
+him before and at the time of the trial. Although he had been thrown from
+his horse and hurt a few days previously, he insisted on being present to
+give evidence in his _protege's_ favour, who was of course acquitted.
+Warm-hearted Blake felt a generous inrush of the old affection for his
+friend, and a deep sense of gratitude helped to re-establish the old
+cordial relations between the two men. It must not be inferred from this,
+however, that Blake had altered his opinion that Hayley was his spiritual
+enemy. That, he held, Hayley had proved himself to be. But he now
+recognized that it was not malignity, but deficiency of spiritual
+knowledge and insight that had made him act as he did. It was the law of
+his being, and Blake, having learned this through experience of his three
+years' stay at Felpham, expected no more from him than his capacity
+warranted, and gave him his dues, dwelling with gratitude on the fact that
+Hayley was at least a true "corporeal friend."
+
+The stress and strain connected with the trial had a bad effect on Blake's
+highly-sensitive nerves, and is painfully apparent in the writing of the
+time. The time at Felpham, and the period that succeeded on his return to
+London, have much light shed on them by the Note-book. The MS. book to
+which reference has been made was a sort of safety valve, which Blake kept
+ever at his elbow, and in which he wrote long dissertations on Art and
+Religion--the "Public Address," the "Vision of the Last Judgment," and
+many of the poems published under the title (which heads the Note-book
+itself) of "Ideas of Good and Evil." Along with, and interspersed with
+these connected and finished utterances, are splenetic epigrams, rude
+rather than humorous caricature couplets, little scraps of unconsidered
+verse written to illustrate some incident of the day, and drawings here,
+there, and everywhere. The MS. Note-book is a very intimate part of Blake.
+On its first page Messrs. Ellis and Yeats quote the inscription written by
+Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who possessed it till his death:
+
+"I purchased this original MS. of Palmer, an attendant at the Antique
+Gallery of the British Museum, on the 30th April, 1849. Palmer knew Blake
+personally, and it was from the artist's wife that he had the present MS.,
+which he sold me for 10_s._ Among the sketches are one or two profiles of
+Blake himself." Unfortunately it has now passed by purchase into the
+possession of a collector at Boston, U.S.A. I say unfortunately, because
+our own National Museum should have secured such a treasure, but its
+present owner courteously lent it for a prolonged period to Messrs. Ellis
+and Yeats, who have embodied the main part of it in their exhaustive and
+most interesting work. The Note-book was deeply studied by Gilchrist, and
+was one of Rossetti's dearest treasures, leaving its impress on his mind
+and work.
+
+The work Blake did during the Felpham period included the designs and
+engraving of animals to Hayley's "Ballads," some of the engravings for
+"The Life of Cowper," and, above all, the writing of two long prophetic
+books, the "Milton" and the "Jerusalem," which, however, he did not finish
+till he had returned to London.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE PROCESSION OF THE PILGRIMS
+
+
+Blake's course was now definitely chosen. He had turned his back on
+patronage and voluntarily married poverty, like St. Francis, in order that
+he might be free to work out his own poetic and artistic ideas without
+reference to popularity, patronage, or pecuniary advantage. His wants and
+Catherine's were simple indeed, and to pay for them, from week to week,
+was all he desired. South Molton Street, in which they now took up their
+abode, was closely shut in by streets and houses. There was no garden, no
+summer-house or vine with pattering green leaves against the window as at
+Lambeth,--no trees even to recall the natural beauties of Felpham. But
+Blake seems to have been almost glad to be delivered from the agitating
+beauty of the natural or "vegetative world," as he called it, which was to
+him error and not truth--the visible shadow that darkened and hid
+invisible and eternal ideas. Now indeed, with nothing to distract him, he
+could open his eyes inward into the "World of Thought," into "Eternity,"
+which is imagination. Gilchrist's Life enables us to realize how he could
+live in this imaginative world, and yet, at the same time, fulfil with
+great practical ability such a work, for instance, as collecting material
+for Hayley for the "Life of Romney," which the latter was now beginning.
+The letters he wrote to Hayley at the time, which are all given in the
+Life, are the letters of a kindly business-like man, intent on giving
+only such information as will be useful. The good sense, the sanity, the
+mediocrity (I had almost said) of these letters are a pledge of Blake's
+ability to act and express himself as other men when he wished so to do.
+
+
+[Illustration: FROM BLAIR'S "GRAVE": THE RE-UNION OF THE SOUL AND THE BODY
+
+Engraving by L. Schiavonetti after Blake's design. Published 1808]
+
+
+Hayley was his good "corporeal friend," to whom he was grateful for
+"corporeal acts" of kindness, and as such he treated him.
+
+In one of the letters alone there bursts forth a great full-throated shout
+of joy, as it were, because he has suddenly achieved a great advance in
+his art. As the passage gives valuable insight into his mind at the time,
+I shall take liberty to quote it:
+
+"O glory! O delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous Fiend to his
+station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last
+passed twenty years of my life. He is the enemy of conjugal love, and is
+the Jupiter of the Greeks, an iron-hearted tyrant, the ruiner of ancient
+Greece. I speak with perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which
+has passed upon me. Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him, I have
+had twenty; thank God, I was not altogether a beast as he was; but I was a
+slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils; these beasts and these
+devils are now, together with myself, become children of light and
+liberty, and my feet and my wife's feet are free from fetters....
+
+"Suddenly on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of Pictures,
+I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which
+has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by
+window shutters. Consequently I can, with confidence, promise you ocular
+demonstration of my altered state on the plates I am engraving after
+Romney, whose spiritual aid has not a little conduced to my restoration to
+the light of Art. O, the distress I have undergone, and my poor wife with
+me; incessantly labouring and incessantly spoiling what I had done well.
+Every one of my friends was astonished at my faults, and could not assign
+a reason; they knew my industry and abstinence from every pleasure for the
+sake of study, and yet--and yet--and yet there wanted proofs of industry
+in my works. I thank God with entire confidence that it shall be so no
+longer: he is become my servant who domineered over me, he is even as a
+brother who was my enemy. Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm, or rather
+madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a
+pencil or graver into my hand, even as I used to be in my youth, and as I
+have not been for twenty dark but very profitable years. I thank God that
+I courageously pursued my course through darkness."
+
+All of which tense and highly-figurative language means that Blake had
+suddenly received enlightenment on various technical methods from the
+silent witness of Raphael's and Michael Angelo's and other masters'
+achievement. He could never learn by verbal advice, precept or criticism,
+but when shown great work, the artist in him dwelt on every line,
+absorbing and assimilating its principles. The spectrous fiend to whom he
+refers is, according to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, his own "selfhood." He
+held that every man contained in himself a devil and an angel, the devil
+being the natural man, the angel the God in man. Of this idea of his more
+hereafter.
+
+Blake's work, when done in the heat of his spirit, is always noble,
+characteristic, and _largely, often wholly, right_ (I am speaking of the
+execution, not the ideas expressed), but when "incessant labour" was
+expended without the incessant reference to nature which an elaborate
+technique demands, it is not wonderful that "incessant spoiling" should
+have been the result.
+
+Now, indeed, he seems to have seen how it was with himself, and to have
+gained a new mastery of material through studying the manner of other
+men's work.
+
+In 1804 Blake brought out his "Jerusalem; the Emanation of the Giant
+Albion," a poem which he told Mr. Butts was descriptive of the "spiritual
+acts of his three years' slumber on the banks of Ocean."
+
+"Milton" was also produced in the same year.
+
+In 1805 Robert Hartley Cromek, whilom engraver, but now publisher and
+printseller, "discovered" Blake in his self-chosen retirement, and
+proposed giving him employment. The story of his treacherous dealings is
+an evil one.
+
+Cromek, who had learnt engraving in the studio of Bartolozzi, found it
+laborious and slow work, so exchanged its drudgery for the calling of a
+publisher, but, having good taste but no capital, he was hard pressed
+indeed to make both ends meet.
+
+One day a piece of luck came in his way. He paid a visit to Blake's
+working and living room in South Molton Street. Many beautiful things were
+to come into being in that room, but none more so than the drawings for
+Blair's "Grave" which Blake had designed, intending to print and publish
+them in the usual way. Cromek found them, and seized upon them, gloating.
+He persuaded Blake to relinquish the idea of publishing them himself, and
+to surrender the undertaking to Cromek as one more fitted to push them and
+bring them before the notice of the public.
+
+Blake was very poor at the time. In an insulting letter written by Cromek
+to Blake some two years later, he refers with contemptible want of feeling
+and taste to this fact. "Your best work, the illustrations to the
+'Grave,'" he says, "was produced when you and Mrs. Blake were reduced so
+low as to be obliged to live on half a guinea a week!"
+
+Blake sold the twelve drawings to him for L1 10_s._ each, with the
+assured verbal agreement that he was himself to engrave them for the
+projected edition--a promise which of course entailed considerable further
+payment for the work of engraving later on.
+
+Cromek in possession of the copyright conveniently forgot his promise.
+Impregnated as he was with the fluent and graceful style of Bartolozzi's
+school, Blake's manner of engraving seemed to him grim, austere and
+archaic. He thought that the noble drawings translated by the hand of the
+popular and graceful engraver, Lewis Schiavonetti, would insure the
+success of the designs with the public as Blake could never have done were
+he to have engraved them himself.
+
+It may be that there was truth in it. Some critics hold that the
+illustrations to Blair's "Grave" have a suavity, a felicity superimposed
+by the engraver on the stern and original work of Blake which was just
+what was needed to render his work attractive to the public. To Blake's
+true lovers, however, his own graver is the rightful interpreter of his
+own drawings, and, whether Cromek were right or not in this critical
+matter of taste, he was dishonest and mean to break the engagement on the
+basis of which alone he had obtained the drawings.
+
+While Blake was looking forward with "anxious delight" to the engraving of
+his designs, Cromek had other schemes afoot. He called often at South
+Molton Street, hoping to pounce on some other work of genius which he
+could turn into money for himself. He was arrested one day before a pencil
+sketch of a new and hitherto untreated subject--the Procession of
+Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims. He tried to get Blake to make a finished
+drawing of it, with a view of course to getting it out of the artist's
+hands, and then having it engraved by someone else. Negotiations on this
+basis failing, he gave Blake a commission (verbal again) to execute the
+design in a finished picture and an engraving from it. On the strength of
+this, Blake's friends circulated a subscription paper for the engraving,
+and he himself set to work on the picture. Cromek, however, had not done.
+He was in love with the subject. Sure of Blake's conception being
+thoughtful and strong, but probably wishful that it might be invested with
+a more earthly grace and interest than he would put upon it, he went to
+Stothard and suggested the subject to him, suppressing all mention of
+Blake. Probably he assisted the suggestion by hints as to its treatment
+derived from what he had actually appreciated in Blake's conception. He
+commissioned him to paint the picture for sixty guineas, an engraving from
+which was to be done by Bromley, though Schiavonetti was eventually
+substituted for him.
+
+
+[Illustration: PILGRIMAGE TO CANTERBURY
+
+Engraving after Stothard's Canterbury Pilgrimage. Published October, 1817]
+
+
+[Illustration: CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY PILGRIMS
+
+Engraved by Blake in 1810 after his own "fresco" of the Canterbury
+Pilgrimage]
+
+
+When Blake learned that Cromek denied having given him a commission, and
+came to know that Stothard, his old friend, was to paint a picture on his
+stolen idea, to supersede his own, his rage and indignation knew no
+bounds, and he became bitterly estranged from Stothard, believing in his
+haste "that all men are liars," and that this man had been a party to the
+whole mean transaction. Gilchrist is almost sure that Stothard knew
+nothing of Cromek's previous deal with Blake on the subject of the
+Canterbury Pilgrimage.
+
+During 1806 Blake was moved to make some designs to Shakespeare which were
+neither commissioned nor engraved. Judging from the one reproduced in the
+Life,--"Hamlet and the Ghost of his Father,"--they must have been wild and
+powerful indeed. He had always a profound reverence for, and joy in,
+Shakespeare, whose works were among his favourite books.
+
+A strange and characteristic collection were those books which fed his
+fiery imagination. Could we have glanced along the row, we should have
+seen Shakespeare cheek by jowl with Lavater and Jacob Boehmen, while
+Macpherson's "Ossian," Chatterton's "Rowley," and the "Visions" of
+Emmanuel Swedenborg helped to fill in the ranks. Milton held perhaps the
+most honoured place of all, while Ovid, St. Theresa's works, and De la
+Motte Fouque's "Sintram" were among the heterogeneous collection. Chaucer
+was also cheerfully conspicuous, and, towards the close of Blake's life,
+Dante's "Divine Comedy" came to join the silent company in the
+bookshelves.
+
+In 1806 Blake became acquainted with a good and kindly man, Dr. Malkin,
+Head Master of Bury Grammar School. He gave him a commission for the
+frontispiece of Malkin's "Memorials of his Child," and in the preface
+wrote an account of the childhood and youth of the designer. Ozias
+Humphrey, the miniature painter, and a staunch friend of Blake, bought
+many of his engraved books, and it was he who obtained a commission for
+him from the Countess of Egremont to paint a picture elaborated from the
+Blair drawing of the "Last Judgment." The paper called by the same name in
+the MS. book is descriptive of this picture, and in its _intimite_ and
+demonstration of Blake's bed-rock foundations of thought and artistic
+principles, gives profound insight into his mind.
+
+These things occupied him during 1807. During that year Stothard's cabinet
+picture was publicly exhibited, and drew thousands of gazers. Blake
+doggedly continued to work at his own "Canterbury Pilgrimage," which he
+wrought in a water-colour medium which he arbitrarily termed "fresco." It
+was finished about the end of 1808. In the autumn of that year the twelve
+beautiful engravings after his designs for Blair's "Grave" were produced
+by Cromek, with a flowery introduction by Fuseli. The list of subscribers
+for the book at two-and-a-half guineas a copy was so large--thanks to
+Cromek's skilful manipulation--that the amount realized by its sale came
+to L1,800. Of this Blake received twenty guineas and Schiavonetti about
+L500. I cannot omit to mention that leave to dedicate to Queen Charlotte
+having previously been obtained, Blake made a vignette drawing with some
+grave and beautiful verses to accompany it, and sent it to Cromek as an
+additional plate, asking the modest price of four guineas for it.
+
+The design and verses were returned with a long letter from Cromek,
+closely packed with insults and slanders, and exhibiting a meanness too
+contemptible for expression. At the end of the letter he thus refers to
+the subject of the Pilgrimage, of which one would suppose he would be too
+ashamed to speak: "Why did you so _furiously rage_ at the success of the
+little picture of the Pilgrimage? Three thousand people have now _seen it
+and have approved of it_. Believe me, yours is 'the voice of one crying in
+the wilderness.'
+
+"You say the subject is _low_ and _contemptibly treated_. For his
+excellent mode of treating the subject the poet has been admired for the
+last four hundred years; the poor painter has not yet the advantage of
+antiquity on his side, therefore with some people an apology may be
+necessary for him. The conclusion of one of Squire Simpkins' letters to
+his mother in the 'Bath Guide' will afford one. He speaks greatly to the
+purpose:
+
+                                I very well know
+      Both my subject and verse is exceedingly low,
+      But if any _great critic_ finds fault with my letter,
+      _He has nothing to do but to send you a better_.
+
+  "With much respect for your talents,
+        "I remain, Sir,
+              "Your real friend and well-wisher,
+                          "R. H. CROMEK."
+
+Perhaps it was that last jeering taunt which determined Blake to show
+_his_ "Canterbury Pilgrimage" to the public, and make it the occasion of a
+little exhibition of his own. It was opened in May, 1809. Poor unworldly
+Blake, enraged and baffled, was the last man to organize an undertaking of
+this sort. Cromek could afford to laugh at the modest show on the first
+floor of James Blake's shop at the corner of Broad Street, all
+unadvertised and unpatronized as it was.
+
+The exhibition comprised, besides the "Pilgrimage," sixteen "Poetical and
+Historical Inventions," ten "frescoes," and seven drawings--"a
+collection," as Gilchrist remarks, "singularly remote from ordinary
+sympathies or even ordinary apprehension."
+
+Few of the general public penetrated here, but Blake's friends, his few
+buyers, and many contemporary artists probably went through the rooms with
+no little curiosity. Seymour Kirkup--the discoverer of Giotto's portrait
+of Dante in the Bargello,--and Henry Crabb Robinson were among the number
+of those who went and purchased catalogues. With the catalogue were issued
+subscription papers for the engraving of the "Canterbury Pilgrimage,"
+which, in spite of Cromek and Stothard, Blake intended to execute.
+
+Blake drew up a Descriptive Catalogue to interpret his pictures, and in it
+gave free rein, unfortunately, to his personal antipathy to Stothard, but
+he also expressed at some length, and with characteristic fire and
+intemperance, his views on art. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was intensely
+sympathetic with his artistic forerunner, says that the Descriptive
+Catalogue, and the "Address to the Public," "abound in critical passages,
+on painting and poetry, which must be ranked without reserve among the
+very best things ever said on either subject."
+
+It may be remarked, however, with all respect and honour, that neither
+Blake nor Rossetti were critics in any exact sense of the word. The
+unprejudiced and scientific character of mind which analyses, classifies,
+and lays bare with sharp dissecting knife the structure, bones, muscles,
+heart, of an artistic creation, belonged to neither of them. The analytic
+and synthetic qualities are seldom united in one mind. (Goethe recognized
+this when he wrote, "I, being an artist, prefer that the principles
+through which I work should be hidden from me.") Both Blake and Rossetti
+leaped with unerring instinct and the artistic intuition at all noble and
+right work, and loved it with passion, rather than appreciated it with
+cold reason. Blake's affinities in art, for instance, especially as he
+grew older, were much more catholic than it would be supposed. Although
+the Descriptive Catalogue would induce us to believe that works of art
+which he did not worship were loathed by him, this was only the case when
+he was doing battle for certain cherished principles, and then he would
+hit blindly to right and left in the heat of his partisanship. Mr. Samuel
+Palmer spoke of evenings spent with him in his old age looking over
+reproductions of the pictures of various masters, which Blake enjoyed
+greatly, dwelling on whatever was beautiful and true in each. The
+Catalogue and Address were written by him with a pen steeped in wormwood.
+His attacks were mainly directed against the "Venetian and Flemish
+demons," with their "infernal machine Chiaro Oscuro," and the "hellish
+brownness" with which he says they and their school and modern followers
+load their paintings. It is true that the English school of the day feared
+colour, and gave a brown tone to nearly all its pictures, but probably
+Blake had never seen good examples of the Venetians, whose chief glory is
+that they "conceived colour heroically." He enunciated his own principle
+in these words: "The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is
+this: that the more distinct, sharp and wiry the bounding line, the more
+perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the
+evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling." His mood was
+exasperated, truculent, passionately prejudiced, though there is much here
+of artistic insight and originality. It must be admitted that a great deal
+is painful reading, but through all the unmeasured language one feels the
+labouring, overstrained, noble, human heart, tormented beyond endurance.
+He had been galled to this state of Titanic fury by a policy of calumny,
+plagiarism, and neglect, used against him by the little souls, of what was
+in many respects a little age, with no mercy and little intermission for
+many years.
+
+Since the production of Blair's "Grave," he had been held up to public
+ridicule as an artist, in a paper called the "Examiner," edited by Leigh
+Hunt, and the occasion of this exhibition called forth another article in
+its columns full of crass misunderstanding of his aims and the superior
+sneers of a self-satisfied and material-minded writer. In it he was termed
+"an unfortunate lunatic whose personal unoffensiveness secures him from
+confinement."
+
+But the "most unkindest cut of all" had been Cromek's, in making his own
+friend of thirty years' standing the supplanter of his work, the thief of
+his idea.
+
+All these things had inflamed his tremulous and excitable nerves to a
+point beyond self-control.
+
+Material disagreements of the kind I have related had a sad effect on him,
+and drove him to an expression of bitterness very difficult to reconcile
+with the benign, gentle and courteous nature to which all his friends and
+acquaintances have affectionately testified. There is no doubt that during
+the period of middle life he developed a hard and violent strain which did
+not mix with, diminish, or distemper the fine and beautiful qualities of
+his heart and spirit, but shot through them like a barbed wire among a
+tangle of honeysuckle. In great part, it was the irritation of capricious
+and highly-strung nerves, the tension of an overheated and excitable
+brain, and not a quality of the mind or character at all.
+
+The expression of this condition of Blake's must, therefore, be taken as
+an undisciplined and wilfully exaggerated statement of his intellectual
+convictions, with a deep note of truth at the bottom. It seems strange
+that in the matter of the "Pilgrimage" he did not go straight to Stothard
+and invite him to clear himself of the suspicions with which he regarded
+him. But like all guileless people, and perhaps especially those of the
+artistic temperament, when once they have been deceived they find it easy
+to believe that all the world is in league against them.
+
+Before people who were not intimate, who were, in fact, antipathetic to
+him, Blake would abuse Stothard roundly and criticise him wantonly. But to
+the immediate circle of his personal friends or sympathisers--those who,
+knowing how he had suffered, and how black the case looked for Stothard,
+would have understood anything he might have said,--he maintained complete
+silence on the subject of the "Pilgrimage," and the name of the popular
+artist was mentioned without comment and listened to in grave silence by
+him. Once, many years after, he met Stothard at a dinner, and went up to
+him impulsively with outstretched hand. It was refused with coldness.
+Another time, hearing that Stothard was ill, Blake's heart softened and
+warmed to the old friend, and he rushed off impetuously to call and make
+up the quarrel in which he ever believed Stothard to have been the
+aggressor. But Stothard would not receive him, desired no reconciliation.
+
+In the year 1808 Blake exhibited, for the fifth and last time, at the
+Royal Academy, two pictures in "fresco," "Christ in the Sepulchre guarded
+by Angels," and "Jacob's Dream." The engraving of Blake's "Canterbury
+Pilgrimage" was issued in October, 1810.
+
+It was altogether unadvertised and unheralded, and the public held itself
+coldly aloof, neither admiring nor buying. The original picture was taken
+by the ever-faithful Mr. Butts. Stothard's picture was not finished
+engraving till a year or two later, for adverse fortunes overtook it.
+Lewis Schiavonetti died in the middle of the work, and another hand had to
+finish it. Notwithstanding all of which misadventures, it was one of the
+most popular engravings ever issued.
+
+We shall compare the two compositions in a succeeding chapter.
+
+
+[Illustration: SATAN POURING THE PLAGUE OF BOILS ON JOB
+
+Water-colour drawing. Reproduced by kind permission of Sir Charles Dilke]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+DECLINING YEARS
+
+
+Seventeen years of quiet productiveness and unceasing work, marked by the
+increasing neglect of the world, were passed by Blake at 17, South Molton
+Street.
+
+When finally abandoned by the public to the deep solitude which he created
+for himself in the midst of the roar of the city, the years are a record
+of much peaceful labour, of beautiful and strange work, produced as the
+result of his spiritual meditations and visions.
+
+"That he should do great things for small wages," writes Mr. Swinburne,
+"was a condition of his life," and the poverty which had knocked at his
+door for almost half a century, now raised the latch and came in, to live
+with the Blakes as accustomed house-mate to the end. Mrs. Blake had often
+to remind him of the bare larder and purse by setting an empty plate
+before him, when he turned to his task-work of engraving to earn the
+needful money whereby they might live.
+
+In the last years of his life Blake said significantly to Crabb Robinson,
+"I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a
+man has, is so much taken from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing
+for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite
+happy." And so indeed he was.
+
+But he wrote in the Note-book these lines also, indicative of the
+loneliness and misunderstanding of his whole life:
+
+  The Angel who presided at my birth,
+  Said, "Little creature formed for joy and mirth,
+  Go, Love, without the help of anything on earth."
+
+The struggle between himself and the world being over, and his intractable
+genius relegated by the influential and great persons of his age to a
+limbo of neglect and contempt, then did he reach out his hands as to a
+friend, and pulled Poverty across the threshold; and stretching his limbs
+and shaking back his gray old head in relief and content, he settled in to
+the unhindered and undistracted contemplation of "those things which
+really are"--the eternal inner world of the imagination.
+
+"They pity me," Blake said of Sir Thomas Lawrence and other popular
+artists of the day, "but 'tis they are the just objects of pity. I possess
+my visions and peace. They have bartered their birthright for a mess of
+pottage."
+
+Gradually the ranks of Blake's old friends were thinned till but two
+remained, Fuseli and Flaxman, both of whom, however, died before him.
