WILLIAM BLAKE: THE MAN

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THE BURIAL OF MOSES.
Reproduced by kind permission of Mr Sydney Morse.

WILLIAM BLAKE
THE MAN

BY

CHARLES GARDNER

AUTHOR OF “VISION AND VESTURE,” “THE REDEMPTION OF RELIGION,” ETC.

LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS LIMITED
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
MCMXIX

To
MONICA

Preface

This book is an attempt to trace the mental and spiritual growth of William Blake as disclosed in his works. After meditating on these for some years an image of the man has risen in my mind. This I have tried to present with the aid of such biographical details as are to be found in Gilchrist’s Life. My warm thanks are due to Mr and Mrs Sydney Morse for permission to reproduce their beautiful Prayer of the Infant Jesus, and The Burial of Moses. The photographs were taken by Mr Albert Hester. Also I must thank Mr J. M. Dent for the two designs from an original and invaluable Job series in his possession. The rest of the illustrations are from the Print Room of the British Museum.

C. G.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

WILLIAM BLAKE: THE MAN

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD AND APPRENTICESHIP

William Blake was born on November 28th, 1757, at 28 Broad Street, Carnaby Market, Golden Square.

To-day a large house stands in Broad Street numbered 28, to which is attached a blue disk announcing that William Blake, Poet and Artist, was born there. The house looks old and shabby, and may well have stood a hundred years; but on inquiry one finds that it is a recent erection, and that of Blake’s actual house not one stone has been left upon another. One walks through Broad Street and its neighbouring streets hoping to see at least one group of buildings as Blake saw them. But all has changed, and except for a block of houses on one side of Golden Square, there is nothing to remind one of the sharp transitions that a few years can effect. Even the sounds have changed. From the doors and windows of Number 28 is heard day and night the whir of machinery ceaselessly at work to supply the inhabitants of Pall Mall and St James’s with electric light. Carnaby Market has vanished, and its glowing colours have reappeared in Berwick Street, where fruits are displayed on public stalls, and where from time to time titled ladies are known to explore in search of a pair of boots, or some other indispensable article of clothing. Great ugly buildings—a brewery, an infirmary given up during the war to Belgian refugees, warehouses—afflict the eye at every turn; and through the open windows of the upper stories the social regenerator may detect the countless bent backs and expert fingers of tailor hands turning out perfect equipments for noblemen all over the country who come to Regent Street, Maddox Street, and Conduit Street to be measured and fitted and tried.

In Blake’s day the transitions in Broad Street were more clearly defined. It had been a fashionable quarter, and still retained a vivid memory of its past glory. The new buildings were shops of a good solid kind, which struck the eye like vivid green paint as they sprang up side by side with the older private houses that time had softened and mellowed.

Blake’s father was a hosier. His name was James, he was married to Catherine, and they had five children, William being the second. James was a dissenter, but, like so many dissenters, he liked such important functions as baptism, marriage, and burial to be performed by the Church of England, that there might be no mistake about them. Accordingly, William was taken on December 11th, when he was a fortnight old, to be christened at St James’s Church in a Grinling Gibbons font, the highly ornate character of which was fortunately not observed by the tender recipient of baptismal grace.

William was a solitary, imaginative boy. His imagination was first stimulated and nourished by town. His father’s home, in sharp contrast with the older houses in the neighbourhood, made him perceive that there was a meaning Past as well as a so-far unmeaning Present: and the moment his imagination escaped into the past it tended to abstraction, but knew no bounds.

Very soon in his solitary walks he found his way into the country, emerging from London on the south side and exploring as far as Peckham Rye, Dulwich, Streatham, and Sydenham. His first glimpse of the country was to him as our first trip abroad to us. The trees, the hills, the grass and the cattle spoke obliquely to an imagination that already had a bias. He loved them—with discretion. To him London was older than the country. Nature has a way of disguising her great age in an ever renewed youthful present. London’s present drives one to the past. Nature bewitches her children and will not allow them to transcend her. A great city with its pulsing life carries the exuberant spirit in its mighty rhythm, and yet drives it back to the ancient primeval sources concealed in the eternal kingdom of the imagination. Wordsworth, Nature’s lover, soothes and lulls our restlessness and pain, but fails to carry us into the promised land. Blake, the inspired citizen, pierces with his sword through Nature, and will not rest until in England’s green and pleasant land he has built Jerusalem, wherein we may feast as comrades and be satisfied with the wine of eternity.

Little William Blake was not like other children, or he might have romped with his three brothers, John, James, and Robert, and his sister, Catherine. But from the first he was peculiar, sensitive, and liable to visions. His first recorded vision was in Peckham Rye. There he saw a tree filled with angels. He was neither startled nor surprised. It seemed entirely natural, and, childlike, he told his vision to his parents when he reached home. Visions were not in his father’s line of business. In the dark days of popish supremacy there had been idle monks who thrashed and starved themselves till they saw visions. Even the reformed Church of England knew better than that, and a dissenter of the eighteenth century who spent his spare hours from the shop in reading knew precisely what were the things from which he dissented. He must nip William’s visions in the bud, and he would thrash him. Happily, Mrs. Blake stepped between. It was a jarring shock to an over-sensitive child that a heavy penalty awaited the mention of visions. He continued to see them, but he kept them to himself. His brothers and sister were like his father. Robert, who in after years would have understood, was in the middle of his teething, and it did not yet appear what he would be. Hence all things worked together to separate William from his family and to thrust him into the world of imagination.

At this time—he was about nine years old—he became a devourer of books. His mental bias was sufficiently strong to draw to him the books that would nourish him. Percy’s Reliques, which was sure to be among his father’s books, was entirely congenial to him, as later to little Walter Scott. Also Shakespeare and some of the Elizabethans, of whom Ben Jonson was certainly one, were absorbed into his being. Spencer’s Faery Queen and later poets of his own time—Rowley, Thomson, Chatterton—were his daily companions: and above all he adored with passionate idolatry the then famous Ossian of Macpherson.

Swinburne has expressed astonishment that the child Blake could admire such “lank and lamentable counterfeits of the poetical style” as Macpherson supplied to an undiscerning generation. We must remember that in spite of the Highland Society, then meeting in London, Blake had no easy access to the times of Fingal and Ossian, such as we have to-day. There was something in his genius which made him crave for the society of the Celtic heroes and gods. If Macpherson’s poetic stream