+
+Johnson the bookseller died in 1809, in 1810 Ozias Humphrey; Mr. Butts,
+always a staunch friend, had no room in his house for more pictures, and
+fell off as a buyer; Hayley and Blake had long ceased to have a thought in
+common. Flaxman still continued to find engraving to be done by Blake,
+being determined that he should at least have money enough to live.
+Designing, which he would so far rather have done, was out of Flaxman's
+power to give, for the public had now sedulously turned its back on Blake.
+Much of this part of his life seems to have been lived in drudgery, but
+always cheerfully and happily. He was too poor to afford the outlay
+necessary for printing and producing his books in the old wonderful way,
+and often made unsuccessful applications to regular publishers. "Well, it
+is published elsewhere," he would say quietly, "and beautifully bound."
+
+Our artist had never been sympathetic to the decadent age of crumbling
+institutions and fallow literary and intellectual life that the last part
+of the eighteenth century presented; and now in the first years of a new
+century, a generation of new-born song, of enthusiastic lovers of liberty,
+of strong original and romantic minds, was to supplant the old artificial,
+social and literary ideals. Blake felt the pristine thrills of the great
+new birth in the poetry of Wordsworth, introduced to him by Mr. Crabb
+Robinson, and also in personal acquaintance with Coleridge, a genius
+somewhat akin to himself.
+
+Mr. George Cumberland introduced Blake in 1818 to John Linnell, afterwards
+held high in honour and renown as one of England's greatest landscape
+painters. At that time he painted portraits for a living, and engraved
+them afterwards. In this work he got Blake to help him, and it was through
+him that the latter became acquainted with a younger generation of
+artists, among whom he soon made many congenial friends. Of John Linnell
+it must be recorded, that from this time forth till Blake's death, he
+occupied a quite unique relation to him, constituting himself the old
+man's chief stay and solace, and according him the attentions and the
+admiring love given by a son to a beloved father.
+
+A new circle of friends and enthusiastic admirers, very young men for the
+most part, rose up around Blake, whose hearts, expanding in unison with
+the awakening life of the age, recognized in him a brother, a teacher, and
+inspired prophet. To them he showed his benign and childlike side, to them
+he talked, not in the old dogmatic sledge-hammer fashion, but in a spirit
+of rhapsodic revelation, of peaceful and joyous wisdom.
+
+As the years went by, a new fellowship with mankind, a large toleration
+and deep tenderness, bore golden fruit in his intercourse with this
+favoured band of young friends and disciples. As Walter Pater wrote of
+Michael Angelo, so might it be said of Blake, "This man, because the Gods
+loved him, lingered on to be of immense patriarchal age, till the
+sweetness it had taken so long to secrete in him was found at last. Out of
+the strong came forth sweetness, _ex forti dulcedo_."
+
+Among the new friends were John Varley, the father of English
+water-colours, as he has been affectionately termed, Richter and Holmes,
+both leaders of the new school. These men were the forerunners of Turner,
+Copley-Fielding, De Wint, Cotman, Prout, David Cox and William Hunt, and
+though in these days they are little remembered, and the glory of them has
+been eclipsed by their great successors, their somewhat timid and delicate
+work in South Kensington Museum will repay a visit and establish their
+pioneer claims to our regard.
+
+It was for John Varley that Blake drew the celebrated visionary heads, the
+only work of his with which he is associated by many people. Varley was by
+way of being an astrologer, and took the deepest interest in the occult
+and the spiritualistic. Blake's talk of visions, of the actual appearances
+vouchsafed him from the other world, had a significance to Varley's
+matter-of-fact mind much more vulgar and material than he intended.
+
+Our artist had cultivated imagination till it became vision, and what he
+thought, that he saw, for, as Mr. Smetham wrote, "thought crystallized
+itself sharply into vision with him." So that when his friend asked him to
+draw the portraits of men long dead and gone, such as Edward III, William
+Wallace, Richard I, Wat Tyler, or unknown personages, such as "the man who
+built the Pyramids," or "the man who taught Mr. B. painting in his
+dreams," and (most remarkable of all!) "the Ghost of a Flea," Blake had
+but to command his visionary faculty and summon before his gaze the
+desired sitters. The one which has been the most talked about is the Ghost
+of a Flea, and Varley gives the following description of the manner in
+which it sat for its portrait: "This spirit visited his (Blake's)
+imagination in such a figure as he never anticipated in an insect. As I
+was anxious to make the most correct investigation in my power of the
+truth of these visions, on hearing of this spiritual apparition of a flea,
+I asked him if he could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw. He
+instantly said, 'I see him now before me.' I therefore gave him paper and
+a pencil with which he drew the portrait.... I felt convinced by his mode
+of proceeding that he had a real image before him; for he left off and
+began on another part of the paper to make a separate drawing of the mouth
+of the flea, which, the spirit having opened, he was prevented from
+proceeding with the first sketch till he had closed it."
+
+Various explanations of these portraits of "spectres" (as Varley has it)
+have been put forward. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats write of them, "All are
+pictorial expressions of personality, pictorial opinions, drawn, as Blake
+believed, from influences set going by the character of the men, and
+permanently affecting the atmosphere, finer than air or ether, into which
+his imagination looked for their lineaments."
+
+A large and curious collection of these heads, executed by Blake at
+nocturnal sittings at Varley's house, is still in existence, but not in
+the British Museum, unfortunately. They mostly bear the date, August,
+1820.
+
+In 1820 Blake illustrated Thornton's "Virgil's Pastorals." These, along
+with his other art-work, will be considered in a later portion of this
+book. They are the only woodcuts Blake ever made, and are unique, strong
+and suggestive as anything he ever did. In the same year he made a drawing
+of Laocoon, to illustrate an article in Rees' "Cyclopaedia" (to such
+hack-work as this he was frequently reduced to replenish the household
+purse). He went to the Academy Schools, and took his place humbly among
+the young men to draw from the cast of Laocoon there.
+
+"What! you heer, Meesther Blake," said his old friend Fuseli; "we ought to
+come and learn of you, not you of us."
+
+In 1821 Blake moved to No. 3, Fountain Court, in the Temple, his last
+dwelling-place on earth. It was at that time an old-fashioned respectable
+court, very quiet, though removed but a few paces from the bustling
+Strand. The two rooms on the first floor which the Blakes inhabited have
+been more graphically described than any other of Blake's homes. The front
+room had its walls covered with his pictures and served as a reception
+room for his friends, while the back room was living room, kitchen,
+sleeping apartment and studio all in one. One of his friends wrote, "There
+was a strange expansion and sensation of freedom in those two rooms,
+_very_ seldom felt elsewhere"; while another, speaking of them to Blake's
+biographer Gilchrist, exclaimed, "Ah! that divine window!" It was there
+that Blake's working table was set, with a print of Albrecht Duerer's
+"Melancholia" beside it; and between a gap in the houses could be seen the
+river, with its endless suggestions, memories and "spiritual
+correspondences."
+
+It is to the credit of the Royal Academy that in the year after Blake's
+last move, 1822, a grant of L25 was given to this least popular but
+greatest of her children.
+
+Allan Cunningham and the fastidious Crabb Robinson give the impression
+that Blake lived in squalor at the end, but the insinuation is refuted by
+all those who knew him well. Says one, "I never look upon him as an
+unfortunate man of genius. He knew every great man of his day, and had
+enough"; while one of the most attached of his friends and disciples (a
+young artist of the band I have mentioned, who attained success as a
+painter of "poetic landscape," Mr. Samuel Palmer) wrote to Gilchrist, "No,
+certainly,--whatever was in Blake's house, there was no squalor. Himself,
+his wife and his rooms, were clean and orderly; everything was in its
+place. His delightful working corner had its implements ready, tempting to
+the hand. The millionaire's upholsterer can furnish no enrichments like
+those of Blake's enchanted rooms."
+
+It would seem that Blake, having won "those just rights as an artist and a
+man" for which he had striven with Hayley and Cromek in the old days, and
+having now established his claim to live as he pleased in honourable
+poverty for the sake of the imaginative life, gained a tardy recognition
+and respect among the intellectual spirits of the time during his last
+years. One of the friendly acquaintances of this period was Thomas
+Griffiths Wainwright, a strange character of great artistic capacity and
+sensibilities, and yet destined to be a secret poisoner and murderer. I
+wonder if Blake was thinking of him when he said in one of his
+conversations with Crabb Robinson, "I have never known a very bad man who
+had not something very good in him." Palmer Samuel has given a
+never-to-be-forgotten picture of Blake at the Academy looking at a picture
+of Wainwright's.
+
+"While so many moments better worthy to remain are fled," wrote Palmer,
+"the caprice of memory presents me with the image of Blake looking up at
+Wainwright's picture; Blake in his plain black suit and _rather_
+broad-brimmed but not quakerish hat, standing so quietly among all the
+dressed-up, rustling, swelling people, and myself thinking, 'How little
+you know _who_ is among you!'" These few graphic and reverential words
+touch the heart by their simple directness and love, for to Samuel Palmer,
+Blake was "the Master." The names of Frederick Tatham the elder, and his
+son the sculptor must be appended to the tale of Blake's friends; Edward
+Calvert, who used to go long walks with Blake, made memorable by high
+conversation; F. O. Finch, a member of the old Water Colour Society; and
+the distinguished painter Richmond, who was a mere boy when he fell under
+the spell of the inspired old man. Blake showed this group of young men
+the most fatherly kindness, encouraged them to appeal to him for advice
+and counsel, and gathered them around him and talked to them simply,
+directly and earnestly, of his high and spiritual views on life and art.
+He poured his noble enthusiasm and other-worldliness into receptive
+hearts, and his words bore fruit in their works in after life. For this
+group learned from Blake that Art must express the spirit, and must
+interpret natural phenomena esoterically. Richmond tells the following
+characteristic story of how once, "finding his invention flag during a
+whole fortnight, he went to Blake, as was his wont, for some advice and
+comfort. He found him sitting at tea with his wife. He related his
+distress: how he felt deserted by the power of invention. To his
+astonishment, Blake turned to his wife suddenly and said, 'It is just so
+with us, is it not, for weeks together when the visions forsake us? What
+do we do then, Kate?' 'We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake.'"
+
+To these earnest young men Blake was as the prophet Ezekiel, and the home
+in Fountain Court got to be called by them significantly enough, "The
+House of the Interpreter."
+
+
+[Illustration: BLAKE'S LIVING-ROOM AND DEATH-ROOM IN FOUNTAIN COURT
+
+Reproduced from the sketch by Mr. Frederic J. Shields, kindly lent by the
+artist]
+
+
+Mr. Frederick Shields (who, like Blake and many other great artists,
+will doubtless be honoured as he deserves to be when nothing further can
+touch him, and this world may not lay at his living feet its due meed of
+recognition and gratitude,) made a sketch of the sombre little living room
+in Fountain Court. His friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti was so profoundly
+touched on seeing it that he eased his heart in a sonnet:
+
+  This is the place. Even here the dauntless soul,
+  The unflinching hand, wrought on; till in that nook,
+  As on that very bed, his life partook
+  New birth and passed. Yon river's dusky shoal,
+  Whereto the close-built coiling lanes unroll,
+  Faced his work window, whence his eyes would stare,
+  Thought wandering, unto nought that met them there,
+  But to the unfettered irreversible goal.
+
+  This cupboard, Holy of Holies, held the cloud
+  Of his soul writ and limned; this other one,
+  His true wife's charge, full oft to their abode
+  Yielded for daily bread, the martyr's stone,
+  Ere yet their food might be that Bread alone,
+  The words now home-speech of the mouth of God.
+
+The house in Fountain Court has been pulled down lately. The footprints of
+the great and gentle soul in his passage through this world to the
+"unfettered irreversible goal" have almost all disappeared in the dust and
+scurry of the last century. We can still think of him, and of those long
+rapt mornings he spent in our glorious Abbey. Full as it is--pent up and
+overflowing--with the associations of centuries, it will henceforth hold
+this one more--Blake worked there, Blake dreamed there, Blake caught
+inspiration from the enchanted forests of its aisles.
+
+We may think of him, too, as standing in the Diploma Gallery of Burlington
+House, gazing with all his flaming spirit in his eyes at Marco d'Oggione's
+beautiful copy of Da Vinci's "Last Supper." Of the apostles he said,
+"Every one of them save Judas looks as if he had conquered the natural
+man."
+
+Mr. Linnell, always during this period Blake's truest, closest friend,
+introduced him to a rich and cultivated gentleman, a collector of pictures
+of the German school, a Mr. Aders, at whose table Blake met Crabb Robinson
+and Coleridge. Crabb Robinson thus describes our artist's appearance: "He
+has a most interesting appearance. He is now old--sixty-eight--pale, with
+a Socratic countenance, and an expression of great sweetness, though with
+something of languor about it, except when animated, and then he has about
+him an air of inspiration." Lamb was an habitue at the house also.
+Gotzenburger, the German painter, met Blake at Mr. Aders, and he declared
+on his return to Germany that he saw but three men of genius in
+England--Coleridge, Flaxman and Blake, and the greatest of these was
+Blake.
+
+Much happy time was spent by the old man among the Linnell family at the
+painter's house, Collins Farm, at North End, Hampstead. Here he often went
+of a Saturday, and was always welcomed with keen delight by the children
+and glad affection by their parents. Mrs. Linnell sang his favourite
+Scotch songs to him, John Linnell talked to him of art and listened
+appreciatively to his wild poetic conversation. The latter made happy the
+last few years of his life by a commission to engrave a set of plates
+after water-colour drawings, already executed, illustrating the Book of
+Job.
+
+The congeniality of this task, which was to result in the crowning
+achievement of his life, fired Blake to put his whole soul into the
+monumental inventions. Linnell also commissioned him to make a series of
+drawings from the "Divine Comedy." It is interesting to note that at
+sixty-seven Blake set to work and learned Italian, in order to read his
+author in the original. His health had long been failing, and before the
+drawings were finished Death came to him like a friend who loved him, and
+took him from this cold and unsympathetic world (where, however, he had
+been strangely happy) to that other one, with which he had always had so
+close and mystical a communion. The review of his life, from a worldly
+point of view, is of one whose means were painfully straitened, whose
+genius was baffled and powers crippled, by poverty and want of
+encouragement; to whom the world's acknowledgement was lacking, and the
+fame of the painter and poet denied.
+
+His own assessment of life, however, was very different. Gilchrist relates
+that a rich and influential lady (Mrs. Aders?) brought her little
+golden-haired daughter to see him. When this child was old she recalled
+the strangeness of the words said to her, a radiant spoilt child of
+fortune, by the poor shabby old man: "May God make this world as beautiful
+to you, my child, as it has been to me!" he said, stroking her golden
+curls.
+
+I cannot forbear to quote from Gilchrist the passage which describes his
+death.
+
+"The final leave-taking came which he had so often seen in vision; so
+often and with such child-like simple faith sung and designed. With the
+same intense high feeling he had depicted the 'Death of the Righteous
+Man,' he enacted it, serenely, joyously; for life and design and song were
+with him all pitched in one key, different expressions of one reality. No
+dissonances there! It happened on a Sunday, the 12th of August, 1827,
+nearly three months before completion of his seventieth year. On the day
+of his death ... he composed and uttered songs to his Maker so sweetly to
+the ear of his Catherine, that, when she stood to hear him, he, looking
+upon her most affectionately, said, 'My beloved! they are not _mine_! No!
+they are _not_ mine.'"
+
+The last things Blake did were to execute and colour the design of the
+"Ancient of Days" from the Europe for the young Mr. Tatham. When that was
+done, "his glance fell on his loving Kate.... As his eyes rested on the
+once-graceful form, thought of all she had been to him in these years
+filled the poet-artist's mind. "Stay," he cried, "keep as you are! _you_
+have been ever an angel to me; I will draw you." And he made what Mr.
+Tatham describes as "a phrenzied sketch of some power, highly interesting,
+but not like."
+
+In that plain back room where he had worked so contentedly he closed his
+eyes on this world, about six of a summer evening, to open them on the
+glorious visions of the next. Those beloved nervous hands which Mrs. Blake
+said she had never once seen idle, were laid to rest at last in the cold
+sleep of death.
+
+The year of Blake's death, 1827, was that of Beethoven's. Of both of them
+it may be said that they were but strangers and sojourners here, and the
+language they spoke was the language of a far country. Catherine, the
+devoted wife, only survived her husband four years, during the whole of
+which time she felt his spiritual presence close to her. Blake, though so
+poor, left no single debt, and his MSS., pictures, and printed books
+realized sufficient to keep Mrs. Blake in comfort for those few years.
+John Linnell and Tatham piously cared for and tended their lost leader's
+widow. She died as Blake died, joyfully, and her body was laid to rest
+beside his in Bunhill Fields. There is no sign to-day to show where those
+graves lie, but it is as well.
+
+"The vegetative earth" has absorbed the two dear bodies that the spirits
+of William Blake and his wife may shine the clearer; their bright radiance
+glimmers through the century like a guiding star, to lead men's thoughts
+out into the endless vistas of the infinite life which transcends our
+present limited consciousness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HIS RELIGIOUS VIEWS
+
+
+It seems to me that it would be quite vain and useless to go on to a
+review of Blake's art, and, incidentally, his poetry, without a
+preliminary examination--as concise as may be--of the fundamental
+religious and intellectual conceptions which made him the man he was, and
+gave him so strange and subjective a point of view. Blake is no ordinary
+painter, whose art-work is the only key to his inner life or to his
+perceptions of beauty in the natural world.
+
+He is an artist and a poet of the highest spiritual order, but he is also
+a mystic. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats tell us that his rank as a mystic
+entitles him to far more admiration and patient study than any claims he
+may have as a mere painter and poet! Be that as it may (and some of us
+cannot but hold the artist as the most glorious manifestation of the
+divine on this earth!), it is certainly necessary to apprehend Blake the
+mystic before we can enter into the spirit of Blake the artist.
+
+His was a strange religious creed. It is evident that in early life he
+obtained somehow or other many of the works of the great mystics and
+studied them with passionate attention. Among them Swedenborg (whom,
+however, he frequently criticised harshly) and Jacob Boehmen, the
+wonderful shoemaker of the sixteenth century, seem to have exerted the
+most lasting influence on his mind.
+
+Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences--the theory that natural
+phenomena actually represent, or rather shadow, unseen spiritual
+conditions and existence--attracted Blake at first reading, and became so
+much a part of his mental fibre that one feels certain he would have
+eventually fought his intellectual way out into this channel of thought
+had Swedenborg never written. Nature seemed to Blake but the confused and
+vague copy of something definite and perfect in "Imagination" or "Spirit."
+"All things exist in the human imagination," and "in every bosom a
+universe expands," he wrote, and in the human imagination and its reverend
+preservation and cultivation lay man's only source of divine illumination,
+he believed.
+
+"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man
+as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things
+through narrow chinks in his cavern," are illuminating words of his.
+Blake's whole effort in life seemed to be the cleansing and spiritualizing
+of the portals of the senses that he might see and hear and receive as
+much of the infinite spirit as his humanity could hold.
+
+The mission which he put clearly before him always, he expressed in these
+words in his prophetic poem of "Jerusalem":
+
+  I rest not from my great task
+  To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal Eyes
+  Of Man inwards; into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity
+  Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the Human Imagination.
+
+No man ever sought more gallantly to batter down the walls of materialism
+which were closing round the souls of men, to let in the sweet breath of
+Spirit, and to unveil the Vision of the Universal Life. The immemorial
+struggle between the body and the soul of man was never lost sight of by
+him, though he sometimes seems to deny it, and his letters to Butts from
+Felpham show something of his acute consciousness of the difficulty of
+subduing his spectre or "selfhood." "Nature and religion," he announces
+passionately, "are the fetters of Life." The orthodox narrow unspiritual
+religion of his time and all times was repugnant to Blake, and aroused all
+his fiery combative qualities. It seemed to him to be as actually a fetter
+to the spirit as the carnal nature of man. Religion was to him a matter of
+intuition, and not a question of creed or dogma at all. He gives a picture
+of ordinary religious conceptions in the poem called the "Everlasting
+Gospel":
+
+  The vision of Christ that thou dost see
+  Is my vision's greatest enemy.
+  Thine is the friend of all mankind;
+  Mine speaks in parables to the blind.
+  Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
+  Thy heaven-doors are my hell-gates.
+  Socrates taught what Miletus
+  Loathed as a nation's bitterest curse;
+  And Caiaphas was, in his own mind,
+  A benefactor to mankind.
+  Both read the Bible day and night;
+  But thou read'st black where I read white.
+
+The last line is very significant of Blake. The world which made so decent
+and respectable a thing out of Christianity, which called success and
+opportunism the favour of God, and hailed the Prince of this world by the
+name of Christ, excited Blake's utmost antagonism. He announced definite
+counter doctrines on his part, and advocated in his vehemence, almost as
+partial a view of things, as in their own way, did the materialists of his
+time. "La verite est dans une nuance," Renan has declared, but the swing
+of the pendulum of opinion must alternate from one extreme to the other
+before the precise "nuance" can be determined. Blake's noble but often
+impractical views have yet a practical utility, for only through a
+knowledge of the extreme, can the mean be discriminated. Of his own
+personal religion it might be said that certain fantastic and strange
+tenets he _chose_ to believe because they pleased him, as we may choose to
+believe in this or that section of the Catholic Church; but the most
+quintessential, intimate, and spiritual of his views were not beliefs at
+all, but simply and purely knowledge. He _knew_, by an intuition beyond
+reason, things outside the ken of ordinary men.
+
+The deep melodies of the super-sensible universe reverberated through his
+soul, and he could never therefore think much of the hum and clamour of
+this material world. From this intuitive and rapt knowledge of the mystic
+there is no appeal, for it transcends human experience, and when Blake had
+it, he was prophet (teller of hidden things) indeed. But when he chose to
+believe and assert complex and sometimes contradictory doctrines, the
+affair is different, and we may give or withhold our intellectual sympathy
+as we will. In any case the spiritual and unorthodox creed which was the
+lamp of truth to this beautiful soul is worthy of deep reverence, but I
+cannot altogether agree with Messrs. Ellis and Yeats that a _consistent_
+basis of mysticism underlies Blake's writings. Even a system of mystic
+philosophy requires to be stated comprehensibly and in a recognizable
+literary form, and the prophetic books (in which the greater part of
+Blake's views are expressed) have no form nor sequence, and are as chaotic
+and dim as dreams. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, it is true, have constructed
+an elaborate, imaginative and very coherent thought-structure out of
+Blake's prophetic writings, but owing to the looseness, confusion and
+unintelligible character of the greater part of the symbolic books
+themselves, the deftly woven web of mysticism which they present to us as
+Blake's does not carry conviction with it. It is suggestive, deeply
+sympathetic with Blake--sometimes radiantly illuminating--but seems an
+independent treatise rather than an exposition. Deeply as all students of
+Blake must feel themselves indebted to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats for their
+learned work, and the real help it has afforded to a clearer view of his
+unique personality, I cannot but think that every man will--nay
+_must_--interpret Blake for himself. He was too erratic, too emotional,
+too much the artist, the apostle of discernment and the enemy of reason
+and science, to have constructed the closely-reasoned,
+carefully-articulated system of thought which they describe so
+graphically. Blake was an intuitive mystic, not a systematic or learned
+one. However, if Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have appreciated Blake's
+mysticism, in all its strange convolutions and cloudy gyrations, they have
+done so not by following his expressed thoughts but by stating from a
+sympathetic insight denied to others, what he himself left unexpressed.
+This does not materially concern the student of Blake's art and poetry,
+but it _does_ deeply concern them that they should ascertain the _main_
+opinions which we know he held and the nature of the spiritual insight
+that obviously moulded his intellect, and hence his art.
+
+He had a startlingly naive and original mental perspective, and he
+focussed profound and virgin thought on Life, Spirit and Art. Virgin
+thought it was indeed, for tradition had little hold on him, and the
+social, political and intellectual movements of his time passed by him,
+washing round the rock on which he sat isolated, but leaving him almost
+untouched by their influence and atmosphere. He was never swept into the
+current of contemporary life, but was as removed from the London of his
+time as if his rooms had been an Alpine tower of silence, instead of being
+in the very heart and turmoil of the city.
+
+He belonged to no particular age. We could never think of him, for
+instance, like Rossetti or William Morris, as an exile from the middle
+ages who had fallen upon an uncongenial nineteenth century. He lived apart
+in a world of spirit, and concerned himself with the great elementary
+problems of all ages, bringing none of the bias or characteristic mental
+hamper of his generation to bear upon these considerations. His art
+necessarily ranges in the same primeval world, not yet thoroughly removed
+from chaos.
+
+Mr. Swinburne, in his eloquent critical essay on Blake, finds him largely
+pantheistic in his views. There is something in Blake of the rapt
+indifference to externals, found in the Buddhist.
+
+Here is a characteristic assertion of his:
+
+"God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes. He is
+become a worm that he may nourish the weak. For let it be remembered that
+creation is God descending according to the weakness of man: our Lord is
+the Word of God, and everything on earth is the Word of God, and in its
+essence is _God_." Here certainly speaks the pantheist.
+
+From the study of Blake's writings the following points--and they are
+important to our future understanding of his art-work--stand out clearly
+defined. He believed in a great permeating unconditioned spirit--God--of
+whose nature men also partake, but subjected to the conditions and moral
+nature which result from sexual and generative humanity. And beside the
+unnameable supreme God there is another God, the creator Urizen, who is a
+sort of divine demon. He it is who has divided humanity into sexes, and
+inclosed the universal soul in separate bodies, and set up a code of
+morals which bears no relation to the supreme God, Who being altogether
+removed from, and above, the generative nature of man, does not Himself
+conform to "laws of restriction and forbidding."
+
+Urizen, who imprisons and torments conditioned humanity, is somehow
+subduable by this same humanity of his own invention, and Christ, the
+perfect man filled as full as may be with the Divine Spirit (for "a cup
+may not contain more than its capaciousness"), rises in the hearts of
+humanity, and effects its freedom, by aspiring past the Creator, to the
+Altogether Divine, and uniting with it.
+
+Jehovah addressing Christ, as the highest type and flower of humanity,
+says to him, in the poem called the "Everlasting Gospel":
+
+  If thou humblest thyself thou humblest me.
+  Thou art a man: God is no more:
+  Thine own humanity learn to adore,
+  For that is my spirit of life.
+
+This makes us think of Blake's follower, Walt Whitman, who in the same
+sort of turgid and chaotic poetry in which Blake wrote the prophetic
+books, but with no mystic clouds to shroud the meaning, has consistently
+developed this thought: "One's self I sing, a simple separate person," and
+"none has begun to think how divine he himself is," etc.
+
+In Blake's conversations with Crabb Robinson, this mystic view of Christ
+is very apparent. "On my asking," writes Mr. Robinson, "in what light he
+viewed the great questions of the duty of Jesus," he said, "He is the only
+God. But then," he added, "and so am I, and so are you."
+
+Keeping this point in view,--Blake's belief in the identity of the Spirit
+of God behind all phenomena, the homogeneous character of the great
+creative Energy or Imagination expressing Itself through various forms and
+organisms,--another extract from Crabb Robinson's diary will help us still
+nearer home to Blake's point of view. He writes: "In the same tone, he
+said repeatedly, 'The Spirit told me.' I took occasion to say, 'You
+express yourself as Socrates used to do. What resemblance do you suppose
+there is between your spirit and his?' 'The same as between our
+countenances.' He paused and added, 'I was Socrates,' and then, as if
+correcting himself, 'a sort of brother. I must have had conversations with
+him. So I had with Jesus Christ. I have an obscure recollection of having
+been with both of them.' I suggested on philosophic grounds the
+impossibility of supposing an immortal being created an _a parte post_
+without an _a parte ante_. His eye brightened at this, and he fully
+concurred with me. 'To be sure, it is impossible. We are all co-existent
+with God, members of the Divine Body. We are all partakers of the Divine
+Nature.'"
+
+The latter words seem as ordinary and orthodox as on first reading his
+assertion that he was Socrates seems wild and mad. But all Blake really
+meant (and I think Crabb Robinson only half took his meaning) was, that
+the vegetative universe being a mere shadow, so are the accidents of
+personality, the age one is born into, the organic form which incloses the
+spirit. So his personality and that of Socrates, their imprisonment in the
+"vegetative" life were differences of no account, being transitory. But he
+and Socrates were one (or at least related) at the point where their
+spirits (the eternal verity) touched, and melted each into the other.
+
+He understood the Bible in its spiritual sense. As to the natural sense,
+"Voltaire was commissioned by God to expose that. I have had much
+intercourse with Voltaire, and he said to me, 'I blasphemed the Son of
+Man, and it shall be forgiven me, but they (the enemies of Voltaire)
+blasphemed the Holy Ghost in me, and it shall not be forgiven them.'" This
+affords an instance of the manner in which Blake intuitively probed
+beneath the appearance, and divined the spirit beneath, discarding the
+fact or body with which it clothed itself. Another characteristic opinion
+of Blake's, and one that moulded much of his work, is the following:
+
+"Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason
+and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence. From these
+contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the
+passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active, springing from Energy. Good
+is Heaven, Evil is Hell."
+
+"All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors:
+
+"1. That man has two existing principles, viz., a Body and a Soul.
+
+"2. That energy, called evil, is alone from the body, and that Heaven,
+called Good, is alone from the soul.
+
+"3. That God will torment man in Eternity for following his energies. But
+the following contraries are true:
+
+"1. Man has no Body distinct from Soul, for that called Body is a portion
+of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this
+age.
+
+"2. Energy is the only life, and is from the body, and reason is the bound
+or outward circumference of energy.
+
+"3. Energy is eternal delight."
+
+These postulates form links in a chain of thought, another progression of
+which is developed in "Jerusalem." Blake writes: "There is a limit of
+opaqueness and a limit of contraction in every individual man, and the
+limit of opaqueness is called Satan, and the limit of contraction is
+called Adam. But there is no limit of expansion, there is no limit of
+translucence in the bosom of man for ever from eternity to eternity."
+Certainly there was no limit in his own bosom, and in vision he expanded
+away from his own "ego" and merged in the universal life, the
+all-pervading Spirit. Opaqueness and contraction were the only forms of
+evil he recognized, and these are negative rather than active qualities.
+
+Indeed, Blake often seems to deny the existence of sin at all. Again
+referring to the invaluable record that Crabb Robinson has left of
+Blake--I quote always from Messrs. Ellis and Yeats' complete reprint of
+the part of the diary referring to him--"He allowed, indeed, that there
+are errors, mistakes, etc., and if these be evil, then there is evil. But
+these are only negations. He denied that the natural world is anything. It
+is all nothing, and Satan's empire is the empire of nothing."
+
+In another place he writes: "Negations are not contraries. Contraries
+exist. But negations exist not; nor shall they ever be organized for ever
+and ever." Contraries, 'the marriage of Heaven and Hell,' seemed necessary
+and right to him, and the urge and recoil natural correlatives.
+
+The great strife with Blake was always that between reason and
+imagination, experience and spiritual discernment.
+
+The greater part of humanity seemed to him to see _with_ the natural eye
+natural phenomena only. This was accordingly opaque to them, and did not
+let through the light of the Universal Spirit or Imagination, seen with
+which alone it was beautiful, as being then the symbol of something
+immeasureably greater than itself. Locke and Newton, the men of "single
+vision" as he called them, were the types of this part of humanity. He
+would fain have had men look _through_ the eye at the infinite imagination
+which is the cause of phenomena.
+
+
+[Illustration: 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
+
+HIS MYSTICAL NATURE
+
+
+To the world of his own time Blake appeared a mad visionary, whose sweet
+impulsive early poems attracted a few of the rarer souls of the age, but
+whose pictures and designs were practically unknown. His genius,
+atmosphere, and modes of thought were antipathetic to his age, and his
+aims and achievement proved so difficult to understand from the point of
+view of that day, that he was summarily and uncomprehendingly set down as
+mad.
+
+This was an offhand and unintelligent method of accounting for so rare a
+spirit. The spectacle of a man who might, had he chosen, have enjoyed
+riches, honour, admiration and glory, but who instead, like his great
+Master, cared not at all for lordship in this world, but much for the
+preservation of the kingdom of the spirit that is not of this world, did a
+great deal to earn for Blake the name of madman. The world has always
+regarded the voluntarily poor with suspicion and misapprehension.
+
+Then, again, Blake was one of those who lived very near the veil which
+shrouds the great unexplored spiritual forces. Death, as we know, seemed
+to him but the "passing from one room to another."
+
+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 erudition 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
+
+HIS ART WORK
+
+
+And now we must turn our attention to Blake's art-work--the fruit of his
+life "of beautiful purpose and warped power," as Ruskin calls it--and the
+expression of those strange thoughts, beliefs and visions, which were his
+real world. My purpose is, to turn over, as it were, the leaves of his
+books in the Print Room of the British Museum (the only copies available
+to the general public, though several finer are contained in private
+collections), and thus help to recall to the crowded mind of to-day's art
+the living burning spirit of Blake which is inclosed in those covers.
+After which we will pass on to a general description and review of his
+drawings, engravings and water-colours in the British Museum, and then
+consider his pictures in the National Gallery. A chapter will also be
+devoted to the Exhibition of Works of Blake which were on view for six
+weeks (January and February, 1904) at Messrs. Carfax's Rooms in Ryder
+Street, for this exhibition contained many of his finest works, and
+several which will not again be seen by the public for many a long day.
+
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+
+[Illustration: 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."
+
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+
+[Illustration: "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" (1-5/8 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.
+
+
+[Illustration: 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'etre_--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.
+
+
+[Illustration: 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 L300. 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.
+
+
+[Illustration: PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM "SONGS OF INNOCENCE," 1789]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE PROPHETIC BOOKS
+
+
+"The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they
+dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them, and whether they did
+not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, and so be the
+cause of imposition?
+
+"Isaiah answer'd. I saw no God nor heard any, in a finite organical
+perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in everything, and as I
+was then persuaded and remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest
+indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote."
+These words are quoted from one of Blake's "Memorable Fancies" in the
+"Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and in some such vein as that which Blake
+makes Isaiah describe, did he himself commence the writing of the
+"Prophetic Books." The sense of his great, though somewhat indefinite
+mission, came upon Blake gradually. Much of his time, even when engaged in
+designing, engraving and painting, was spent in thinking immense and
+original thoughts. They tyrannized over him, these thoughts, and instead
+of his guiding their sun-ward and most daring flight, they drew him along
+on their reckless course, sometimes bringing him to complete overthrow, as
+did the horses of Apollo when driven by Phaethon.
+
+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 L29. 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.
+
+
+[Illustration: 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 L295. 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 L207. 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.
+
+Duerer'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.
+
+
+[Illustration: 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 L20 10_s._
+
+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."
+
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+
+[Illustration: 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
+L80.
+
+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.
+
+
+[Illustration: PLATE FROM "EUROPE, A PROPHECY," 1794
+
+Printed and coloured by hand]
+
+
+Another plate from the "Europe," the lines of which we reproduce,
+represents two lithe nude women springing upwards with incomparable grace
+and the true Blake vigour, among arching wheat stems. They blow horns
+through which descends a fall of blight upon the corn. The decorative
+rightness, the exquisite appreciation of the melodies of form, the
+vitality of action, cannot be too much admired. And the colour! The tender
+flesh-painting contrasted with the young green of the corn!--Yet Mr.
+Swinburne, usually so intensely alive to the beautiful, and especially
+Blake's beautiful, describes the plate in these terms: "Mildews are seen
+incarnate as foul, flushed women with strenuous limbs contorted, blighting
+ears of corn with the violent breath of their inflated mouths."
+
+There is some delicate tracery of cobwebs, among leaves and greenery, on
+another page, exhibiting Blake in a marvellously naturalistic mood for
+once, and a final plate of a man rescuing a woman and child from fierce,
+rolling flames. No one ever painted fire as Blake did, and over and over
+again in his treatment of this favourite motive we shall have to own that
+he is, as Mr. William Michael Rossetti says, in this respect at least,
+"supreme painter."
+
+As I do not know where to place the tiny book or pamphlet entitled, "There
+is no Natural Religion,"--it having no date affixed to it,--I shall refer
+to it here. It consists of eleven illustrated leaves, each containing in
+the engraved text a didactic statement or thesis by Blake on this
+favourite subject. Below the words, which give much illumination to his
+peculiar opinions, are small, rough drawings made with a brush full of
+heavy black, relieved in parts by outlines in sepia.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE PROPHETIC BOOKS CONTINUED
+
+
+In studying the next book which Blake produced in 1794--the "Book of
+Urizen"--it is necessary to disabuse our minds of the idea that Blake's
+thoughts were not clear to himself. However confused and troubled they
+appear to us, they were certainly clear as sunlight to him, but he failed
+in the labour of reducing them to terms of intellectual definiteness, much
+less to terms of poetic art. The excitement which these visions brought
+upon his tremulous and sensitive brain seems to have induced a kind of
+"possession," similar to that of the maenads at the festival of Dionysus
+of old, so that no very consecutive utterance may be expected from him.
+Yet there _is_ a kind of sequence in "Urizen," and the marvellous
+illustrations to the book cannot be properly appreciated without holding
+the thread of the so-called poem. Setting aside the ancient Biblical
+tradition, our prophet undertakes no less a task than the writing of a new
+Genesis, which in its naked horror and despair causes the very gods
+themselves to hide their faces out of pity to the sons of men.
+
+Urizen the creator, the god of restraints and prohibitions, becomes
+self-inclosed and divides himself from Eternity and the Eternals.
+
+
+[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF "URIZEN." PUBLISHED 1794]
+
+
+In fire and strife and anguish he creates the world, "like a black globe,
+viewed by the Sons of Eternity, standing on the shore of the Infinite
+Ocean, like a human heart struggling and beating, the vast world of
+Urizen appears." But after this effort he is laid in "stony sleep
+unorganized rent from eternity." Los, who is Time, was then wrenched out
+of Urizen, and suffers fierce pain in the act of separation and division.
+Then, while Time works with hammers at his forge, fires belching around,
+he sees, nay! appears to assist at, the further changes of Urizen. For the
+"formless god" is gradually taking form, and inclosing himself in a human
+body. He assumes bones, heart, brain, eyes, ears, nostrils, stomach,
+throat, tongue, arms, legs, and feet. And now "his eternal life like a
+dream was obliterated." An age of intense agony and stress was allotted to
+the evolution and development of each created portion of the body.
+
+Meanwhile Los "forged chains new and new, numbering with links, hours,
+days and years."
+
+When Los had finished his unwilling task, and saw Urizen all bound with
+the chains of time, the senses, and the enclosing boundaries of his own
+selfhood, "Pity began." This is another painful division and shrinkage,--
+
+  In tears and cries imbodied
+  A female form trembling and pale,
+  Waves before his deathy face.
+
+Her name is Pity or Enitharmon. She is also Space, and her union with Los
+or Time naturally follows. The Eternals are so terrified at what Urizen
+has done, that they enclose the new creation in a tent to hide it from
+their sight, and call the tent Science. From the union of Space and Time
+springs a child, Orc, hereafter the deliverer, whom the father and mother
+chain with the chain of jealousy below the deathful shadow of Urizen.
+
+Urizen then explores his new kingdom, and, looking on his teeming world,
+he sickened, for he saw "that no flesh nor spirit could keep his iron laws
+(of prohibition and restraint) one moment." So he made a great Web or
+Net, and flung it over all, and this was called the Net of Religion. And
+of his now finished Creation it is written,
+
+  Six days they shrunk up from existence
+  And on the seventh day they rested.
+  And they blessed the seventh day in sick hope,
+  And forgot their eternal life.
+
+The evolution or changes of Urizen form the subjects of a great number of
+the plates. Blake has wrought here through the pictorial medium as Dante
+wrought the "Inferno" in his own art. The same high imagination, the same
+passionate and unshrinking realization of it, the same terrible force are
+integral parts of the minds of both artists, and inspire both works,
+different in kind as they are and separated by centuries of thought and
+feeling. No wonder that Linnell desired Blake in his old age to make
+drawings from the "Inferno," "thinking him the very man and only to
+illustrate Dante."
+
+The prelude to the book is set in a tender and lovely key, very difficult,
+however, to harmonize with what follows. It is not obvious why it occurs
+here or what connection it has with the dark story of Urizen. The same
+little picture will be found in the smaller Book of Designs, but there it
+is quite differently rendered as to colour, and I think more beautifully.
+Our reproduction is from the latter plate.
+
+The cloud-like form of a beautiful woman, drifts across the sky, drawing
+by the hand a little baby, with the ideal face of sweet infancy. There is
+a delicious curve in the woman's body, a swirl of the garments, and a
+quick, fish-like, darting movement about the action of the child which
+contribute to the impression of flight through a buoyant atmosphere.
+
+Turning over the pages of "Urizen" one terror after another takes the
+breath and quickens the pulse. Urizen--or is it Orc?--his terrible face
+averted, strides through a world of fire dividing the flames with his
+arms.
+
+
+[Illustration: LOS HOWLING
+
+Colour-printed plate from "Urizen." 1794]
+
+
+A human figure, snake-encircled, falls headlong into raging flames,
+recalling a somewhat similar idea in "America." Los is next seen, howling
+in fire, because of his painful separation from Urizen.
+
+Poor solitary thinker! what shuddering emotions must have rent Blake as
+his relentless hand drew and coloured the visionary appearances of these
+monsters of imagination!
+
+To the hot and lurid impression of Plate 6 succeeds one, in which a pallid
+skeleton, bowed head between knees, sits grisly on the ground. Urizen
+assumes bones. In much the same attitude, but now turned to the spectator,
+the next plate shows us an arresting figure. An old man, nude, with white
+hair, and patriarchal beard sweeping the ground, shows an upturned
+despairing blind face. Suggestions of indescribable suffering are
+incarnate in this design. I shall take the liberty of calling the type the
+"Blake old man." We come across it again and again, and it instances his
+tendency to concentrate all varieties into a type, to make his artistic
+language as bare and simple and elemental as possible.
+
+The story can be traced through all the plates. Urizen visiting his new
+world forms a series of six wonderful plates, of which one is very Gothic,
+representing as it does an amphibious-looking old man very like a gargoyle
+sinking slowly through a world of water. It is a true grotesque.
+
+The most poetic of all the pictures is, I think, the one which represents
+the Birth of Enitharmon or Pity. Rising from a cloudy abyss with that
+bubble-like buoyancy which Blake knew so well how to breathe into his
+figures, a nude woman with body bowed in anguish floats upward. The face,
+with its strange dim, tortured eyes, speaks of the suffering which only
+the complex and self-conscious soul born of the mingled forces that
+produced the French Revolution and the New Age is capable of experiencing.
+The body is of wonderful beauty and purity. On the brink of the abyss from
+which she rises like the smoke of a hidden fire, Los kneels with head
+bowed in arms. His deep musings have brought forth this strange
+sorrow-laden beauty.
+
+Another picture, Humanity chained by the wrists and ankles in slavery, its
+blind eyes raining tears, but with the light of Eternity like an aureole
+behind its head, is seen waiting, waiting, with an endless and most
+painful patience, for some final deliverance. Like Michael Angelo's "Il
+Penseroso," "it fascinates and is intolerable." No more piteous or
+significant symbol of humanity has ever been conceived, in the full
+compass of its sorrow, its slavery, and its hope. Blake utters a
+Promethean cry in "Urizen." He calls out on the creator for having
+imprisoned and tormented us. A wild ineffectual cry enough, and one not
+consistent with brighter and saner views, which he held as passionately,
+but then,--it is Blake! And Blake was never able "to build a house large
+enough for his ideas." The Print Room does not contain a copy of the "Book
+of Ahania" which is a continuation of the theme of "Urizen," but short and
+unillustrated.
+
+The small Book of Designs should be looked at in conjunction with "Thel,"
+"Urizen," the "Daughters of Albion" and the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell,"
+for the plates are repetitions from these books often far more rich in
+colour and delicate in execution than those in the complete works.
+
+The large Book of Designs contains, among many plates familiar in design
+to us, though varied always in colouring, four, which we have not seen
+before, and can see nowhere else. The first is a colour-print of morning
+or Glad Day. It is a radiant design, but like many of these
+colour-prints of Blake, somewhat the worse for time, having the paint
+rubbed off and blackened in parts. Blake's colour-printing process was as
+follows, according to the only extant account:
+
+
+[Illustration: COLOUR-PRINTED DESIGN FROM "URIZEN." 1794
+
+Reproduced from the "Small Book of Designs"]
+
+
+He drew the outline heavily in chalk on a mill-board and put on the colour
+diluted with oil or glue in thick patches, and printed the wet impression
+off on to paper. He then worked upon this rough ground, when dry, in water
+colour. But only in a few instances did he show complete mastery of the
+ingenious method.
+
+The second plate I would call attention to is a nightmare horror entitled
+the "Accusers of Theft, Adultery and Murder." There are a trio of furies,
+only male instead of female; the watermark of the paper is 1794. A similar
+design, not so finely coloured, was sold at Messrs. Hodgson's for L15
+10_s._ The third is a lovely little gem representing John the Baptist
+preaching to a beautifully grouped crowd. Its fellow sold at the same sale
+for L26 10_s._ The fourth represents a semi-nude figure, with head
+downcast, sitting beneath the bent and blasted stump of a tree, while to
+the left a woman nude and of remarkable beauty tosses a child high in arm.
+It is thought that this plate may have been intended for a cancel in
+"America"; for another one, more beautiful in colouring than this, which
+was also sold at Messrs. Hodgson's, and for L42, was found to bear some
+text from "America," faintly discernible under the colouring on the upper
+half of the plate, which could be read only from the back.
+
+In 1795 Blake produced the "Song of Los." The Print Room copy is heavy and
+opaque in colour, though very splendid and rich, and the Library copy is
+similar in most respects. It was evidently colour-printed after the method
+described above, for the peculiar mottled backgrounds are an effect that
+could not very well have been realized by any other method, nor even then
+are they understandable, unless indeed Blake had a wooden stamp which he
+impressed on the blobs of colour first laid on the paper itself.
+
+The "Song of Los" is the Song of Time, and includes the "Songs of Africa,
+and Asia." So now Blake has written a song of prophecy for each of the
+four great parts of the earth. "Africa" deals in a wild incoherent way
+with the rise of the various religions. Urizen delivers his laws of brass
+and iron and gold to all the Nations. These were "the nets and gins and
+traps to clutch the joys of Eternity," and Har and Heva--representatives
+of natural humanity--find "all the vast of Nature shrunk before their
+shrunken eyes," for the senses are the limits put upon perception.
+
+  Thus the terrible race of Los and Enitharmon gave
+  Laws and Religions to the Sons of Har, binding them more
+  And more to Earth: closing and restraining:
+  Till a philosophy of the Five Senses was complete.
+  Urizen wept and gave it into the hands of Newton and Locke!
+
+In "Asia" Urizen hears the despairing cry of his creation, and himself
+shudders and weeps, but unavailingly. Orc is heard raging on Mount Atlas,
+where he is chained down with the chain of jealousy. Orc is the Flame of
+Genius, the true deliverer of the Race. He was chained by his father and
+mother in fear of Urizen's jealousy, but we know that he will break free
+at last, and bring his living fire into the hearts of the chosen of the
+peoples.
+
+The book contains but five pages, of which the most beautiful is a design
+of a boy and girl with arms wound around each other, running over a
+hill-top, with a passionate sunset sky behind them. The "Book of Los,"
+which must not be confounded with the Song, appeared in the same year. The
+Print Room has no copy, so we must descend to the Library, which happily
+possesses one. It consists of four chapters on the old themes, written
+in a sort of metrical prose. The frontispiece, representing a woman in the
+characteristic attitude so often adopted by Blake--the figure being seated
+on the ground, with head supported on knees in a mysterious lone place
+among rocks--is an arresting and powerful design. The writing in this book
+is particularly fine and clear. It is the last of Blake's "London Books of
+Prophecy."
+
+
+[Illustration: THE ACCUSERS: OR, SATAN'S TRINITY
+
+Colour-print from the Large Book of Designs in the Print Room]
+
+
+What shall I say of "Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion"--this
+longest and perhaps most mystical of all Blake's dithyrambic books?
+
+It was written, as well as the "Milton," during the Felpham period, though
+probably added to, and finally finished after his return to London.
+
+Those who have heard the extraordinary tone-poem called "Also sprach
+Zarathustra," by Richard Strauss, may not think it far-fetched to suggest
+a parallel between revolutionary, chaotic, yet somehow great music, such
+as it is, and the so-called poem of "Jerusalem." To the authors of both,
+the classical, the established forms of expression belonging to their
+respective arts, seem outworn, inadequate, cramped. They feared to trust
+the new wine of their fermenting ideas to the old bottles of recognized
+form, and each has invented for himself a way of escape--somewhat
+dangerous, nay, almost suicidal--from the pressure of precedent, law, and
+order. Strange harmonies, horrid discords, sweetness as of honey, to be
+succeeded by a sharp acridity like that of unripe lemons, great marshalled
+orchestral forms, and wild abortive sounds, tormenting alike to ear and
+heart, are to be discerned in "Zarathustra," not without irrational
+excitement, anger, dismay, and occasional delight on the part of the
+hearer. And in "Jerusalem" is it not much the same?
+
+With an Olympian audacity Blake writes, "When this Verse was first
+dictated to me, I considered a monotonous cadence like that used by
+Milton and Shakespeare, and all writers of English blank verse, derived
+from the modern bondage of rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensable
+part of verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true orator, such
+monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I
+therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences and
+number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into
+its place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the
+mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, and the prosaic for the
+inferior parts; all are necessary to each other; Poetry fettered, fetters
+the human race."
+
+Self-assertion such as this is the apology for arts like those of Strauss
+and Walt Whitman, and our very admiration for Blake's youthful lyrical
+gift compels us to lament that his muse was brought at last, after those
+early days of soaring flight, to wading through such quagmires of
+so-called poetry as this and the ensuing book. Mysticism had engulfed the
+poet in its dim cloud, though poetic phrases and passages like crystal dew
+glitter amid the gloom.
+
+The "Jerusalem" may be regarded as an attempted poetic statement of
+Blake's mystic philosophy regarding the development of humanity and its
+various states.
+
+    I give you the end of a golden string
+  Only wind it into a ball,
+  It will lead you in at Heaven's gate
+  Built in Jerusalem's wall,
+
+writes Blake in the course of the book. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have wound
+it into a very tangible ball, taking the symbolizism of the four Zoas as
+the clue to the whole mystery. Blake mentions the Zoas here frequently:
+"Four universes round the mundane egg remain chaotic" (nothing could be
+more true!) "One to the North Urthona; one to the South Urizen; one to the
+East Luvah; one to the west Tharmas. They are the four Zoas that stood
+around the throne divine." But if the symbolism of the Zoas is in reality
+woven into the very tissue of the story, and forms its vital and coherent
+argument, it must be discovered on some mathematical principle very
+foreign, and, indeed, repugnant to the lover of true poetry. It is in no
+sense obvious or sequential. The value of the book lies, not in its
+poetical merit, nor even primarily in its mystic significance, but in the
+insight which it affords into the byways of Blake's mind. The knowledge of
+his opinions gained here (they have been shortly commented on in a former
+chapter) enable us to form correct estimates of the scope of his plastic
+art, and his outlook on the world. Messrs. Maclaggan and Russell have
+edited a plain-typed and unillustrated edition of "Jerusalem," and promise
+an expository essay on it to follow in due course, so that to earnest
+readers its study will be greatly facilitated. The book is concerned with
+one Albion, the father as it would seem of all created men, and Los (Time)
+who is his friend. Jerusalem and Vala are his emanations--Jerusalem being
+his wife. The city of Golgonooza--that is, I believe, Spiritual Art--is
+also described, and bears its part in the story.
+
+On page 13, line 30, we read, "Around Golgonooza lies the land of death
+eternal; a land of pain and misery and despair and ever-brooding
+misery"--the repetition of the word "misery," does not sound as if every
+word had been studied and put in its place! But the idea that the
+beautiful city of spiritual Art should be built in the midst of pain and
+despair reminds one of a similar idea of Goethe's, "Art enshrines the
+great sadness of the world, but is itself not sad." And the following
+lines develop the suggestion, page 16, line 61: "All things acted on
+Earth are seen in the Bright Sculptures of Los's Halls, and every age
+renews its powers from these works. With every pathetic story possible to
+happen from Hate or Wayward Love and every sorrow and distress is carved
+here."
+
+The introduction of localities, streets and districts, has an almost
+ludicrous effect, as for instance in the following lines: "What are those
+golden builders doing near mournful ever-weeping Paddington?" Is it, one
+wonders, a prophetic announcement of the erection of the Great Western
+Terminus? Had Blake possessed the saving grace of humour, he would never
+have committed such laughter-provoking solecisms as this and other
+passages of the same kind. Humour is a means of restoring and keeping the
+balances true. It assists the sense of proportion, and like a fresh wind
+blows the cobwebs away; but, alas! Blake had no faintest trace of it.
+
+In a kind of Dionysiac rage he has flung his noble ideas, original
+conceptions, pell-mell into the cauldron along with mere windy,
+mouth-filling rodomontade. There is a great deal of confused noise, but by
+snatches we distinguish the half-drowned but heavenly music. The fact is
+that his material (God-dictated, as he thought) so excited him that he was
+unable to deal with it, unable to direct the heat of his genius into
+fusing the heterogeneous mass into the perfect artistic unity. The vision
+unnerved him, and he all but lost his balance. Well might he too have
+cried:
+
+    A veil 'twixt us and Thee, dread Lord,
+  A veil 'twixt us and Thee,
+  Lest we should hear too clear, too clear
+  And unto madness see.
+
+The illustrations to the book have all the concentration, power and grasp
+which the literary matter lacks. The pages seem to throb beneath the
+teeming forms of life with which his hand has adorned them. Each in the
+disposition of the beautiful writing is a picture. Wild passionate little
+figures, drawn with exquisite feeling, leap, climb, and fly about some of
+the borders while on others the writing is interrupted and entwined with
+creeping tendrils, or adorned with flames, stars, serpents, and
+processions of insects--a riot of decoration.
+
+"Jerusalem" is a folio of 100 pages, one side of each leaf only being
+printed. From the first page to the twenty-fifth of the Museum copy the
+writing is in black, while the designs are left white outlined in black,
+on a dense sable ground. Pages 26 to 50 are in deep green, the printed
+designs being sometimes finished by hand, the deepest tones being laid on
+with a brush full of heavy colour. Pages 51 to 100 are again black and
+white--the black being always of great intensity.
+
+In the first plate a man is seen entering through a door into darkness,
+with a lamp in his hand. This is our old friend Los entering into the dark
+places of Albion's mind--Albion having turned his back on "the Divine
+Vision." Curiously poetical suggestions are to be found in the title-page,
+whereon a cherubim with covering wings weeps over a beautiful prostrate
+female. This lovely body forms the central vein of a rose leaf, and is
+incorporated in its vegetable life. But above the woman's head are the
+wings that have become atrophied, and the moon and stars, like the eyes of
+a peacock's feathers, are seen on them, suggesting reminiscences and
+possibilities of spiritual development in "Vegetative humanity" beyond
+verbal expression. Glanced at as a whole without discriminating the parts,
+this fanciful and Gothic conception bears a strange resemblance to a
+butterfly. Did not the Greeks find in the butterfly a symbol of the
+immortality of the soul and its renewal in youth, and Blake, who was so
+profoundly sensitive to analogies of this kind, was not likely to have
+created this obvious resemblance accidentally. Everything is with him
+significant.
+
+Is it a dryad who lies outstretched on page 23 with the rising sap of her
+vegetable life stirring within her fibrous extremities, and awakening her
+to some dim half-painful consciousness. And below her, what hints of
+strange buried gnomic life, of Titans convulsively heaving like volcanoes
+in the dark earth, of creatures begotten of rocks and tree-roots, living
+like the suckers of plants in the fissures and crannies of deep strata!
+
+Again, on page 33 appears the beautiful weird fantasy that I have named a
+dryad. The sun and the moon shine on her simultaneously, and her
+rudimentary limbs appear now to be branches and again to be embryonic
+wings. A sort of vampire bat is poised above her. At the top of the same
+page a man with the world under his foot like a stool would seem to have
+been saved fainting in the arms of an effulgent divine Being from some
+threatening danger.
+
+I pondered long over this design before finding the clue, which I now
+believe is to be found in these words, on the previous page, in
+"Jerusalem": "The reasoning spectre stands between man and his immortal
+imagination."
+
+On Plate 53 is represented a woman sitting enthroned on a sunflower, her
+double wings form a sort of baldachino above her head. She has a triple
+tiara from which flames arise in a pyramidal shape, and the sun, the moon,
+and the stars are contained in her vast wings. The vegetative human has
+blossomed in the sunflower of spiritual life. No longer "the starry
+heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of Albion," but instead of
+separation there is a large union. "In every bosom a universe expands,"
+and "everything exists in the human imagination," are words which help to
+explain this curious design.
+
+
+[Illustration: PRINTED PLATE (UNCOLOURED), FROM "JERUSALEM, THE EMANATION
+OF THE GIANT ALBION." 1804]
+
+
+A coloured print of the same plate, very sumptuous and rich, was exhibited
+in the Carfax Galleries in January, 1894.
+
+A beautiful drawing on page 46 gives the meeting of Vala with Jerusalem
+and her children, but as an artist's forms often contain more in them than
+the obvious expression of a fact, so here one may permit oneself to see
+another meaning underlying this, as the ancient text underlies the
+palimpsest. Vala may also have an analogy with Death, who like a veiled
+woman meets a mother with her children. As she lifts her veil, and looks
+upon one among the group, the child takes flight and attempts to draw his
+sister after him. Blake, who seldom made his faces characteristic, but was
+satisfied with making them merely typical, has given this woman's face a
+piteous expression of fear and entreaty.
+
+A notable plate is that representing the Crucifixion, the motive of which,
+when disengaged from the confused material of the book, is discovered to
+be the bed-rock or foundation, the radical thought, at the base of
+"Jerusalem" and the next work "Milton." Jesus the Saviour is Eternal
+Imagination slain by men, who nail it to the "stems of generation," that
+is, kill it through the opacity of the senses and the limitations of
+sexual life. Just in the same way Orc, the deliverer, who is a type or
+other aspect of Jesus, is Genius, and by man is nailed on to the rocks of
+Mount Atlas.
+
+Looking through the pages of "Jerusalem," vague memories of Norse sagas,
+of dim carved stalls in old Gothic cathedrals, of the cold cellar-like air
+that sighs through their aisles and chapels, come to one and cause a
+delightful and yet fearful shudder. But the designs savour only in a
+fleeting irrational way of these things, having a wholly unique character
+of their own.
+
+The "Prophetic Books" reproduced by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats are not taken
+from the British Museum copies it may be as well to remark here, and the
+variation in the disposition of the light and shade is great in the
+various copies, though the outlines are always the same, being printed off
+the same plate, of course. The finest known copy of "Jerusalem" was sold
+at Messrs. Sotheby's among other Blake treasures belonging to Lord Crewe
+for the sum of L83.
+
+"Milton," the last of the published "Books of Prophecy," produced in 1804,
+is a small quarto of forty-five printed pages, coloured by hand in the old
+radiant manner. The preface, beautiful but sibylline, is an appeal to all
+men to worship and exalt Imagination, which in ancient times in the
+Christ-form, says Blake, "walked upon England's mountains green." "Would
+to God that all the Lord's people were prophets"--that is "seers"--he
+quotes with profound earnestness at the end.
+
+The "poem" itself opens more intelligibly than most of the later books
+with a mythic story concerning one Palamabron and the horses of the
+plough; of Satan, who persuaded him to be allowed to drive the horses for
+one day, and of the dire confusion, strife, and tragedy resulting from
+Palamabron's consent.
+
+The story bears a distant analogy to the Phaethon myth, for Palamabron
+represents, according to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, the "imaginative
+impulse," while Satan is the dark angel who erects the barriers of reason
+limited by moral laws and senses around humanity. It was impossible for
+one to do the work of the other.
+
+The definite incidents with which "Milton" so hopefully opens are soon
+lost sight of, and the loosely-fitted framework, ill-adjusted and weak,
+contains a tangled woof of mysticism, from which the end of the thread is
+so difficult of extraction, that I for one must plead that the trouble of
+"winding a golden ball" seems hardly worth while, though it is no doubt
+possible and profitable to the student of mysticism. Milton's part in the
+book is perhaps the hardest to decipher. But we find him undertaking a
+journey from heaven, through earth and hell. "Milton" seems specially dear
+to Blake because he made Satan the supreme study of his greatest poem.
+Blake, as we know, had very original thoughts concerning Satan, and
+regarded him as the world's angel of light, a most respectable person
+indeed, for he is the enforcer of the moral law as evolved by divided
+generative humanity.
+
+Milton like Blake recognized this highly respectable aspect of Satan,
+whereas the world, says our poet in "The Everlasting Gospel," frequently
+mistakes Satan for Christ:
+
+  The vision of Christ that thou dost see,
+  Is my vision's greatest enemy,
+
+and it creates an abortive kind of hell-bat to take the _role_ of
+Satan,--a very confused state of affairs, which leads to no little
+deception and opacity in men's minds. The old themes of free-love for the
+sake of the spirit, and the denunciation of "Nature's cruel holiness,"
+occupy much of the book, in which the mythic personages, Leutha, Rintrah,
+Ololon, and Enitharmon move up and down in dream-like procession. The ease
+with which these shadowy beings enter each other's personalities, divide,
+and separate again into manifold emanations and spectres, suggest the
+multitudinous globes into which a drop of quicksilver may be divided,
+uniting again on contact into several large ones, and finally forming the
+unit from which they were first divided. Fascinating as is the experiment
+with mercury, it becomes confusing and even tiresome when the appearing
+and vanishing parties are persons with names and presumably characters.
+
+One passage full of the old poetical loveliness of which Blake had been
+past master must be quoted. It shows that the beauty of nature at Felpham,
+with its distracting fascination, entered the soul of the poet, despite
+all theories and philosophizings.
+
+    Thou hearest the nightingale begin the Song of Spring:
+  The lark sitting upon his earthy bed: just as the morn
+  Appears; listens silent: then springing from the waving cornfield, loud
+  He leads the choir of Day! trill, trill, trill, trill,
+  Mounting upon the wings of light into the great expanse:
+  Re-echoing against the lovely blue and shining shell.
+  His little throat labours with inspiration, every feather,
+  On throat and breast and wings vibrates with the effluence divine,
+  All Nature listens silent to him, and the awful sun
+  Stands still upon the mountains looking on this little bird,
+  With eyes of soft humility, and wonder, love and awe.
+  Then loud from their green covert all the birds begin their song.
+  The thrush, the linnet and the goldfinch, robin and the wren,
+  Awake the Sun from his sweet reverie upon the mountains.
+  The nightingale again assays his song and through the day
+  And through the night warbles luxuriant: every bird of song
+  Attending his loud harmony with admiration and love.
+
+To this passage succeeds another of like beauty, a Flora's Feast of colour
+and scent.
+
+    Thou perceivest the flowers put forth their precious odours:
+  And none can tell how from so small a centre comes such sweet,
+  Forgetting that within that centre Eternity expands
+  Its ever-during doors, that Og and Anak fiercely guard.
+  First ere the morning breaks, joy opens in the flowery bosoms,
+  Joy even to tears, which the Sun rising dries: first the wild thyme
+  And meadowsweet downy and soft, waving among the reeds,
+  Light springing in the air, lead the sweet dance: they wake
+  The honeysuckle sleeping on the oak: the flaunting beauty
+  Revels along the wind: the white-thorn, lovely may
+  Opens her many lovely eyes: listening, the rose still sleeps,
+  None dare to wake her: soon she bursts her crimson-curtained bed
+  And comes forth in the majesty of beauty; every flower,
+  The pink, the jessamine, the wall-flower, the carnation,
+  The jonquil, the mild lily opes her heavens: every tree
+  And herb and flower soon fill the ear with an innumerable dance,
+  Yet all in order sweet and lovely. Men are sick with love.
+
+Oh! how gladly the ear and heart rest on passages such as these, after
+toiling through the arid wilds of non-poetical occultism!
+
+As usual the illustrations are turned to with keen delight. The iridescent
+pages recall the charms of the "Songs of Innocence and Experience." Take
+it all in all the colour in this last prophetic book combines a clarity
+and brilliance of tone inferior to no other of Blake's. All is careful,
+clear and precise, and there are no passages of heavy colouring or impasto
+work.
+
+Forms, elemental, electric, indicative of unknown forces and conditions of
+consciousness start from the pages. As in "Jerusalem," every page of
+writing is adorned, but the colour adds the necessary charm to the
+forceful designs. Plate 15 represents a muscular male--Michael Angelesque
+in its modelling--leaping upon a rock and seizing by the shoulders a
+languid old man. The young man is Milton, starting on his journey "to
+annihilate the selfhood of deceit and false forgiveness." The old man is
+Albion seated on the Rock of Ages, his legs immersed in the sea of Time
+and Space, his nerveless arms supported on the tables of the Law. Above
+them both, on a semi-circular plane of light, the Eternals are seen,
+passing in procession in a kind of ecstatic choric dance. Three play on
+instruments of music, while two others toss balls of light in joyous
+abandon. The rhythmic character of these dancers, their robes fetched out
+like clouds upon the wind, and the colour translucent and vivid as that of
+a border of April flowers, makes one think of the fair works with which
+Luca della Robbia has set the dark old streets of Florence, of which, as
+some one has poetically said, they would seem to be the "wall-flowers."
+
+The two other specially noteworthy plates are full-page designs, entitled
+respectively William and Robert. It is evident that they are the spiritual
+likenesses of Blake and that younger brother with whom he always
+maintained such close communion. A burning star emitting fountains of
+light falls beside each brother, while their bodies thrown backwards, and
+their faces skywards, seem to indicate the abandon of themselves to
+spiritual influences. The senses are not the limits put upon their
+perceptions. The Infinite spirit, the "Poetic Genius," thrills through
+their entire beings as the sunshine through a dewdrop.
+
+Let not the profane smile when they learn that the star is in reality
+Milton! For it is written, "so Milton's shadow fell Precipitant loud
+thundering into the sea of Time and Space."
+
+  Then first I saw him in the zenith as a falling star,
+  Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift,
+  And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enter'd there.
+
+So there can be no doubt as to what the star symbolizes in the design. The
+articulation, the tense nervous drawing of these two figures is
+remarkable, even for Blake, and the light throbbing with rainbow hues, and
+the intense darkness, against which it is contrasted, are boldly handled,
+while the weird colouring of the dead Robert, whose skin has the tone and
+lustre of gun metal, conduce to make these two designs of great
+imaginative appeal. Space has only allowed me to call attention to the
+most remarkable of the plates in this and the other "Prophetic Books," but
+enough has been said to indicate the extraordinary range of their
+expression.
+
+
+[Illustration: COLOUR-PRINTED PLATE FROM "MILTON: A POEM IN TWO BOOKS."
+1804]
+
+
+To see Blake's work of this kind is to enjoy a new experience. Many of the
+pictorial representations we have reviewed seem to be disregardful of
+Nature, if one dare say it, _above_ Nature altogether! Yet so clearly are
+they discriminated, so minutely are the parts made out, that we are
+compelled to realize that they are copied from visions definitely seen
+by Blake's inner eye, and energetically seized upon by him. And it is this
+quality in them which so powerfully acts on the spectator, assuring him
+that indeed "More things exist in heaven and earth than our philosophy
+dreams of." But besides these tremendous imaginative creations, there
+occur touching and beautiful transcripts from Nature, low-lying hills,
+under a great sky, waving field grasses and delicate spiders' webs
+accurately observed and represented, as far as they go, proving that Dame
+Nature was not so utterly repudiated by Blake but that at times he saw and
+loved her for her own sake, in spite of all his theories.
+
+Still, the great word for him--the only word fit to bear the burden of his
+tremendous thoughts--was always, as with Michael Angelo, the human form,
+which, in its varieties of type and action, seemed to him alone suited to
+express his deep meanings and spiritual ideas. As for the prophecies
+themselves, they can never be largely read, nor in any sense popular,
+though, to use Mr. W. M. Rossetti's words, "a reader susceptible to poetic
+influence cannot make light of them; nor can one who has perused Mr.
+Swinburne's essay" (or, we may add, Messrs. Ellis and Yeats' work) "affect
+to consider that they lack meaning--positive and important, though not
+definite and developed meaning." So now we take leave of these mystic
+books of revelation, which, whatever our personal estimate of them may be,
+stand alone in literature for intrinsic and unique qualities.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+WORK IN ILLUSTRATION
+
+
+Blake's work in illustration is considered by many persons to be finer
+than the embodiment of his original conceptions in art.
+
+There is perhaps something to be said for this point of view. In the
+designs to the "Prophetic Books" his over-heated brain attempted the
+production in visible images of conceptions not matured--hints, scraps,
+vague but immense suggestions. His unfettered imagination set sail on a
+shoreless ocean of speculative thinking, and kept to no recognized course,
+made for no definite port. Roaming hither and thither on the wide dim sea
+of his ever-shifting thoughts, we sometimes long to see his imagination at
+work in a more limited, a more definite area.
+
+And so when other minds circumscribed this area, giving him a central pole
+around which to group his ideas, we find no loss of individuality, no pale
+reflection of another's conceptions, but a passionate concentration of
+original thinking on the subject prescribed, resulting in the development
+of an unsuspected point of view, a new aspect.
+
+I am not speaking of illustrations such as those he executed as mere
+task-work to gain a living, like the engravings to Mary Wollstonecraft's
+Stories, or those for Hayley's Ballads. For these subjects had not enough
+matter, depth or scope to attract his thoughts or engage his sympathies.
+As illustrator to Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Virgil and the Book of Job,
+Blake worked with all his best and most characteristic powers under his
+command, and the more effective, vital and original for being
+concentrated.
+
+In the same year in which he produced the last of the "London Books of
+Prophecy," 1795, we find him illustrating a so-called translation of
+Buerger's "Lenore." In spite of the weakness and wilful inaccuracy of the
+English version, Blake seized with power on the spirit of the Teutonic
+legend, and gave the edition, a copy of which is in the Print Room (a
+quarto), three fine designs, of which the first is the most forceful.
+
+We cannot linger over the designs which Hayley commissioned Blake to
+execute for his "Ballads on Animals." From the engraver's point of view
+they are specially fine, as the execution is very delicate, and reaches a
+state of high finish seldom attempted by Blake. Perhaps he wished to atone
+for paucity of inspiration by elaborate labour. Certain it is that he
+worked in bonds and trammels. The subjects were not interesting to him.
+Hayley might well say, in his lumberingly playful way, that "our good
+Blake was in labour with a young lion," when he was engaged on the plate
+representing that animal. The labour was immense, for the conception had
+no vitality. Blake scourged his imagination into a degree of liveliness
+sufficient to make "the Horse" and "the Eagle" arresting and uncommon
+work, but the shackles were on his hands, because on his spirit, and he
+knew it.
+
+Young's "Night Thoughts," which we take up next, bears the date 1797.
+Blake made no less than five hundred and thirty-seven water-colour
+drawings for this poem, but only forty-three designs were eventually
+selected for publication, and these were reproduced as uncoloured
+engravings. Till a short while ago, Mr. Bain of the Haymarket possessed
+the whole series of water-colour drawings, but they have now passed by
+purchase into the hands of an American collector. Through the kindness of
+Mr. Frederic Shields, who many years ago made tracings and copies from the
+unpublished designs, I am enabled to give reproductions of some of the
+most striking, though of course not in colour. (It will be remembered that
+Mr. Shields wrote the very powerful chapter on Young's "Night Thoughts"
+which is included in the second volume of Gilchrist's Life.) The designs
+published with the poem are larger than those we are accustomed to see in
+Blake's books, and the disposition of them on the pages, of which the
+middle is occupied by the printed type enclosed in rectangular spaces, is
+not effective. We miss our artist's beautiful fluent writing, and the type
+produces a bald staring impression on the beholder. When, too, the head
+and shoulders of a figure appear above the placard and the feet and legs
+below, as in one or two plates, we are irresistibly reminded of sandwich
+men. The want of colour also is a crying need in these large, pale,
+somewhat flat plates. The engravings are executed with great lightness,
+though with a certain monotony of line. They are slightly shaded, and have
+a distinguishing quality of purity and breadth. What luminous conceptions
+and stimulating fancies they contain! though it must also be admitted that
+there are a few plates which seem unworthy of Blake, being diffuse, tame,
+uninspired.
+
+Plate 16 represents the "Aspiration of the Soul for Immortality" in a
+beautiful symbolic female figure holding a lyre and fluttering upward, but
+confined to the earth by chains around the ankles.
+
+Plates 25 and 26 are, perhaps, the most tremendous in the book. In one
+Time creeps towards the spectator, while in the other he half-leaps,
+half-flies in his headlong course away.
+
+
+[Illustration: TIME SPEEDING AWAY
+
+Engraved plate from Young's "Night Thoughts," published in 1797]
+
+
+As one turns the pages one is fain to exclaim of the artist that he
+breathed the fine thin air of the mountain tops, that indeed he lived "in
+the high places of thought."
+
+I have an impression that Blake drew much of his inspiration from watching
+the ever-changing cloud forms of the sky. We know that his designs gained
+actually very little from the beautiful natural scenery of Felpham, that
+indeed Nature seemed to close round him like a wall. "Natural objects
+always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me," he
+wrote in his MS. notes to Wordsworth. Strange words to come from a
+painter-poet. A top room in London with a good view of the sky were all
+the conditions which he found necessary for the expression of his genius.
+In the vastness of the heavens, clear and deeply blue, or peopled with
+glistening clouds, or set with large peaceful stars, which spread
+themselves before his upward gaze, Blake found that impetus to creation
+which most genius finds in nature or humanity.
+
+He had set himself the task of probing the world of appearances, and
+revealing the world of spiritual causes. To say that he succeeded in
+representing this pictorially would be to assert that an impossibility had
+been achieved, but he got nearer to the goal than any other artist before
+or since, not even excepting D. G. Rossetti and G. F. Watts, whose
+affinity with Blake's genius is as close as their manifestation of it is
+different.
+
+The better to realize his aim Blake stripped his drawing of everything
+that was not essential to the idea he wished to represent. There is never
+a single redundant accessory. He never stayed his upward or outward flight
+to represent a lovely landscape, woman's dainty dress, flashing jewels,
+bloomy fruit. Typical or merely suggested natural scenes under a great sky
+are the usual settings of the human forms who were to him, as to his
+master Michael Angelo, the only language coherent enough to express the
+innerness and the infinity of spirit.
+
+He seldom chose to inclose his figures in interiors, and such drawings as
+he has left of places from which the sky cannot be seen are so rare as to
+startle when we come across them. It may be that from Blake Walt Whitman
+learned to say, "I swear I will never mention love or death inside a
+house."
+
+The sea fascinated his imagination, and he has left characteristic records
+of it. But for the most part that which he saw with his "corporeal eye"
+appeared to him as merely the type of what was unseen. He climbed along
+the jutting peninsula of sense to its farthest point, where, giddy with
+the immensity of the unsuspected forces revealed to him, he clung, neither
+angel nor mortal, but partaking to a certain degree of the conditions of
+both. When in this mystic condition of consciousness he focussed his mind
+on the "Night Thoughts," the pencilled ideas resulting are liberal,
+spacious, empyrean.
+
+But Blake's most forcible and poetical thinking on the subject of Death is
+crystallized in the delicately gleaming drawings for Blair's "Grave."
+
+True, the drawings are not reproduced in Cromek's edition of the poem as
+they left Blake's hand. The story of Cromek's mean transaction has already
+been retold in these pages. Schiavonetti's plates, beautiful and fluent in
+execution as they are, have lost that peculiar rugged character, that
+almost galvanic energy which stamp the original drawings with Blake's
+hallmark. It must be borne in mind that engraving may alter original
+drawings much in the same way as does the transposition of a musical
+phrase from the original into a foreign key. The melody is the same, but
+the mood of it is different. It becomes dull instead of bright, or
+plaintive instead of triumphant. Schiavonetti's transposing of Blake has
+made the designs more sweet and less strong, or perhaps less vehement. It
+is Blake in a new aspect, one so obviously beautiful that all the world
+admits its loveliness. It is Blake arranged for the many, not Blake for
+the intimate few!
+
+
+[Illustration: DEATH OF THE STRONG, WICKED MAN, FROM BLAIR'S "GRAVE"
+
+Engraving by L. Schiavonetti after design by Blake. Published 1808]
+
+
+The stanzas he wrote in dedication to Queen Charlotte form such a fitting
+introduction to the plates that we quote them:
+
+  The door of death is made of gold
+  That mortal eyes cannot behold,
+  But when the mortal eyes are closed
+  And cold and pale the limbs reposed,
+  The soul awakes and wond'ring sees
+  In her mild hands the golden keys.
+  The grave is heaven's golden gate,
+  And rich and poor around it wait.
+  O Shepherdess of England's fold,
+  Behold this gate of pearl and gold.
+
+  To dedicate to England's Queen
+  The visions that my soul has seen,
+  And, by her kind permission bring,
+  What I have borne on solemn wing,
+  From the vast regions of the grave;
+  Before her throne my wings I wave,
+  Bowing before my sov'reign's feet.
+  The grave produced these blossoms sweet,
+  In mild repose from earthly strife;
+  The blossoms of eternal life.
+
+And now Blake comes to close quarters with the subject that had haunted
+him all his life, the dark web on which he had woven so many bright,
+half-defined fancies.
+
+Again we discern a _point d'appui_ between him and Michael Angelo. The
+thoughts of neither of them were long away from death. Michael Angelo
+wrestled with the dark angel and brought away from the encounter the
+profound and intimate thoughts that he has enshrined in the Medici Tombs
+of San Lorenzo. Never has the human soul--save perhaps
+Beethoven's--apprehended more closely the mystery, the terror, the mingled
+shrinking and awe of the grave, yet at the same time its hope, than he did
+in the Sacristy of the Medici Chapel. And in all plastic art, the only
+things to which these fateful sculptures may be likened in their qualities
+of rapt and sincere thinking, united to imagination and insight, are the
+designs, which Blake made to illustrate Blair's "Grave."
+
+The great Florentine, it is true, wrought colossally in enduring marble
+before all the world, while the obscure Blake, two centuries later, traced
+out his thoughts on paper, his designs being known to comparatively few
+persons; but the conceptions of the two brains are allied, and the works
+of the two hands are own brothers.
+
+Blair's conventional and smooth verses in Blake's case have nothing to do
+with the matter. They merely form the pegs on which he cast the great
+garment of his thoughts. Death--the Grave!--his intense and fervent spirit
+so brooded on the subject that the result is no mere illustration of
+Blair's text, but invention. The poem in his handling has enlarged itself
+out of all knowledge, and turned to us an unfamiliar face, new and
+enriching conceptions. Blair merely indicated the track on which his
+pioneer spirit journeyed heedfully and musingly, through the dim country
+of Death. Piercing all conventions, all accepted theology, he would fain
+seize the very heart of the elusive mystery. "What _is_ Death?" he asks;
+"let me peer into the grave unshrinkingly and see for myself." And from
+the grave he brings this triumphant answer, "Death is Life, this Life only
+is Death; you have but to die to conquer Death"; or in Walt Whitman's
+prosaic but arresting phrase, "To die is different from what anyone
+supposes, and luckier."
+
+We reproduce the most significant of the plates.
+
+In "The Soul exploring the Recesses of the Grave," we see a shuddering yet
+resolved man determinately bringing himself to the close contemplation of
+death. He remains above the vault on the hillside trying to pierce the
+moonlit earth with his limited human vision; but his imagination, his
+soul, penetrates where he cannot enter--yet!
+
+In the likeness of a fair woman with a lamp, like the Greek Psyche, she
+tiptoes delicately into the arched hollow beneath the hill, and gazes
+alarmed but steadfast on a dead body wrapped in flickering flames. It is
+to be noted that the man whose soul regards death so closely is already on
+the mountain tops, he has "lifted up his eyes unto the hills," and his
+figure set against the sky has an indefinable air of separateness from
+ordinary humanity.
+
+The plate entitled "The Soul hovering over the Body reluctantly parting
+with Life" satisfies with a strange and unearthly delight. No Diana ever
+hung more yearningly above her Endymion than this beautiful and tender
+soul lingers, in loving reluctance to part, above the stiff human tenement
+she has just quitted. Presently she will take her darting flight through
+the window and over the mountains and up into the illimitable glory of the
+distant sunrise. There is the hush and the blessedness of a great silence
+on this dim silver dawn, suggesting the spiritual correspondence between
+it and the dawning life of the newly-released soul. Was it a recollection
+of that younger brother, Robert, so dearly loved, that taught Blake the
+pathetic dignity of the composed limbs, the sculptured calm of the dead
+face?
+
+The "Death of the Strong Wicked Man" is a savage contrast to the peace,
+the musical pause, of the last-mentioned design.
+
+In "Milton," Blake writes:
+
+  Judge then of thyself; thy Eternal Lineaments explore,
+  What is eternal and what changeable, and what annihilable.
+
+And he answers the question in the forms given to these passing souls,
+some being closely analogous to their mortal appearances, others changing
+even to sex, while others again have passed from age into a state of
+perpetual youth.
+
+This latter is the case in the plate called "Death's Door." "Age on
+crutches is hurried by a tempest into the open door of the Grave, while
+above sits a young man--'the renovated man in light and glory'--his
+beautiful young head thrown up to the sky, his mouth full of inspired
+song, his whole virile body expressing ideal beauty, rapture, glad new
+life."
+
+No one but Michael Angelo could have drawn with strong felicitous hand the
+glorious youth atop of the grave as Blake has done. The whole allegory is
+so intellectually definite, so succinctly expressed that thought and its
+body form are here identical. But the strangest flower of his thoughts on
+the grave, blossoms in the picture called "The Re-Union of the Soul and
+the Body." Descending like a bolt from the blue, cleaving the smoke
+ascending from the fires of consuming materialism, the soul embraces with
+passionate joy the strong male body, which struggles from the grave to
+enfold her. Cleansing and fusing fires flame around them. The beauty of
+the drawing--the melodious curves of the downward plunging "soul," the
+delicious foreshortening of the leg, the swirl of the white drapery--has
+stricken into poetic lines the forcefulness of flight, the passion of
+re-union. This emotional conception moves the heart strangely. It is the
+promise of St. Paul here visibly consummated, that a spiritual body shall
+at last clothe the shivering unhoused soul.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE SOUL RELUCTANTLY PARTING FROM THE BODY, FROM BLAIR'S
+"GRAVE"
+
+Engraving by L. Schiavonetti after design made by Blake. Published 1808]
+
+
+"States change," Blake wrote, "but Individual Identities never change nor
+cease."
+
+And now take last of all, but not least, the plate called the "Day of
+Judgment." Nothing daunted by the long array of "Last Judgments" that have
+been executed from Orcagna to Michael Angelo, Blake must needs give _his_
+rendering of the subject; and an original one it is, though he can hardly
+avoid--even _he_!--the traditional disposition of the main parts of the
+picture.
+
+But what freshness, what new life and new motives he has introduced into
+this subject, hoary with extreme age. The spirits ascending into Paradise
+are as lovely as heart and eye of man could wish. Orcagna's conception of
+the beatified souls in Santa Maria, whose profiles Ruskin likened to
+"lilies laid together in a garden border," is not more delightful in its
+artless way than is Blake's. The children of wrath, snake-encircled,
+howling, and falling head foremost into the abyss, recall the terrors, the
+uncouth and wild imagination of "Urizen" and one of the plates in
+"America." But here Schiavonetti's graceful and civilizing hand has passed
+over each figure, and he has contrived in some indefinable way to smooth
+away the too austere and savage strength of this latest born of the "_Dies
+illa_" of art.
+
+I have not mentioned the first plate, which represents Christ with the
+Keys of the Grave in his hand, because my function is chiefly that of
+praise. But I ought perhaps to point out, what is however painfully
+obvious, that Blake always failed in any attempt to represent Jesus.
+Whether he was hampered to a degree beyond his strength of liberation by
+the traditional likeness, the type ascribed to the Saviour, and so could
+not work in freedom, it is impossible to say authoritatively. But this
+traditional face of Christ, ploughed as it is into the heart and memory of
+humanity, probably arose and disturbed his own soul's independent vision
+whenever he tried to fix his imagination on the ideal lineaments.
+
+If this were the case, then indeed it is proved beyond question that
+Blake's work is almost valueless when it is not dependent on his own naked
+perceptions, his inward recognition of facts, disregardful of all outward
+corroboration.
+
+Blake's next work in illustration was done for Dr. Thornton, who projected
+an English edition of Virgil's "Pastorals" for the use of schools, with
+Ambrose Philips' imitation of Virgil's first eclogue. They were the first
+and the only woodcuts Blake ever did, and though they bear traces of an
+unpractised hand, "he put to proof art alien to the artists," and showed
+his essential mastery of this means of expression in a manner which more
+than reconciles one to his slight defects of method.
+
+Gilchrist is of opinion that the original designs were a little
+marred--lost somewhat in expression and drawing in transference to the
+wood; but Mr. Laurence Binyon, who has lately studied them closely, and
+has reproduced them with admirable truth, holds a different opinion. He
+writes, "Blake's conceptions in these illustrations did not take their
+final form in the drawings; they were only fully realized on the block
+itself. Hence they have the character of visions called up as if by
+moonlight out of the darkened surface of the wood, and seem to have no
+existence apart from it."
+
+They instance the power Blake had in a remarkable degree of concentrating
+in a few types the essence of his subject. In these blocks it is pastoral
+life--flocks feeding in lonely stretches of country, the still peace of
+hills, the might of tempest--that he concentrates and expresses by the
+roughly executed but exquisitely felt little scenes which are the
+consummation of his insight into the large natural life of the earth.
+
+
+[Illustration: BLAKE'S WOODCUTS, FROM HIS OWN DESIGNS, TO PHILLIP'S
+"VIRGIL'S PASTORALS." 1821]
+
+
+Blake did in these woodcuts, what he could never have achieved, had he
+sought to do so, in any other of the branches of art practised by
+him,--namely, he gave truthful because extremely simple impressions of
+Nature as she appears in her rarer moods. Master as he was of linear
+design, he was too neglectful of tonic values to interpret with any
+delicacy the effects of landscape in water-colour or engraving. But here,
+the very nature and limitations of woodcutting, its necessary economy of
+means, enabled him for once to express effectively and adequately his
+great simple generalized impressions.
+
+These pregnant suggestions of his induce a mood sympathetic with the
+deeper and subtler chords of pantheism.
+
+In one of the most beautiful, but at the same time one of the simplest of
+the blocks, all the witchery and solemn charm of a remote pastoral
+neighbourhood is represented in a few typical rural images.
+
+A solitary traveller journeys along a road winding deep between hills, in
+the last beams of the setting sun. Blake has endowed this darkened
+landscape with I know not what suggestions of watchful intentness. The
+wayfarer in some mysterious manner is in its power!
+
+                      Hands unseen
+  Are hanging the night around him fast.
+
+And again:
+
+  The place is silent and aware,
+  It has had its scenes, its joy and crimes,
+  But that is its own affair.
+
+These words of Browning's are singularly apt to express the delicate and
+profound hints in this little woodcut. The wonderful thing is that Blake
+_could_ convey so much on a slip of paper about three inches by one and a
+half in size.
+
+In all the plates we find this strange accent laid on Nature, her
+awareness, her sombre fateful moods, her listening, and the long patience
+of her endless waiting. The oft-repeated motive of the shepherding of
+flocks is treated in no glib or merely idyllic manner, but has the sort of
+holy peace that befits that most ancient and most gentle of all the
+occupations of men.
+
+An appreciative critic has said anent these woodcuts, that they prove
+conclusively that "amid all drawbacks there exists a power in the work of
+the man of genius which no one but himself can utter fully."
+
+The truth of this remark must be felt by all Blake's admirers with double
+force and poignancy when they think regretfully of Blair's "Grave,"
+wherein the designs, being engraved by another hand than the father of
+them, have lost some indefinable note of character belonging to Blake's
+personality.
+
+And now we come to the greatest series of engravings on a religious
+subject that have appeared since Albrecht Duerer. The inventions to "Job"
+are the crown of glorious achievement on the strenuous and austere life of
+the artist-poet, and of all his work there is nothing so perfect in the
+dramatic development of the subject, the broad, forceful yet delicate
+execution, and the poetic sensibility which animates the entire series.
+
+It appears that Blake's lifelong friend, Mr. Butts, bought from him a
+series of twenty-one water-colour drawings or "Inventions" from the Book
+of Job.
+
+(This set of drawings, be it remarked, together with twenty-two brilliant
+proof impressions on India paper of the engravings afterwards made from
+them, were sold to Mr. Quaritch on March 31st, 1903, at the sale of the
+Crewe collection of Blake's works, for the sum of L5,600.)
+
+I have seen one water-colour (presumably not one of the original set done
+for Thomas Butts, though probably a repliqua) of Satan pouring a vial
+containing the plague of boils on the prostrate body of Job. It is
+interesting to compare it with the final form the design assumed in the
+engraving (Plate 6 in the Book of Job) done for John Linnell. Owing to the
+courtesy of Sir Charles Dilke, to whom the picture now belongs, we have
+been enabled to reproduce it. It will at once be seen that, in the
+engraving the management of the light is more satisfactory, because it is
+comprehensible, than in the water-colour; while the cloud-forms are less
+conventional and rounder. The bat-like wings with which Satan is furnished
+in the painting have been sacrificed in the engraving. Job's wife has been
+put into tone, whereas in the water-colour, the visible side of her, which
+ought to have been in dense shadow, was in full light. The whole design
+has been pulled together, gaining an impressiveness and unity altogether
+wanting in the earlier work. Blake's passion for "determinate outline"
+(irrespective of its appearance in Nature), and contempt for truth of tone
+in colour, gives the water-colour a mapped-out definitive appearance in
+its background of scenery,--despite the magnificent qualities of
+imagination and draughtsmanship displayed in the treatment of the
+figures,--which somehow recalls the work of such masters as Paolo Uccello.
+
+Mr. Linnell, deeply impressed with the lofty and imaginative character of
+the water-colours done for Mr. Butts, commissioned a complete set of
+engravings to be executed from them by Blake's hand, for which he paid
+L150 in instalments of L2 to L3 weekly--the largest sum Blake had ever
+received for any one series.
+
+On glancing through them it will at once be noticed that his style of
+engraving had undergone a change during the last period of his life.
+
+"The Canterbury Pilgrimage," which he had executed fifteen years
+previously, exhibited the old hard and dry manner of engraving which he
+had adopted from Basire in its most accentuated form. (For the convenience
+of classification I have included that picture among the loose drawings,
+engravings, and water-colours for consideration in a later chapter, but it
+would be well for the student to look at it now, the better to appreciate
+the freedom, grace and power of the engravings in the "Job" series.)
+
+On one of the many pleasant days Blake spent with Linnell at North End,
+Hampstead, the latter showed him some choice engravings of Marc Antonio
+and his pupil Bononsoni, and from this latter's work Blake suddenly
+apprehended the possibilities, the scope, that lay for him in the
+engraver's art. In the school of Basire much of the work was accomplished
+by a laborious and indiscriminate process of cross-hatching.
+
+It is true that Blake by the sheer force of his genius had made this style
+answer in a manner to his needs of expression, but it was work performed
+in an unnecessarily confined technique.
+
+When he came to study the Italian school of engraving he found to his
+delight that every stroke was made to tell. Nothing blotchy or muddled, no
+careless cross-hatching, no "lozenges or dots" were admitted, and Blake
+quickly appreciated the wider range of effects obtainable by this Italian
+manner, and engrafted its main principles on to his own characteristic
+style. Of that characteristic style, as we know, the beauty of outline,
+the care for its preservation whenever possible, was the main principle.
+And here in the school of Marc Antonio and Bononsoni he found that
+principle adopted as the basis of beauty in engraving, every other
+consideration being made subservient to it. The conflict and want of unity
+of effect, resultant on making compromises with other principles of
+art,--such as subtlety of modelling, delicate distinctions in values,
+imitation of textures, intricacy of detail,--had not disturbed the dignity
+of the Italian school, which consciously sacrificed variety and a wide
+range of effects in order to keep the work of the burin as broad and
+simple as possible, the outline always being insisted on as the chief
+subject of alterations, while the shading and modelling were
+comprehensively indicated by long curved lines, close together, only
+crossing and intersecting in the darkest parts. The beauty and freedom of
+the "Job" engravings are a revelation of the final grace and power
+achieved by Blake through his appreciation of the legitimate functions of
+an art pre-eminently concerned with line.
+
+
+[Illustration: PLATE II FROM "THE BOOK OF JOB"
+
+Engraving, published March, 1825]
+
+
+The Book of Job is one of the world's great epics. It voices man's need of
+belief in God; it is the cry of one pierced to death with the arrows of
+misfortune, yet asserting with passionate faith, "Though He slay me, yet
+will I trust in Him." Earthquake, famine, bereavements, pestilence cannot
+eradicate from man the deep-rooted assurance that God not only exists, but
+is just and loving, and the Book of Job is the supreme poetical expression
+of this fundamental belief.
+
+As such, it welded itself into Blake's imagination, and the designs he
+made to illustrate it are worthy in all respects to be set alongside the
+ancient tragic text.
+
+Plate 1 represents Job, his wife, and their sons and daughter kneeling
+around them, praising God at the rising of the sun. Their flocks and herds
+surround them, and a noble tree--on which their musical instruments are
+hung--overshadows them; in the background, at the base of rocky hills, a
+Gothic cathedral is daringly set, to typify the soul of worship made
+visible. "Thus did Job continually." The border that surrounds the
+finely-wrought plate is very slight but decorative and thoughtful. An
+altar with a flaming sacrifice upon it is indicated, with these words
+inscribed upon its front:
+
+  The letter killeth,
+  The Spirit giveth Life,
+  It is spiritually discerned.
+
+While, above, the words,
+
+  Our Father which art in Heaven,
+  Hallowed be Thy name,
+
+set the keynote to the whole work.
+
+Plate 2 contains no less than twenty-three figures, and two scenes are
+being enacted simultaneously.
+
+Job and his wife still sit beneath the tree with their children, but above
+them we see the heavens open and God giving power to Satan, who strides
+like Urizen through flame, to test the uprightness of His servant Job.
+"This was the day when the sons of God came to present themselves before
+the Lord, and Satan came also among them to present himself before God."
+The border is exquisite, light as gossamer, and containing in its fine
+web-like lines beautiful suggestions. Angels with heads bent beneath
+Gothic tracery receive the flame and smoke that are the thought-sacrifices
+of two shepherds, who mind the sleeping flocks in their fold. The next two
+plates are (3) the Destruction of the Children of Job, and (4) the
+reception of the news by Job and his wife.
+
+Plate 5 is one of the finest of the series. Job and his wife, sitting on
+the ruins of their home, give of their straitened means to the blind and
+halt, while "the angels of their love and resignation," as Gilchrist
+sympathetically terms them, hallow and beautify the scene. But above, the
+Almighty sits enthroned, with an expression almost remorseful, and the
+angels shrink away in horror, for He has given Satan leave to try Job
+to the uttermost, only reserving his life. "Behold he is in thy hand, but
+save his life." Satan, with face averted from the sublime spectacle of Job
+in his affliction, has concentrated the fires of God into a phial which he
+is about to pour on his head.
+
+
+[Illustration: PLATE V FROM "THE BOOK OF JOB," 1825
+
+Engraving]
+
+
+The border is symbolically woven with writhing snakes and thorn-set
+brambles, among which quick darting flames find their way upwards.
+
+And then follow Plates 6, 7, 8, the workings of the Evil One, the coming
+of the three friends to Job, and Job raising himself in agony and uttering
+the frantic words, "Lo, let the night be solitary and let no joyful voice
+come therein, let the day perish wherein I was born." This suggests
+"thoughts beyond the reaches of the soul." Then follows the Vision of
+Eliphaz--very terrible and grand--and Plate 10, "The Just Upright Man is
+laughed to scorn," in which Job's attitude, the dignity of his grief and
+faith, are magnificent. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him," is
+expressed in every line of the noble, piteous figure.
+
+Plate 11--"With Dreams upon my bed thou scarest me and affrightest me with
+Visions"--has something mediaeval in the grotesqueness and ingeniousness
+of the horrors depicted. Orcagna's devils, Duerer's "Death and Satan" are
+not more terrible than Job's tormentors. The words engraved in the border
+contain all the condensed pain of the race of man, as well as the faith
+which alone makes it possible to be endured.
+
+And then to all this "storm and stress" succeeds Plate 12, with its
+suggestions of returning peace and the everlasting calm of the stars. "Lo,
+all these things worketh God oftentimes with Man to bring back his Soul
+from the pit to be enlightened with the light of the living!" says the
+inspired young man to Job, who with the seal of a great suffering set on
+his face--but a suffering of which the bitterness is past--sits listening
+intently as one who suddenly receives light in his soul. The sonorous
+penetrating words fall on the senses like the music of rain-drops on a
+thirsty land, and the design grows out of them like a true organic form of
+which the shape is innate. Oh! the peace of that night sky, and the gentle
+radiance of the stars set in its depth!
+
+The border is here specially beautiful. "Look upon the heavens, and behold
+the clouds which are higher than thou"--words that found a responsive echo
+in the heart of Blake--is the verse inscribed on the robe of a sleeping
+old man. The border is quick with winged thoughts, floating upwards from
+his head, in the shape of small men and women, linked in a sinuous
+succession, which finally reaches a sky, also set with stars, whose clouds
+have verses written upon them that contribute to a full understanding of
+Job.
+
+Plate 13, "Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind," continues the
+gracious and softening influences of the last design. Job and his wife,
+with tremulous eager hope, look up into the mild face of God, who, clothed
+and enwreathed by a whirlwind of which Blake only could have suggested the
+marvellous vortex, stretches His arms in blessing above them. The three
+friends are prostrated and overwhelmed beneath the force of the blast that
+encloses God.
+
+And now we come to Plate 14, than which nothing can be imagined more
+beautiful. "When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God
+shouted for joy," are the words beneath and around the border; the six
+days of creation are indicated in six delicate medallions, which _may_ in
+their turn have suggested the noble series of paintings, of ample scope
+and poetic imagining, which Sir Edward Burne-Jones executed.
+
+
+[Illustration: PLATE XIV FROM "THE BOOK OF JOB," 1825
+
+Engraving]
+
+
+But the main design--God, the centre of the universe, from whom issues Day
+and Night, the listening rapt group of Job, his wife, and the
+comforters, and, above all, the glorious rejoicing ranks of angels--is
+beautiful almost beyond expression. It is noticeable that on either side
+appears the arm alone of an angel outside the picture, thus cleverly
+suggesting the idea of an infinity of this heavenly host. Mrs. Jamieson,
+in her "Christian Art," says, "The most original and, in truth, the only
+new and original version of the scripture idea of angels which I have met
+with is that of William Blake, a poet-painter, somewhat mad as we are
+told, if indeed his madness were not rather 'the telescope of truth,' a
+sort of poetical clairvoyance, bringing the unearthly nearer to him than
+others.
+
+"His adoring angels float rather than fly, and with their half-liquid
+draperies seem about to dissolve into light and love; and his rejoicing
+angels--behold them!--sending up their voices with the morning stars, that
+'singing in their glory move!'"
+
+The picture has the thrill, the immensity of music in it, and I never look
+at it without recalling the motive of the last movement of the Choral
+Symphony.
+
+[Music]
+
+It resolves all the human suffering, all the incoherent and striving
+emotions, all the diverse and multiform forces of the Book of Job, into a
+final harmony and triumph of beauty.
+
+In much the same way the last motive of Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony" rings
+forth after the tentative, subtle and passionate music of the preceding
+movements like a shout of joy, the cry of a faith which says--not, "I
+have heard, I have learnt, I believe," but, "I _know_! absolutely and for
+ever!"
+
+Plate 15 shows God pointing out the works that His hand has fashioned.
+"Behemoth" and Leviathan, in a circular design very Gothic in character,
+appear below. And to this succeeds Plate 16, "Satan Falling."
+
+Plate 17, in which God appears blessing Job and his wife, while the false
+comforters hide their diminished heads with an almost comic fright, is
+distinguished by another of those fine effects of light for which Blake
+had so great an aptitude. The sun, which forms the nimbus of God's head,
+emits strange prismatic rays, very beautiful and weird. "Also the Lord
+accepted Job" shows us Job with his wife and friends offering a fire on an
+altar before a great sun, which, like God's halo in the previous picture,
+flashes the same strange light. The design is calm and solemn, and has an
+exquisite decorative feeling. Immediately below the altar, on some steps
+which form part of the border, Blake has touchingly and humbly laid his
+own palette and brushes, as if to indicate that, like Job, his work had
+been offered and accepted by the Lord.
+
+In Plate 19 Job and his wife are seated beneath a fig-tree in a field of
+standing corn, gratefully receiving offerings from a father and mother and
+their two beautiful daughters.
+
+"Everyone also gave him a piece of money." The border contains, as usual,
+amid its palm leaves and angelic figures, verses relating to and assisting
+the chief motive of the picture.
+
+For pure melodious beauty perhaps there is no plate like 20. "There were
+not found women fair as the daughters of Job in all the land, and their
+father gave them inheritance among their brethren." Job is seated in a dim
+rich chamber, on whose walls are wrought paintings illustrating the trials
+he has experienced. Around him are grouped three beautiful daughters, who
+listen rapt while he relates to them God's dealings with him.
+
+This is a rare example of Blake's choosing an interior with no opening out
+into the beyond. It is quaint and beautiful, but we are so accustomed to
+seeing Blake's figures set in the open air with the sky above them, that
+this closed-in chamber, exquisitely wrought and fantastic as it is, seems
+a thing foreign to his usual methods, his elective affinity for the great
+expansive types of God's universe. I think the reason he chose an interior
+in this instance was that we might be shut in and enclosed within the mind
+of Job as it revealed itself to his daughters. Instinctively we know that
+Blake's true lover Rossetti must have cared for this plate with quite
+special fervour, so close is the analogy between its hidden mysterious
+richness and the wonderful painted interiors in which he set his women,
+and from which he developed such a high degree of romantic suggestion and
+atmosphere. A lute and harp amid trailing vines, grape-laden, form a
+border to Blake's design, as delicate as the illuminated tracery in a
+mediaeval Hour-Book. In the final plate--"So the Lord blessed the latter
+end of Job more than the beginning"--the hole of the great tree that has
+figured in so many of the designs is surrounded by a crowd of persons,
+with Job, his wife and beautiful daughters in the midst. All play on
+instruments of music, while sheep and lambs and (it must be admitted) a
+most Gothic-looking sheep-dog repose in the immediate foreground. The
+ancient and fantastic instruments, the rapt upraised faces, the beautiful
+girls, recall the old Florentine singing galleries--cantorias as they are
+called--the one by Donatello and the other by Luca della Robbia, now in
+the Museo del Duomo at Florence. In neither has the joy of praise, the
+delight in making music, found more complete expression.
+
+Blake's "Book of Job" is a holy thing. The full compass of his orchestral
+nature exerted itself for this final effort. All his long sacrifices,
+deprivations, passionate sorrows and sacred joys, his burning aspirations
+and his steadfast faith, found their true meaning, their perfect
+consecration in the blossoming of this supreme flower on his tree of life.
+It was Blake's offering to God, like the Sacred Host, reserved and offered
+up in his own hands on the altar of his storm-weary heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+WORK IN THE EXHIBITION OF 1904
+
+
+In the January of 1904 Messrs. Carfax's tiny galleries at 17, Ryder
+Street, St. James's, became a shrine to which all pious lovers of William
+Blake hastened to make their pilgrimage. None of the usual crowd that
+visit picture shows were to be descried here.
+
+Blake's appreciators are not those who are most learned in schools of
+painting, in tricks of style and niceties of technique. They are mainly
+composed of those who, having a strong pictorial sense, are yet only
+effectively moved by _ideas_ in art.
+
+And what a harvest of ideas was garnered here!--ideas which sprung like
+Athene fully developed and armed from the head of Blake--of which head a
+cast taken by Deville the phrenologist was conspicuously placed in the
+centre of the lower room of the exhibition. The closely-set mouth and jaw,
+arched and inflated nostrils, massy brow, and intense and rapt expression,
+tell one something of the nature of this rare and spiritual intellect.
+
+Out of forty-one exhibits, twenty-five were subjects from the Bible, three
+were single plates repeated from Blake's "Prophetic Books," one was an
+Indian ink drawing illustrating a scene in his poem "Tiriel," three were
+purely imaginative compositions, the keys to which were to be sought in
+themselves, and seven were illustrations to the poets (three of Milton's
+"Paradise Lost," one of a scene in Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's
+Dream," and three sketches to illustrate Gray, Young, and Blair). Mainly,
+then, the exhibition might be said to have dealt with Biblical subjects,
+though good specimens of all kinds of Blake's work rendered it
+representative of his genius in its various phases.
+
+From the old Byzantine mosaicists through art's early springtime to her
+full summer in the Renaissance, and even since then, no class of subjects
+has so deeply occupied the mind of painters as sacred history. There are
+no incidents left untreated in the New Testament, and the Old has had a
+large meed of attention, yet we find a painter of such unique and peculiar
+genius as William Blake expending his strength and invention on this
+well-worn field of motives. But with results so new, so different from
+anything ever achieved before, that our interest and delight were
+stimulated in proportion to our susceptibility to Blake's influence. I am
+not saying that this new treatment of Biblical subjects, of the Gospel
+story, is finer than the work of the old masters of the golden age of
+Italy. Nor do I rank it lower. "The ages are all equal," Blake says
+himself, "but genius is always above its age." The great point is that it
+is entirely _different_, and that it exhibits a total disregard for
+traditional treatment. Blake only found it _possible_ to see these
+subjects from his own point of view--one never before attained by any
+artist. And as objects seen from different outlooks vary in colour,
+profile, and proportion, so as to be sometimes quite unrecognizable, so do
+these religious pictures of Blake's appear startlingly alien to any we
+have ever seen before. Or as he puts it himself, "If perceptive organs
+vary, objects of perception seem to vary too."
+
+Looking round the characteristic and representative collection, the
+ingenuous student realized that the predominant effect of this art on his
+mind was one of _strangeness_. It seemed to him unconnected with the
+past, unrelated to the present, an art set apart, unique, somewhat
+disquieting, which took him into Blake's visionary world, opposed in every
+sense to the natural world of daily experience. This visionary world of
+Blake's, was minutely discriminated by him, however, and was no formless
+region of emasculating dreams.
+
+The amazing vigour of his conceptions, and the flat contradiction which
+they impose on the orthodox and traditional images which most people's
+minds unconsciously harbour, added a sense of shock to that of
+strangeness. Inquiring yet further into the causes of this impression one
+discovered the truth of W. B. Scott's assertion, that Blake's genius was
+unaided by its usual correlative, talent--that facility which enthrones
+the idea in its appropriately wrought shrine, dowers it with its
+organically perfect form. Greatly as Blake disliked it to be said, the
+truth was apparent among these collected works of his, that his execution
+was seldom equal to his invention. As proof of the strangeness, the
+independence of his work, we may quote the water-colour drawing of the
+"Three Maries with the Angel at the Sepulchre" (date 1803), in which the
+holy women shrink terrified from the angel, with all the shuddering horror
+that humanity feels at the manifestations of the spiritual world. A small
+colour-print from "Urizen"--called here "The Flames of Furious
+Desire"--with which we are already very familiar, must have augmented the
+impression of unique imagination and strangeness to those who had no
+previous acquaintance with Blake's work.
+
+The furious raging, the vital majesty of the water-colour called "Fire,"
+the delicate and curious imagination in "Satan watching the Endearments of
+Adam and Eve," with many others must have contributed to this effect; but
+the final strangeness and most curious beauty were to be found in "The
+Nativity," "The River of Life," and "The Bard." In these, Blake's highest
+and most mystic qualities are manifest, and his divergence from all
+preconceived ideas startlingly apparent. "The Nativity" is a small tempera
+picture painted on copper without the usual foundation of gesso that Blake
+first laid on the plate. Small patches of tempera have been dislodged,
+showing little gleaming bits of copper, but happily this has occurred
+mainly at the top part of the picture in the gloom of the roof of the
+stable. All the long succession of Nativities from Giotto to Correggio
+("the soft and effeminate and consequently most cruel demon," as Blake
+termed him) seem not to have touched his imagination. Most artists carry
+an "infused remembrance" of great pictures in their mind, and can seldom
+divest themselves of the subtle influence emanating therefrom. But Blake's
+picture is not in any sense a composition which even unconsciously has
+been built up with the aid of memory. Imagination has here become vision,
+the uncovering of the veritable image; and Blake has faithfully copied
+what his entranced consciousness beheld.
+
+Mary, white as the lilies of her annunciation, has fallen back fainting
+into the arms of Joseph, while above her prostrate body, "a mist of the
+colour of fire" would seem to have gradually taken form and become
+incarnate in the exquisite beauty of the infant Jesus. Light as
+thistledown and shining like a star, so that the whole chamber--with the
+terrified Joseph, the white mother, the oxen feeding--are all illuminated
+by its intense radiance--this apotheosis of divinity in childhood takes
+flight to the outstretched arms of St. Elizabeth, who sits on the floor
+with a quaint little St. John praying in her lap. The open window through
+which is discerned the star in the East, takes the imagination out into
+the night of limitless mystery.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE NATIVITY
+
+Tempera painting on copper. This reproduction is taken from W. B. Scott's
+etching from the original picture. It is undated]
+
+
+The technique is superior to most of Blake's work in tempera, and is
+adequate, the rendering of light in the picture containing qualities
+nothing short of marvellous.
+
+It was impossible to look at this "Nativity" without being moved. The
+event appeared to Blake entirely supernatural in effect as in cause. He
+seems to have attached no historical value to it, nor indeed to any of his
+Biblical subjects. They were to him merely symbols of eternal ideas,
+projected by the Holy Ghost into the world for its enlightenment, and of
+these ideas Christ was the chiefest; but every idea he thought capable of
+manifesting itself equally in diverse symbols. His mind had some of the
+contemplative and impersonal characteristics of the oriental, and by its
+original processes he was enabled to appreciate the true inwardness of
+Christianity as the western mind cannot do. Christianity was born in the
+East like the Star of its Epiphany, and has come to maturity in the West,
+but its most mystical secrets will be hid from us until it has returned
+again and bathed in the immemorial symbolism and true occultism of the
+East.
+
+Being so unfortunate as not to obtain leave from the "Nativity's" present
+owner to reproduce it in these pages, I have been obliged to take our
+illustration from the etching which William Bell Scott made after the
+original, and for which permission was courteously granted me by Messrs.
+Chatto and Windus. It is but the shadow of a shadow, for Bell Scott's
+etching is only that, but it will serve to give some idea of the solemn
+beauty of the tempera painting.
+
+Now let me recall another purely imaginative composition.
+
+"The River of Life," a water-colour picture, reminded me in its
+transparence and delicate brilliance of Blake's earlier printed books.
+
+It is a rhapsody of Heaven. The River of Life which flows through the City
+of God, and in which all new-born souls are dipped, is a mighty stream
+flowing between green banks, on which are situated the gleaming houses of
+the city. Groups of happy souls wander beside the clear pale waters, and
+with his back towards us the Saviour with two children (new-born souls) in
+either hand swims towards the river's source, which is the Throne of God,
+typified by the sun. In its rays may be descried adoring angels, reminding
+us of Blake's ardent words, which I have already quoted, "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!'"
+
+Two angels--angels of the presence--remain suspended in flight above the
+stream on either side, playing on pipes, while a beautiful strong woman,
+clad in lemon-yellow robe, swoops down like a bird just above the surface
+of the stream with lithe strenuous body bent to meet the wind. She is a
+delicious creation, satisfying the aesthetic sense with completeness. The
+disposition of the figures in this picture, the decorative arrangement of
+the overhanging fruit-laden branches of the Tree of Life, the clear treble
+notes of colour, made one think of the rare and iridescent art of Japan.
+Blake's mood when he painted "The River of Life" must have attained to a
+high and heavenly unity and joy.
+
+"The Bard" is a picture of quite another order, and pitched in a very
+different key. Here is a twilight world of intellectual notions and poetic
+motives wafted hither and thither on the blast of the Bard's frenzy. The
+Bard himself, a commanding figure, stands on a shelf of rock surveying the
+vortex, while he smites music from his harp. Below, a king and queen and
+their horses are overwhelmed in a Stygian stream. All is dark, with a
+strange gleam and shimmer here and there, like jewels and burnished silver
+seen through a purple veil. This was one of the pictures that appeared in
+Blake's own exhibition in his brother's shop, and his description in the
+celebrated catalogue is well worth quotation:
+
+  On a rock whose haughty brow
+  Frown'd o'er old Conway's foaming flood,
+  Robed in sable garb of evil
+  With haggard eyes the Poet stood:
+  Loose his beard and hoary hair
+  Streamed like a meteor of the troubled air.
+  Weave the warp and weave the woof,
+  The winding-sheet of Edward's race.
+
+Thus the poet Gray; and Blake commented, "Weaving the winding-sheet of
+Edward's race by means of sounds of spiritual music, and its accompanying
+expressions of spiritual speech, is a bold and daring and most masterly
+conception that the public have embraced and approved with avidity.
+
+"Poetry consists in these conceptions, and shall painting be confined to
+the sordid drudgery of facsimile representations of merely mortal and
+perishing substances, and not be as poetry and music are, elevated to its
+own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception? No, it shall not
+be so! Painting as well as poetry and music exists and exults in immortal
+thoughts.
+
+"The connoisseurs and artists who have made objections to Mr. Blake's mode
+of representing spirits with real bodies would do well to consider that
+the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, the Apollo, which they admire in
+Greek statues are all of them representations of spiritual existences--of
+gods immortal--to the ordinary perishing organ of sight; and yet they are
+embodied and organized in solid marble. Mr. Blake requires the same
+latitude and all is well. King Edward and Queen Eleanor are prostrated
+with their horses at the foot of the rock on which the Bard
+stands--prostrated by the terrors of his harp, on the margin of the river
+Conway, whose waves bear up a corpse of a slaughtered bard at the foot of
+the rock. The armies of Edward are seen winding among the mountains.
+
+  He wound with toilsome march his long array!
+
+"Mortimer and Gloucester lie spellbound behind the King. The execution of
+this picture is also in water-colours or fresco," he added finally. It was
+probably painted in water-colours with white of egg or glue on a medium of
+gesso. The gloomy glory of its colour was a thing to ponder on. Like the
+dim silvery splendour of a pearl seen in the twilight of deep-sea waters,
+so does it glint and gleam. In no picture has Blake brought home to us
+more directly the visible population of the world of his mind--its power
+and grandeur and mystery--than in the complex imagery of this great work.
+
+The picture was probably painted in 1785, and was exhibited at the Royal
+Academy. It afterwards appeared again at Blake's own exhibition in 1809.
+It is a sad thing that he so seldom dated the pictures which he executed
+for his staunch friend and supporter Mr. Butts. The pictures in the
+Exhibition, with a very few exceptions, were originally done for him, but
+few of them could have an authentic date affixed to them. All Blake's
+original methods of working were here represented by splendid examples.
+
+First there are the tempera pictures, or "frescoes," as he termed them. He
+would never paint in oil-colour, because he thought and wrote that "oil,
+being a body itself, will drink, or absorb very little colour, and
+changing yellow, and at length brown, destroys every colour it is mixed
+with, especially every delicate colour. It turns every permanent white to
+a yellow or brown putty, and has compelled the use of that destroyer of
+colour, white lead, which when its protecting oil is evaporated will
+become lead again," and he hotly affirmed the opinion that "oil became a
+fetter to genius and a dungeon to art." This being so, he evolved a method
+of painting in water-colours, stiffened with white of egg or dilute glue,
+on a ground prepared with whiting or plaster and laid on copper or board.
+
+When the "fresco" was finished he varnished it with a preparation of glue.
+In his old age Linnell lent him a copy of Cennino Cennini's "Trattato
+della pittura," and he was delighted to find that the method he had always
+employed in his tempera pictures was very like that of the old
+sixteenth-century painter.
+
+Occasionally his pictures acquired the mellow harmony, the indescribable
+deep, yet faded tenderness of the old masters' tempera pictures, as for
+instance that entitled "Bathsheba at the Bath seen by David." There is
+nothing supernatural or weird here, save the flowers which grow around the
+pool, and they are like the strange mysterious blooms that appear to one
+in dreams. Bathsheba, nude and beautiful, with her two childish
+attendants, one on either side, somehow recalls the work of Masaccio and
+Filippino Lippi in the Chapel of the Carmine at Florence, perhaps because
+it is so nobly naturalistic in treatment.
+
+Another beautiful tempera is "The Flight into Egypt." It was painted in
+1790--the year of the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell." Holman Hunt developed
+in his magnificent picture of the same subject a poetic motive first used
+by Blake. The great may take from the great without shame. The angelic
+spirits of the martyred Innocents flutter around the Mother and Child,
+while the ass on which they ride is followed by angels with great gloomy
+wings, like night made visible and beneficent. The Virgin's little
+delicate face looks wistfully from the dim picture like one of Gentile da
+Fabbriano's small jewel-clear miniatures, and a crescent moon shines
+vaguely silver through the darkness. This is a picture of high and tender
+imaginative quality, more in the spirit of old masters like Fra Angelico,
+it must be admitted, than characteristically Blakean in expression.
+
+There are three other methods used by Blake, of which one--the printed or
+engraved outline, filled in with hand-wrought water-colour--is so familiar
+to us from the examples studied at the British Museum, that we need not
+linger to describe it again. At the British Museum we have also seen many
+of Blake's "colour-printed" designs, but not any nearly as fine as the two
+pictures entitled "Hecate" and "Lamech and his two Wives" of the
+exhibition. The process, according to the younger Tatham's account, was as
+follows: "Blake when he wanted to make his prints in oil, took a common
+thick millboard and drew, in some strong ink or colour, his designs upon
+it strong and thick. He then painted upon that in such oil colours and on
+such a state of fusion that they would blur well. He painted roughly and
+quickly, so that no colour would have time to dry. He then took a print of
+that on paper, and this impression he coloured up in water-colours,
+repainting his outline on the millboard when he wanted to take another
+impression; and each having a sort of accidental look, he could branch out
+so as to make each one different. The accidental look they had was very
+enticing."
+
+The depth and grandeur of tone obtained in "Hecate" are unique, and,
+united to the sombre majesty of the composition, form a most satisfying
+work to eye and intellect. Looking closely at the technique, the colour is
+seen to be collected in little pin-head dots all over the ground, in a
+manner that clearly points to its having been impressed while yet wet,
+with some carefully roughened surface, but just what means were used to
+obtain this effect must always remain a mystery.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT
+
+Tempera painting. Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. W. Graham
+Robertson]
+
+
+The finest example of the process is, however, "Lamech and his two Wives,"
+in which the tragic nature of the subject is deepened by the
+colour-printing, here most successfully handled.
+
+Pure water-colour, sometimes delicately outlined with the pen, was Blake's
+fourth mode of working, and the exhibition had a goodly array of this
+class of work. We have mentioned "The River of Life," perhaps the most
+beautiful example extant, but several others, noticeably "Oberon, Titania,
+and Puck with fairies dancing" and "The Wise and Foolish Virgins," were
+very lovely. The first represents Blake in a rare mood, his mysticism in
+abeyance, and his temper one of aesthetic abandon. We are so little
+accustomed to think of him as an artist of varied and wide appeal, that
+this rhythmic dance, which acted on the spectator like music, surprised.
+It has in it the delirious joy of elemental things. The fairies' delicate
+muslins are fetched out like mist in the greenwood; butterflies' wings and
+petals of flower adorn their dainty heads. Puck has wings on the back of
+his hands (a new and delightful idea this!), and the rapid graceful
+movements of the dance do not seem to be arrested by their embodiment in a
+painting. Though this phase of Blake is distinctly novel, even strange to
+us, it is entirely delightful. There is no stress, no repelling yet
+attractive mystery as in the "Hecate" here. It is just pure "joie de
+vivre."
+
+"The Wise and Foolish Virgins" is much more characteristic of him. The
+wise virgins in the foreground are ranged in a row, their lamps by their
+sides. Their bodies and faces are smitten with a cold unearthly white
+light, presumably, but not obviously, thrown by the lamps. The modelling
+of their forms is most careful. Behind them, issuing from a small hut,
+the foolish virgins, in wild confusion, implore oil for their lamps. The
+landscape in which the scene is laid is anything but Eastern. Dark,
+intensely green downs undulate and swell to meet the sky. A lurid light
+defines the horizon, and in the swathed masses of gray cloud above, an
+angel blowing a trump (suggesting a Last Judgement) wings his fateful way.
+It may easily be urged (and the prosaic mind which only rejoices in the
+precise and neat imitation of what it can _see_ is sure to exclaim) that
+here is a defiance of all artistic rules, a pitiable inability to copy the
+most ordinary natural phenomena, proclaiming Blake a wilful "poseur" or an
+unobservant madman. "Here," they exclaim, "is little atmosphere, no
+distance, no attempt at truth of tone, and no comprehensible rendering of
+the light."
+
+Blake rendered it as he did because he _chose_; because his masterly sense
+of style (that is, the treatment best suited to the representation of the
+idea, his subjective vision) required it to be so painted and thus only,
+because he considered himself free to take from Nature just what he needed
+for his purpose, and never felt himself obliged to make an entire and
+wholly truthful representation of her. To emphasize the light on the
+figures of the foreground, he overcharged the colour in the sky and the
+downs behind, and by this treatment obtained an effect productive of
+strange and solemn emotion in the beholder.
+
+Nature was to him shadow or reminiscence only, and here he has defiantly
+subordinated the truth of the landscape to the spiritual truth of his
+subject.
+
+
+[Illustration: OBERON, TITANIA AND PUCK WITH FAIRIES DANCING
+
+Water-colour. Undated. Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. A. A. de Pass]
+
+
+The most significant types were revealed in his soul, and owned a
+relationship to the visible creation only in so far as this relationship
+was necessary to render his art-work intelligible to the world. His
+decorative sense approved of the white virgins set so statue-pale
+against the dark green of the downs. The suddenness of the contrast,
+the livid and supernatural effect, were part of his deliberate intention.
+So does the white fire of an intense spiritual alertness contrast with the
+opaque darkness of natural physical life. For this scene, taken from the
+parable of Jesus, is only another of those types which Blake regarded in
+so wide and catholic a sense, and which by his treatment he has lifted
+above all merely historical association into a realm of pure spiritual
+symbolism.
+
+The pleasure derived from the examination of his collected pictures is
+rather that of a profound intellectual excitement than a purely aesthetic
+satisfaction. The climax of this excitement is reached before the two
+pictures called, respectively, "Elohim creating Adam" and "Satan
+triumphing over Eve." How different is Blake's conception of the former
+subject to Michael Angelo's, and yet, widely different as they are,
+somehow we know them to be related. Elohim, in the vortex of the winds,
+lifts a face pale with awe and power, as he calls into being from the clay
+below him a figure scarcely human yet, and stamped with the stamp of
+terrestrial creeping mortality. A snake binds one leg, and there is no
+other suggestion of life about this half-developed repelling organism. But
+presently Elohim will breathe into the clay, and then this thing (which
+somehow recalls Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein" to my shuddering fancy!)
+will arise and live.
+
+Michael Angelo chose the right moment, the body made beautiful but
+languid, and God's finger applied like a magnet to the limp hand through
+which the fiery currents of life are just beginning to flow in thrilling
+gushes into the perfect body. But Blake, with a more curious care for the
+earlier part of the process of creation, a more meditative and less
+dramatic sense, invites us to dwell on, not the final perfect beauty of
+created man, but his partial evolution from the dark earth to which he
+will one day return. The accidental character of the body of man, the
+universal nature of the Spirit of God, without whose inspiration there is
+no beauty nor comeliness--these are thoughts on which he mused while
+painting this great and terrible picture.
+
+The death-weary figure of Eve in the companion picture was a haunting
+thing. Overcome by the serpent's wiles, Eve lies prostrate in the
+tightening coils, and the cruel flat head is pressed upon the white
+breast, whose power to resist is quite gone. The struggle is over, the
+delicate body is relaxed, the little head has fallen back piteously, and
+the eyes are closed, for no blue heavens smile comfort down on her who
+lies so low in the dust. Satan in clouds of terror triumphs above her, and
+her overthrow is complete.
+
+A little sketch in pencil, ink and wash, called "Satan, Sin and Death,"
+has a human figure (strangely enough that of Satan), finely posed, and
+drawn with infinite power. The vigorous torso, slender hips, fine and
+muscular legs, are classic in their heroic proportions, but it must be
+admitted that the inspiration of the sketch as a whole is below Blake's
+level.
+
+I must notice a very fine and highly-finished water-colour, called "The
+Judgment of Paris." The subject was a congenial one to Blake, who
+entertained the most original notions about classic legend and literature.
+He wrote in the Descriptive Catalogue:
+
+"The Artist (Blake) having been taken in vision into the ancient
+republics, monarchies, and patriachates of Asia, has seen those wonderful
+originals called in the sacred scriptures the Cherubim, which were
+sculptured and painted on walls of temples, towers, cities, palaces, and
+erected in the highly-cultivated States of Egypt, Moab, Eden, Arum among
+the rivers of Paradise--being the originals from which the Greeks and
+Hetruvians copied Hercules Farnese, Venus of Medicis, Apollo Belvedere,
+and all the grand works of ancient art....
+
+"No man can believe that either Homer's Mythology or Ovid's was the
+production of Greece or Latium; neither will anyone believe that the Greek
+statues, as they are called, were the invention of Greek artists; perhaps
+the Torso is the only original work remaining, all the rest being
+evidently copies, though fine ones, from the greater works of the Asiatic
+patriarchs. The Greek muses are daughters of Mnemosyne or Memory, and not
+of Inspiration or Imagination, therefore not authors of such sublime
+conceptions."
+
+In this ingenious way did Blake seek to justify his admiration for the old
+pagan art, the old pagan mythology. They were recollections of symbols and
+ideas given by God to the ancient patriarchs of the Old Testament, and
+from them had filtered through to the civilization of Greece and Rome. To
+Blake it all amounted to this, "God hath not left Himself without
+witnesses," and he vehemently protested against any race, age, or religion
+arrogating to itself the authorship of ideas which should only be ascribed
+to God.
+
+So that the "Judgment of Paris" is treated like the biblical subjects, as
+a spiritual parable. When the apple of desire is given to mere sensual
+beauty instead of to moral or intellectual beauty, Love, the winged
+spirit, flies away, and Discord, the malformed demon, arrives. The three
+goddesses' forms, delicate as reeds, pure as Blake's austere imagination,
+and modelled with tender care for their lovely limbs, hands and faces,
+awaken in us a great wonder at the technique he could command when he
+chose. One of the tenderest and most beautiful of Blake's slightly tinted
+drawings, "The Vision of Queen Katherine"--we are enabled to reproduce
+through the kindness of its present owner, Sir Charles Dilke. The
+composition is of exceeding harmony, the delicate outlines being suave,
+fluent, gracious, to a singular degree. Sweetness and tenderness are its
+predominant characteristics, and it is without a rival among Blake's works
+in this respect, saving perhaps for the picture, "And when they had sung
+an hymn they ascended unto the Mount of Olives."
+
+Katherine, sick unto death, has been soothed to sleep by music:
+
+  Cause the musicians play me that sad note
+  I named my knell, whilst I sit meditating
+  On that celestial harmony I go to,
+
+she had asked. Griffith and Patience sit beside her, unconscious of the
+vision that is blessing her sleep. Katherine, beautiful and crowned,
+"makes in her sleep signs of rejoicing, and holdeth up her hands to
+heaven." Angels of diminutive but exquisite forms float in circles above
+her, and two are holding a crown of laurels over her head. Many
+pictures--the Indian ink drawing called "The Deluge," an infinite waste of
+stormy sea; "The Entombment," a picture of solemn intensity and
+originality; and others deserve description and comment, but space does
+not allow.
+
+The exhibition was an occasion of much illumination to Blake's admirers,
+and the thoughts on his art which it gave rise to may be happily
+summarized in a passage from Heine's "Salon":
+
+"Art attains its highest value when the symbol, apart from its inner
+meaning, delights our senses externally, like the flowers of a _selam_,
+which without regard to their secret signification are blooming and
+lovely, bound in a bouquet."
+
+
+[Illustration: THE VISION OF QUEEN KATHERINE, FROM SHAKSPERE'S "HENRY
+VIII."
+
+Slightly tinted pencil drawing, executed in 1807 for Mr. Butts. Reproduced
+by kind permission of Sir Charles Dilke]
+
+
+"But is such concord always possible? Is the artist so completely free in
+choosing and binding his mysterious flowers? Or does he only choose and
+bind together what he must? I affirm this question of mystical
+un-freedom or want of will. The artist is like that somnambula princess
+who plucked by night in the garden of Bagdad, inspired by the deep wisdom
+of love, the strangest flowers, and bound them into a _selam_, of whose
+meaning she remembered nothing when she awoke. There she sat in the
+morning in her harem, and looked at the _bouquet de nuit_, musing on it as
+over a forgotten dream, and finally sent it to the beloved Caliph. The fat
+eunuch who brought it greatly enjoyed the beautiful flowers without
+suspecting their meaning. But Haroun al Raschid, the commander of the
+faithful, the follower of the Prophet, the possessor of the ring of
+Solomon, he recognized the deep meaning of the beautiful bouquet; his
+heart bounded with delight; he kissed every blossom, and laughed till
+tears ran down his long beard." We may not be followers of the Prophet,
+nor rejoice in long beards or magic rings, yet I dare assert that in
+entering into the meaning, the deep "_Innigkeit_" of the _selam_ which
+Blake presented to us, we have entered on a new phase of spiritual and
+artistic life not less intensely delightful than the joy experienced by
+the Prophet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ENGRAVINGS AND DRAWINGS IN THE PRINT ROOM
+
+
+I am afraid that the first view of Blake's engraving of "The Canterbury
+Pilgrimage" will prejudice the spectator unfavourably towards our artist,
+even if the work by him already seen has made its fascination felt.
+
+Especially will this prejudice be heightened if the engraving from
+Stothard's picture of the same subject be set against Blake's and compared
+with it, for Blake's astonishes and repels on first sight, while
+Stothard's pleases at once.
+
+In Stothard's composition the variety of the company, and especially of
+the horses they ride, is charming. Very different are the grim ranks of
+Blake's procession, the ten horses therein exhibiting only three positions
+among them, and those positions being all traditionally faithful to the
+hobby-horse type. Stothard's motley throng are gracefully habited, and
+appear dainty and spruce in spite of the dust of the highway as they amble
+along. His lighting of the picture, the firm and effective modelling of
+the horses and their riders, the wide range of tones amounting almost to
+colour itself, give a satisfying richness which we fail to find in Blake's
+picture.
+
+The whole composition is harmonious, and for those who desire nothing
+further of art than that it shall cater for the eye without much or
+intimate reference to the mind, then Stothard's graceful performance is
+indeed pre-eminent.
+
+Turning to Blake's picture, we find he has catered for the mind, but,
+having done that, he has denied us the one thing of which Stothard is so
+prodigal--beauty. In his restless search beneath the surface with which
+beauty obviously is concerned, for the things of the spirit and the
+intelligence underlying the appearance, Blake has here lost sight of art's
+first principle, beauty in the whole, as the result of the parts. The
+composition in its entirety is not beautiful. It has no harmony. It is an
+accretion of separate parts, made out without reference to the picture's
+final unity. These parts, although some are beautiful in themselves, are
+not intimately related to each other, and contribute so little towards a
+general predominant scheme that the effect of discord is produced, and the
+multitudinous meanings and intentions with which each figure is fraught
+over-weight the composition and confuse the beholder; the simple reason of
+all this being, that the first obligation of the painter, his sense of
+harmony and balance, has been ruthlessly violated. Perhaps Blake's sense
+of style--about which I imagine he never reasoned, it being innate and
+intuitive--deserted him on this one occasion, because anger was making
+havoc in his heart and blinding his eyes. The conditions under which he
+worked, it will be remembered, must have been destructive to all
+concentration and artistic isolation of mood. Still, as I have said,
+though sadly wanting as a whole, there is beauty of an intricate and
+curious sort in the details.
+
+Look on the wide expanse of swelling downs over-arched by the tragic
+splendour of an evening sky. Here the thought, as ever with Blake, is
+lifted up above the accidents, into the eternal and the infinite. But
+Stothard's gentle hills and bowery trees shut out such vistas, and he
+concerns himself scarcely at all about the sky, which is merely the
+background on which to throw up the graceful heads of his graceful
+unintelligent folk.
+
+The characteristic group of children with their mother and grandfather,
+which Blake has set beside the gateway of the Tabard Inn, has great beauty
+as a single motive. No labour has been spared to make all faithful to the
+Chaucerian conception: the curious semi-Gothic gateway, the crowding
+pigeons, the barbaric splendours of the wife of Bath, the mediaeval figure
+of the knight, whose face reminds one somewhat of the supposed portrait of
+Cimabue in the Chapel of the Spaniards in Santa Maria Novella; all have
+been wrought with painful care. The work is an illustration of Blake's
+principle enunciated in his notes on Reynolds' "Discourses" and elsewhere
+that "Real effect is making out of parts, and it is nothing else but
+that."
+
+Perhaps the strangest trait the engraving exhibits in comparison with
+Stothard's is that it looks so antique. It might have been executed a
+hundred years earlier than the other picture, so wilfully grotesque and
+archaic is it. Yes, _wilfully_ is the word, for Blake _wished_ to make his
+procession as stiff and quaint and rich as the stately Chaucerian language
+that first painted the scene, forgetting perhaps that the two arts of
+poetry and painting achieve the same end through widely different
+conditions, and according to processes contiguous, but
+non-interchangeable. The want of ease, of careless and familiar naturalism
+in the engraving, may recall to those who look for it the splendid and
+ceremonious language of the old story-teller. The description written by
+Blake of his own design (it will be found in Gilchrist) shows how he loved
+and understood Chaucer, and, we may add, how very loosely the poem was
+grasped, and with what want of truth to the original it was represented by
+his rival. Lamb said of the engraving itself that it was "a work of
+wonderful power and spirit, hard and dry, yet with grace," and the
+Descriptive Catalogue--a copy of which was given him by Crabb
+Robinson--pleased him greatly; the part devoted to an analysis of the
+characters in the "Canterbury Pilgrimage" he found to be "the finest
+criticism of Chaucer's poem he had ever read."
+
+Savagely powerful as it is, the engraving is merely an interesting and not
+a vital utterance of Blake. The tempera picture from which it was engraved
+was bought by Mr. Butts, but has been lost sight of now for many years.
+Stothard's oil painting of the same subject is in the National Gallery.
+
+Turning to the other original single engravings of Blake in the Print
+Room, we find several of interest. There is that early one, designed and
+engraved in 1780, which has been called "Glad Day," and is the expression
+of a mood oftener felt in Blake's early manhood than in the ensuing years
+of chafing complexity and multitudinous emotions. I have wondered whether
+it be not the pictorial embodiment of the vision which he saw of the
+"Spiritual Sun on Primrose Hill," described by him to Crabb Robinson.
+
+Among the original engravings here may be seen the broadsheet of "Little
+Tom the Sailor," executed by Blake for Hayley while at Felpham in 1800,
+for a charitable purpose.
+
+Hayley's verses and Blake's designs were bitten in with stopping-out
+varnish on the pewter plate of the original from which the prints are
+taken.
+
+In the designs setting out the misfortunes of a poor widow and the heroism
+of her little son he has given us one theme of natural scenery--a winding
+path, a little wood surmounted by bare folded downs--testifying to the
+invasion which the obvious beauty of Felpham had made on his artistic
+consciousness; while the other illustration represents the tragic moment
+when little Tom on the wreck is about to be drowned; over the trough of
+deep sea the spiritual form of his father appears ready to receive and
+embrace his soul. Mrs. Blake's hand unfortunately has coloured the Print
+Room copy.
+
+And now let us turn to the pen-and-ink etchings to Dante, designed and
+executed for Mr. Linnell between the years 1824 and 1827, the year of
+Blake's death.
+
+There are seven of them, wrought by the pen, which had become so
+deliberate, careful and delicate in execution during these last years of
+his life.
+
+Let us linger over two of them for a moment.
+
+Among the many pictures of Paolo and Francesca that exist, was there ever
+seen anything like this of Blake's imagining?
+
+You may prefer others--Ary Scheffer's, Dante Rossetti's, or Mr. G. F.
+Watts'--you may object that this one has not grappled with the passionate
+love-motive of the story, that it has omitted the note of yearning, of
+beloved pain, with which Dante's conception is fraught. The austerity of a
+mind which theorized much on the subject of love--the love of man and
+woman--but knew actually very little of its vehemence, its trouble, and
+its languorous sweetness, forbade Blake to focus in the figures of Paolo
+and Francesca the ideal tragedy of those "whom love bereav'd of life."
+
+The scene as a whole--that second circle of the Inferno, in which
+
+  The stormy blast of hell
+  With restless fury drives the spirits on,
+  Whirl'd round and dashed amain
+                  With sore annoy--
+
+was what arrested his imagination. Here, in his rendering of the subject,
+the blast has torn upward in a visible ribbon-like vortex from the surface
+of the waters, bearing within it, as images in a crystal, the
+innumerable figures of the world's great lovers. From a spit of land,
+Paolo and Francesca, fluttering "light before the wind," appear in a
+single tongue of flame, and Dante lies stretched upon the ground--"through
+compassion fainting." Virgil is seen irradiated by the effulgent light
+which trembles around the disc wherein the immortal kiss--that which
+Rostand calls "_l'instant d'infini_"--is poetically represented.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE CIRCLE OF THE LUSTFUL
+
+Fine Indian ink pen drawing, in the Print Room, 1825-6. Francesca da
+Rimini, Canto V. of the "Inferno"]
+
+
+As usual, the force, the unusualness of the conception, rather than its
+ideal beauty are the points we notice first. But closer study attests to
+its beauty too. Mere literary interest would give the picture no real
+claim to artistic regard. But Blake felt the drawing of each bounding line
+as a thing of beauty in itself, having an aesthetic element of its own,
+apart from its representative or symbolic use. In that coil of entangled
+fates, what manifold themes of pure sensuous beauty are to be found! For
+instance--just at the leap and bend of the circle--appears a woman with
+arms extended in the fluent wind, like a bird in flight, and a man's
+embrace encircles her neck--a man whose face she kisses rapturously.
+Leaping, floating, falling, the multitudinous figures are borne onward by
+the resistless force of that terrible blast; and, however foreign or
+antipathetic this embodiment of Dante's vision may seem to us, we are
+bound to admit that its imaginative scope is of a temper characteristic
+not only of Blake, but of the Florentine himself. An aspect of Dante's
+conception is developed and emphasized here in a manner which has not been
+attempted in any other picture of the subject.
+
+The other pen-and-ink drawing from the "Inferno" represents Dante and
+Virgil in the Circle of the Traitors, with the head of Bocca degli Abati
+breaking through the lake of ice at the foot of Dante. Blake has given
+strangely passionless faces to his Dante and Virgil, but the pure simple
+lines of their figures are severely congruous with the scene, and the
+iceberg, formed of shadowy frozen figures to the right, is powerfully
+suggested by a few lines of sufficient economy. The picture is another of
+those unique embodiments from which, once seen and dwelt on, the modern
+imagination can never release itself. Gustave Dore's sensational rendering
+of the same scene seems to me to acknowledge an inspiration at this
+source.
+
+The other five designs to Dante merit a description and attention which
+space does not allow us to give them here. They are of great power, but
+whether the unflinching realization of the terrible imaginings of Dante is
+permissible in pictorial art--where the visual representation attacks the
+emotions and intellect with a poignancy that words, however forcible, can
+never attain--is a question the discussion of which may provide food for
+argument to critics of the school of Lessing. For my own part, I incline
+to the opinion that they overstep the bounds of terror authorized in art,
+and approach the confines of the horrible in the treatment of the main
+motive of each design--"Admirably horrid," Mr. W. M. Rossetti pronounces
+them. The unwavering truth to Dante's detailed descriptions is beyond
+question, however.
+
+The inmost sanctuary of an artist's mind is far more accessible through
+his pencil sketches than through his final consummated pictures and
+designs. There is something so intimate, so personal in these
+manifestations of himself, that in regarding them I have something of the
+feeling of one who listens unseen to a man thinking aloud. Nothing
+convinces one of the labour, the thought, the balancing, the rejections,
+the careful choice, that go to make up a picture like the study of the
+sketches made for it.
+
+The peculiarity of Blake's pencil sketches is their vehemence, and the
+absence in them of all hesitation. He seems from the first moment of
+conception to know exactly what he means to do, and rough, almost
+hieroglyphic, as the first shadow of his idea may appear at first sight,
+we have only to compare it with the design or picture which eventually
+resulted from it, to see that all the rapid "short-hand" lines of the
+sketch, block out accurately the disposition of the main parts of the
+design, the final attitude of the figures therein, without as a rule any
+real variation from the first idea having taken place in the working out.
+
+This testifies more than anything else to the distinctness of the vision
+seen by Blake, and his eager passionate discernment of it. Among such
+sketches of clearly apprehended vision is that for "The Soul exploring the
+recesses of the Grave," the final design of which we are already very
+familiar with. It is executed with a broad-ended chalk pencil, in quick
+unhesitating lines. There is not a single touch that cannot be traced,
+that is not an essential development, in the finished picture, so that we
+know Blake saw it all from the first, complete then in his mind's eye as
+on the day when he finished the detailed drawing for the engraver.
+
+Another sketch of the same order is one which, although it does not belong
+to any public collection, is so important as to excuse a reference to it
+here. Through the great kindness of Mr. Frederick Shields, to whom it
+belongs, I am enabled to reproduce it. The two motives of the picture in
+Blair's "Grave," called "Death's Door," had been favourite ones with
+Blake, and used by him separately in "The Gates of Paradise," "The
+Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and "America," before he combined them so
+felicitously in the noble design which ranks among his best works. The
+sketch by Blake belonging to Mr. Shields would seem to represent the
+moment when he first realized the power and significance and beauty to be
+obtained by their incorporation in one design. Of this conception it must
+be admitted that it grew in Blake's mind after the first flashing vision
+of it, and was not from the beginning discernible in all the splendour to
+which it was eventually developed.
+
+Here is another beautiful and careful sketch of a female figure diving
+through the air. The force of her perpendicular flight, the attitude of
+one leg (the left, not the right, however) recall the "Reunion of the Soul
+and the Body," but this figure is undraped, and the arms are extended
+downwards, and indeed the differences are so numerous that it cannot be
+regarded as a sketch for that picture. In all probability it is a
+preliminary study for one of the numerous figures in the "Last Judgment"
+which he executed for the Countess of Egremont in 1807.
+
+Looking at the terse expressive little drawing, we are reminded of Blake's
+"golden rule of art"--"that the more distinct, sharp, and wiry the
+boundary line, the more perfect the work of art." Ah! but how he played
+with his line! "Wiry" at least it never was, say what Blake would! He
+never "painted" it, but felt his way along with sympathetic accuracy. And
+with what infinite inflexions of tenderness and strength did his pencil
+impress itself on the paper, indicating by that rare quality of touch more
+than form and modelling--almost, one had said--the very nature of the
+flesh of the figures he drew.
+
+Speaking of Blake's drawings, the manner in which he drew the muscular
+form of the male leg is very noticeable and strangely characteristic of
+him. Another line he felt very tenderly was the curved sweep of a woman's
+back from shoulder to indented waist, and downwards to delicate ankles and
+heels.
+
+
+[Illustration: UNDATED PENCIL SKETCH FOR "DEATH'S DOOR"
+
+Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. Frederic J. Shields]
+
+
+Let us linger a minute over another of what I may call Blake's shorthand
+sketches in the Print Room collection. It is undoubtedly the first idea
+for the picture entitled "The Spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan,
+in whose wreathings are enfolded the nations of the earth." The finished
+picture appeared in Blake's own exhibition in 1809; it is now in the
+possession of T. W. Jackson, Esq., of Worcester College, Oxford.
+
+In the sketch, "Nelson" is drawn symbolically as a young sea-god, nude and
+commanding. He stands firmly on a coil of Leviathan's body, which rearing
+and circling surrounds him like a frame. We can just distinguish the human
+forms caught in the serpent's toils, and its great mouth is in the act of
+devouring a man. The mouth is bridled, and the reins held by Nelson's
+hand. The symbolism is easy enough to understand and requires no
+explanation.
+
+A carefully shaded and conscientious drawing of a naked man with arms
+upraised testifies to the fact that Blake _did_ work from the model
+sometimes. But how cold such work appears--valuable and necessary as it
+is--compared with the passionate half-defined sketches, the mood of which
+transfers to us something of the high pleasure that Blake himself felt in
+making these burning transcripts from his imagination or visions.
+
+I had much ado to make out the subject of the pen-and-wash sketch of a
+woman and man with a group of people on their knees in a cornfield. In the
+distance a thunder-cloud emits a lightning flash. Mr. Shields tells me
+that he and Dante Gabriel Rossetti spent an evening trying to decipher a
+larger and more definite sketch of the same idea, and finally decided that
+it was an illustration of the following verses (1 Sam. xii. 16-19): "Now
+therefore stand and see this great thing which the Lord will do before
+your eyes. Is it not wheat harvest to-day? I will call unto the Lord and
+he shall send thunder and rain; that ye may perceive and see that your
+wickedness is great, which ye have done in the sight of the Lord, in
+asking you a king. So Samuel called unto the Lord, and the Lord sent
+thunder and rain that day; and all the people greatly feared the Lord and
+Samuel."
+
+Among the many other sketches which space does not permit me to comment
+on, are two very beautiful studies in red chalk, showing Blake to be a
+master of line indeed. Of his engravings after designs by Stothard,
+Romney, Flaxman, Hogarth, examples of which the Print Room possesses, it
+is not necessary to speak, for this book is not concerned with engraving
+or any other technical branch of art. Its purpose is merely to examine
+into, and if possible lay bare, the nature of the artistic impulse that
+makes the work of Blake--as we may all know it in our public
+collections--so rare and so precious a thing. But though we shall not
+concern ourselves with these engravings, as they contribute nothing to our
+purpose, it is interesting to look at the numerous copies which our artist
+made from prints of Michael Angelo's frescoes on the roof of the Sistine,
+from drawings after the antique, and from Cumberland's "Designs for
+Engravings." These latter are pen drawings of Greek figures--similar to
+those represented on old black and yellow vases--and display the Greek
+ideal of form, so beautiful yet so passionless and un-individual, when
+compared with the figures of the great Florentine, in which the soul with
+all its struggles is apparent. Copying such diverse work
+faithfully--"for," wrote Blake, "servile copying is the great merit of
+copying"--must have made him think, compare, choose. Goethe says that his
+study of the ancient classic literature convinced him "that a vast
+abundance of objects must lie before us ere we can think upon them,--that
+we must accomplish something, nay, fail in something, before we can
+learn our own capacities and those of others." And this was much more the
+case with Blake and his art than might be supposed. It was not ignorance
+of other ideals, of other methods of thought and work, that caused him to
+take the artistic path he did; it was definite choice, the ratification of
+his innate, strongly individualistic tendencies, resulting from comparing
+them with the characteristic principles of art exhibited in other ages,
+other masters. Blake in fact copied a good deal; he himself writes in his
+notes on Reynolds, "the difference between a bad artist and a good one is:
+the bad artist seems to copy a great deal, the good one really does copy a
+great deal."
+
+
+[Illustration: HEAD OF AN OLD MAN
+
+Pencil, pen, and wash drawing. Undated]
+
+
+Turning to his water-colour sketches in the Print Room, I consider the
+finest to be a very portrait-like head of an old man. It was evidently put
+in in pencil and pale washes of colour, and afterwards strengthened,
+rather daringly, with pen-and-ink outlines. The face with its deep eyes
+and noble contours is that of a seer, awestruck before his vision. It is
+in such work as this--swift, strong and delicate--that we see Blake at his
+best. In finished work--such little as he has left us--some heat, some
+fire seems to have escaped, but in sketches such as this the inspiration
+is contained in all its strongly-spiced vitality; that which is left
+undone, assisting that which is done, in producing an impression of energy
+and imaginative development. A pale-tinted, very careful and elaborate
+drawing of the Whore of Babylon, as Blake imagined her, next claims our
+attention. It was etched and reproduced by William Bell Scott. Never did
+Blake represent so voluptuous, so sensual a face, as this of the Whore of
+Babylon, which in spite of its beauty is of the same type as that of the
+Wife of Bath in his "Canterbury Pilgrimage." In its expression it has no
+fellow, save perhaps the face of Leda in Michael Angelo's small statuette
+in the Bargello. The woman is seated on a seven-headed semi-human
+monster, and she holds in her hand a cup out of which smoke issues and
+condenses in the forms of floating men and women of incomparable grace.
+These swim around her head in a long ribbon-like streamer, and as the
+little figures reach the ground they are devoured by the seven heads. They
+symbolize the pleasures, ambitions, lusts of this world.
+
+Another beautiful water-colour, in faint and tender colour, is perhaps the
+very vignette for Blair's "Grave," which Blake sent to Cromek with his
+verses of dedication to the Queen, and which was returned on his hands
+with such a cruel and insulting letter. Part of this design has been
+etched and reproduced by William Bell Scott. A mother and her young
+family, from whose ankles the chains of mortality have just been severed,
+ascend upward with looks of solemn exaltation on their rapt faces. They
+form a noble group. Above, on the left, is an angel with a sword and key
+who has presumably just set them free; he is Death, I suppose--a young and
+beautiful Death; while to the right is another Apollo-like being, who
+holds a pair of scales and represents St. Michael. In the most ancient
+Italian pictures the Archangel is often pictured as weighing the souls of
+the newly dead.
+
+A large and very important water-colour drawing is called the "Lazar
+House," from Milton. It is one of Blake's terrible works, and has a
+tendency to haunt the memory unpleasantly. It is very powerful.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE WHORE OF BABYLON
+
+Water colour drawing, 1809]
+
+
+A great blind, bearded figure, with outstretched arms--Death in another
+aspect--is suspended in air over a scene of painfulness and intense
+horror, such as few artists would dare to represent. The victims of plague
+are writhing in death-agonies on the floor, while a figure to the right,
+with sinister face and nervous hand clutching a bolt (or is it a knife?),
+fills the spectator with insane shudderings and alarm. He eyes the
+sufferers with gloating satisfaction, and the fact that he is coloured
+green as verdigris from head to foot does not detract from his horrible
+fascinations. I can never get over the feeling that pictures such as these
+caused Blake profound pain, that indeed he sought relief from their
+dominion over his mental life by turning the vision that haunted him into
+a definite artistic image, thus by the act of projection getting rid of
+the disquieting, the torturing inward tyrant. For with him, as I have
+striven to show, all thought came with the definiteness of vision; so that
+he could not read Milton's or Dante's descriptions without seeing the
+thing described, immediately start into visible being before him.
+
+A finished and elaborate water-colour of a female recumbent figure on a
+tomb, with a foreground starred with brilliant flowers, is called "Letho
+Similis," but in no respect is it like Blake's work, and there seems no
+reason whatever to consider it as having been done by his hand, except
+that it has passed as his for a long time. So acute a critic as Mr. W. M.
+Rossetti casts doubt on the authorship of the work in his descriptive
+catalogue.
+
+On the whole I think the review of Blake's pencil sketches and drawings
+impress one as powerfully as any of the work of his which we have
+previously seen, and mainly for the reason that it is in these that we can
+most clearly trace his thoughts in process of evolution.
+
+And now all that remains for us to do is to visit the National Gallery,
+and there in the little octagonal room behind the Turner Gallery seek out
+those few precious works which are the representatives of his genius to
+the public at large. Whether that public often penetrates here, or, being
+here, lingers even momently before the few strange little pictures by
+Blake which it contains, may be questioned.
+
+That they are not popular, and that the little room is never crowded,
+needs no demonstration. Blake's greatness is not of the kind that can ever
+compete successfully with the claims of such masters as his
+contemporaries--Stothard, Romney, Gainsborough and Reynolds--whose
+brilliant and alluring work adorns the galleries through which one must
+pass to reach the little octagonal room where his few pictures, modestly
+retired behind the door, await such as will patiently seek them out.
+
+First let us look at the water-colour numbered 43, entitled "David
+delivered out of Deep Waters." It has qualities of handling akin to the
+"River of Life," belonging to Captain Butts, and the conception is
+specially Blakean. David, with his arms bound round with cords, floats
+symbolically on dark waters. Above, seven cherubim, with wings interlacing
+like the shields of a phalanx, swoop down in rhythmic ranks, with Christ
+in their centre. The remarkable thing about these cherubim is that two
+have the faces of children, two those of old white-bearded men, two those
+of mature manhood, while the centre one alone, immediately below Christ,
+has the face of a beautiful youth.
+
+The figure and attitude of the Saviour have a noble grace, but the face is
+weak and ineffectual, as is usual with Blake when treating the divine
+lineaments.
+
+The effect of the picture--with those strong, ordered wings in ranks,
+recalling the banners borne in some rich church procession--is one of
+curious symmetry, of almost heraldic composition. A delicate and remote
+strangeness of imagination makes itself felt in every line, every tint;
+and the range of tone is noticeably peculiar, the deepest and highest
+parts of the scale being used with great effect, while no recourse has
+been had to the intermediate gamut, so that there is no full body of
+colour present at all. The nearest approach to it is the quivering pale
+golden light that is diffused around the figure of Christ.
+
+
+[Illustration: DAVID, DELIVERED OUT OF MANY WATERS
+
+Water-colour. In National Gallery, undated]
+
+
+No. 1164, "The Procession from Calvary," is a tempera picture reminiscent
+in quality of colour of the _quattrocento_ Italian masters. Stiff,
+composed and straight is the body of Jesus laid on the bier. Three pairs
+of bearers support the holy burden on their shoulders. The Virgin alone,
+and two other women side by side, follow the _cortege_, while in the
+distance Calvary, with its three crosses, may be seen; and Jerusalem is
+represented by a group of buildings defiantly Gothic in character. The
+bearers and the women moving across the foreground so majestically, so
+quietly, might be the somewhat stiff rendering of an idea, inspired by the
+procession in a basrelief on some old Greek or Roman sarcophagus, such as
+Mantegna or Andrea del Castagno worked out on canvas.
+
+Then there is a highly-finished water-colour of an allegory--numbered
+44--to be studied. It is soon evident to the spectator that the elaborate
+composition owns as central motive the Atonement, with all the symbolic
+correspondences which in the scriptures predicted it. At the highest point
+of the picture is a medallion wherein the Almighty is represented. Dull
+flames flicker and smoke around, while on them is inscribed in very small
+writing the significant words "God out of Christ is a consuming fire."
+This, as we know, was a much-insisted-on doctrine of Blake's, for he seems
+to have denied at times the responsible fatherhood of God; and never did
+he share the respectable conception of Him, prevalent at that day even
+more than in this, which Tennyson so aptly defined as "an immeasurable
+clergyman."
+
+Below the medallion are little scenes displaying the Death of Abel, the
+Flood, the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Transfiguration, and, finally, the
+symbolic Vision of the Holy Grail. All these separate but related motives
+are woven together, with subsidiary scenes to right and left, into one
+intricate and most beautiful scheme.
+
+The low tones of the composition, the dim, delicate tinting, bring the
+varied and multitudinous parts into a harmony of effect that is very
+delightful, while the spiritual and intellectual material with which it is
+characteristically builded up, send our thoughts voyaging out like birds
+over the sea of religious mysticism.
+
+I have left the most important picture to be dealt with last. The tempera
+picture, numbered 1110, was painted as the companion to "Nelson and
+Leviathan"--a sketch for which is in the British Museum, it will be
+remembered--and was shown for the first time at Blake's own exhibition in
+1809. In his Descriptive Catalogue the title ran as follows: "The
+spiritual form of Pitt guiding Behemoth; he is that Angel, who, pleased to
+perform the Almighty's orders, rides on the whirlwind directing the storms
+of war; he is ordering the Reaper to reap the vine of the earth, and the
+Ploughman to plough up the cities and towers."
+
+At first sight the figure of a beautiful young man is the one thing that
+stands out clearly from the dim splendour and bewildering detail of the
+picture. This noble form, instinct with power and authority, represents
+the spiritual body of Pitt. A gleaming halo surrounds his head, and the
+background is massed with seething indistinct figures.
+
+Here and there strange glancing lights and phosphorescent stars emit a
+milky radiance, but it is some few minutes before the eye can distinguish
+the head and back of Leviathan. On either side of the great halo appears a
+man's form; one holds the crescent moon by way of sickle, the other
+presses heavily upon a harrow. They are the Reaper, Death, and the
+Ploughman Equality. All is steeped in gloomy twilight touched here and
+there with subdued yet brilliant light, as of moonlight on water. Strange
+little figures seem to gather form out of the brownish mist before one's
+very eyes, and there is something of a miraculous charm on this
+cosmos--the fruit of the travail of Blake's intellect.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF PITT GUIDING BEHEMOTH
+
+Tempera. 1809 or earlier. In the National Gallery]
+
+
+Of serenity, of clarity, there is none; but Blake's virtue, his quality
+with its necessary attendant defects, dominates this work and makes it
+precious in the sense of a unique record of a unique conception. Therefore
+it is fittingly placed as a representative of Blake's genius in our
+National Palace of Art.
+
+What the place assigned to Blake by future generations will be is not for
+me to predict. That he has been gravely misapprehended and foolishly
+neglected until the last few years is common knowledge, but even to-day
+the ranks of his true lovers are scattered and few, though there are some
+people who affirm that an exaggerated distinction, an inflated value,
+attaches to his name at present, as a result of the swing of time's
+pendulum. Such people, however, are not among those who under any
+circumstances would be likely to admire Blake or appreciate his unique
+point of view.
+
+This little book has had for its object, not the imparting of any new
+facts about him, nor the technical discussion of his works, but the
+reverent and sympathetic meditation on our own National Blake treasures,
+with a view to understanding the great spirit who projected them. I have
+attempted to point out their essential beauties and value, not from the
+vantage-ground of the connoisseur, but from the point of view of the
+sympathetic observer. I have sought to explain, to justify, the affinity
+felt for them by those to whom the doctrine of "Art for art's sake" is not
+an all-satisfying thesis, who would fain find in plastic art a language
+expressive of spiritual intuitions and revelation. Blake's mission
+undoubtedly was to discover in his representations of visible phenomena
+the spiritual cause, or correspondence, of which it appeared to him to be
+merely a type. How far his ideas are consistent with the conditions and
+scope of an art which must necessarily concern itself with surfaces and
+appearances, it is hard to say. His view of art's function was largely,
+but not wholly true, yet in its special application was profoundly noble
+and salutary. Exaggerated, perhaps, in his recoil from the materialism and
+preoccupation with physical and natural beauties as ends in themselves
+which characterized the art of his day, he set to work to liberate one
+hitherto unsuspected aspect of art's functions, at the expense of
+belittling the recognized and practised articles of belief recited in her
+honour by the masters of his time.
+
+The innerness of art; that is what he was concerned about. Impetuously,
+passionately he stormed along the rugged track he had set himself to
+explore, ignoring much of beauty and truth to either side of him, because
+his eyes were so steadfastly fixed on his goal. To-day we acclaim him as
+the heroic and devoted priest of a new and yet old altar to Art, the flame
+of which has been kept burning since his time by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
+and the Pre-Raphaelites, and Mr. G. F. Watts.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Academy, Royal, Blake attends the schools of, 6, 50.
+
+  Academy, Royal, Exhibits at, 8, 14, 43.
+
+  Academy, Royal, A grant from, 50.
+
+  _Accusers, The Three_, 121.
+
+  _Ahania, The Book of_, 23, 120.
+
+  _America_, 23;
+    described, 107;
+    a cancel-sheet for, 121.
+
+  _Ancient of Days, The_, 56, 112.
+
+  Apprenticeship to Basire, 5, 20.
+
+  _Atonement, The_, 191.
+
+
+  _Ballads on Animals_, illustrations to Hayley's, 31, 137.
+
+  _Bard, The_, 164.
+
+  Basire, Blake apprenticed to, 5;
+    his influence, 150.
+
+  _Bathsheba at the Bath_, 167.
+
+  Blake, Robert, 4, 15, 133;
+    his death, 15.
+
+  Blake, William, birth, 3;
+    family history, 4;
+    birthplace, 3;
+    his brothers and sister, 4;
+    marriage, 9;
+    suggested as tutor to the royal family, 22;
+    his last sketch, 56;
+    death, 56;
+    lived at Green Street, 11;
+    Broad Street, 14;
+    Poland Street, 15;
+    Lambeth, 21;
+    Felpham, 24;
+    South Molton Street, 29;
+    Temple, 50;
+    his hatred of oppression, 16;
+    visions of his brother, 17;
+    his kind-heartedness, 22;
+    trial for sedition, 29;
+    influence over younger men, 47, 52;
+    his circle of friends, 48, 52, 54;
+    his surroundings in later years, 50;
+    his appearance, 51, 54;
+    German eulogy, 54;
+    learns Italian, 54;
+    his poverty, 82;
+    his exhibition, 40;
+    criticisms on painting and poetry, 40;
+    his artistic affinities, 41;
+    his aim in art, 7;
+    his literary affinities, 37;
+    views on contemporary artists, 20, 46;
+    justifies his mode of representation, 165;
+    his inability to depict Christ, 145, 190;
+    his intuitive system of belief, 61;
+    his detachment from his age, 61;
+    his view of humanity, 65, 66.
+
+  Bouchier, Catherine, married to Blake, 9;
+    her character, 10;
+    her death, 56;
+    her assistance in printing, 83.
+
+
+  Calvert, Edward, friendship with Blake, 52.
+
+  _Canterbury Pilgrims, The_ (Blake's), designed, 37;
+    completed, 38;
+    exhibited, 40.
+    _See_ Stothard, Thomas.
+
+  _Canterbury Pilgrims, The_ (Engraving), issued, 44;
+    discussed, 176.
+
+  Coleridge, S. T., meeting with Blake, 47.
+
+  Cowper, engravings for Hayley's Life of, 31.
+
+  Cromek, R. H., his relations with Blake, 35-37, 39.
+
+
+  Dante, illustrations to the _Divina Commedia_ of, 54;
+    discussed, 180.
+
+  _David delivered out of Deep Waters_, 190.
+
+  _Death of Earl Godwin_, 8.
+
+  _Death's Door_, development of the design of, 91, 96.
+
+  _Descriptive Catalogue_ of Blake's exhibition, 40, 77, 82, 165, 172,
+        178, 192.
+
+  _Designs, The Large Book of_, 120.
+
+  _Designs, The Small Book of_, 120.
+
+
+  Education, Blake's early, 4.
+
+  Ellis and Yeats, Commentary on Blake, 1, 3, 16, 22, 30, 49, 57, 60, 71.
+
+  _Elohim Creating Adam, The_, 171.
+
+  _Europe_, 23;
+    described, 110.
+
+  Exhibitions of Blake's works, (1809), 40;
+    (1904), 159.
+
+
+  Felpham, residence at, 24, 179;
+    early enjoyment of, 25;
+    subsequent unhappiness at, 27.
+
+  Flaxman, J., introduction to, 8;
+    aid from, 12, 23;
+    correspondence with, 25.
+
+  _Flight into Egypt, The_, 167.
+
+  _French Revolution, The_, 17.
+
+  Fresco, Blake's use of the term, 38.
+
+  Fuseli, Blake's friendship with, 8, 17, 50;
+    his appreciation of Blake, 11, 38, 50.
+
+
+  _Gates of Paradise, The_, 23;
+    described, 93.
+
+  _Ghost of Abel, The_, 17.
+
+  _Ghost of a Flea_, 49.
+
+  Gilchrist's _Life of Blake_, 1, 9, 32, 50, 51, 55.
+
+  _Glad Day_, 179.
+
+  Gothic influences, 5, 151.
+
+  _Grave, The_, Blake's illustrations to Blair's: sold to Cromek, 35;
+    published, 39;
+    discussed, 140;
+    described, 143;
+    Blake's introductory verses, 141.
+
+
+  Hayley, Blake's introduction to, 23;
+    life at Felpham, 24-31;
+    illustrations to his _Ballads_, 31;
+    to his life of Cowper, 31;
+    letters to, 32.
+
+  _Hecate_, 168.
+
+  Humphrey, Ozias, Blake's relations with, 38.
+
+  Hunt, Leigh, inept criticisms by, 42.
+
+
+  _Ideas of Good and Evil_, 30.
+
+  Irish ancestry suggested for Blake, 3.
+
+
+  _Jerusalem_, 31, 34;
+    discussed, 123;
+    described, 127.
+
+  _Job, The Book of_, drawings for, 54;
+    discussed, 148;
+    described, 151;
+    sold, 148.
+
+  _Joseph of Arimathea_, 6.
+
+  _Judgment of Paris, The_, 172.
+
+
+  Lamb, Charles, appreciative criticisms by, 99, 179.
+
+  _Lamech and his Two Wives_, 168, 169.
+
+  _Laocoon_, 50.
+
+  _Last Judgment, The_, 38.
+
+  _Lazar House, The_, 188.
+
+  Le Brun, Blake's early aversion to her work, 6.
+
+  _Lenore_, illustrations to Buerger's, 137.
+
+  Linnell, John, Blake's friendship with, 47, 54, 150;
+    and the Book of Job, 149.
+
+  _Little Tom the Sailor_, 179.
+
+  _Los, The Book of_, 23;
+    described, 122.
+
+  _Los, The Song of_, 23;
+    described, 121.
+
+
+  Madness, his alleged, 73.
+
+  Malkin's _Memorials_ of his child, illustrated by Blake, 38.
+
+  _Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The_, 17;
+    discussed, 90;
+    quoted, 101.
+
+  Mathew, the Rev. Henry, an early friend, 11-14.
+
+  Michael Angelo, his influence on Blake, 4, 6, 78, 141, 171, 187.
+
+  _Milton_, 31;
+    discussed, 130;
+    described, 133.
+
+  MS. Notebook, Blake's, references to, 6, 11, 26, 30, 38, 45, 46, 81, 82.
+
+  Mystical views, Blake's, are misunderstood, 72-79;
+    explained by Smetham, 75.
+
+  Mythological characters, Blake's, 71, 105, 112, 117.
+
+
+  National Gallery, works by Blake in the, 189.
+
+  _Nativity, The_, 161, 162.
+
+  _Nebuchadnezzar_, 22.
+
+  _Nelson, The Spiritual Form of, etc._, 185.
+
+  _Night Thoughts_, designs for Young's, 23;
+    described, 137.
+
+
+  _Oberon, Titania, and Puck_, 169.
+
+
+  Paine, Tom, Blake's acquaintance with, 17.
+
+  Pars' drawing-classes, Blake attends, 4.
+
+  _Pitt guiding Behemoth, The Spiritual Form of_, 192.
+
+  Poetic Genius, his theory of the, 67, 68.
+
+  _Poetical Sketches_, 12.
+
+  Prices now brought by Blake's work, 100, 107, 110, 113, 121, 130, 148.
+
+  Prices received by Blake, 21, 35, 38, 100, 149.
+
+  Processes employed by Blake, 38, 82, 91, 150, 166, 168, 179, 186, 187.
+
+  _Procession from Calvary_, 191.
+
+
+  Raphael, early love for, 6.
+
+  Religious views, 57-71, 102.
+
+  Religious views, Swedenborg, 57, 58;
+    pantheism, 62;
+    Blake's beliefs, 62;
+    the necessity of contraries, 65;
+    "art in religion," 67.
+
+  Reynolds, Sir Joshua, his advice to Blake, 19.
+
+  Reynolds, Sir Joshua, Blake's MS. notes on Reynolds' Discourses, 6, 19,
+        79.
+
+  _River of Life, The_, 163, 169.
+
+  Robinson, Henry Crabb, his relations with Blake, 2, 40, 45, 47, 51, 54,
+        63, 73.
+
+  Rossetti, D. G., appreciations of Blake, 12, 40, 185.
+
+  Rossetti, D. G., owns Blake's MS. Notebook, 30.
+
+  Rubens, early comments on, 6.
+
+  Rylands, proposal to apprentice Blake to, 4.
+
+
+  _Satan Watching Adam and Eve_, 161.
+
+  _Satan, Sin, and Death_, 172.
+
+  _Satan Triumphing over Eve_, 171.
+
+  _Satan's Three Accusers_, 121.
+
+  Schiavonetti, Lewis, engraves the drawings for the _Grave_, 36, 140, 145.
+
+  Shakespeare, designs to illustrate, 37.
+
+  Shields, Mr. Frederick J., 52, 138, 183, 185.
+
+  "Single Vision" of Bacon and Newton, 92.
+
+  _Songs of Experience_, 97;
+    described, 98.
+
+  _Songs of Innocence_, 16;
+    described, 83.
+
+  Stothard, Thomas Blake's introduction to, 8;
+    quarrel with, 37, 40, 42, 43.
+
+  Stothard, his _Canterbury Pilgrims_, 37;
+    exhibited, 38;
+    described, 176.
+
+  Swedenborg, his influence, 38, 57.
+
+  Swinburne, Mr. A. C., criticisms by, 11, 45, 62, 95, 104, 105, 115.
+
+
+  _Tales for Children_, 91.
+
+  Tathams, Blake's friendship with the, 52, 56, 113.
+
+  Technique, his deficiency in, 78.
+
+  _Thel, The Book of_, 17;
+    described, 87.
+
+  _There is no Natural Religion_, 115.
+
+  _Three Maries with the Angel at the Sepulchre_, 161.
+
+  _Tiriel_, 89.
+
+
+  _Urizen, The Book of_, 23;
+    described, 116.
+
+
+  _Vegetative Life_, what Blake meant by the, 2, 64, 127.
+
+  _Virgil's Pastorals_, woodcuts for, 49;
+    described, 146.
+
+  _Vision of Queen Katherine_, 173.
+
+  _Visionary Heads_, drawn by Blake, 48.
+
+  _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_, 23;
+    described, 104.
+
+  Visions of Blake; in childhood, 2;
+    in later years, 17.
+
+
+  Water-colour sketches, 187, 188.
+
+  Westminster Abbey, drawings in, 5.
+
+  _Whore of Babylon, The_, 187.
+
+  _Wise and Foolish Virgins, The_, 169.
+
+  Wollstonecraft, Mary, acquaintance with, 17;
+    designs for her Tales, 91.
+
+  Women, his views on the position of, 70.
+
+
+CHISWICK PRESS: PRINTED BY CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
+
+TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of William Blake, by Irene Langridge
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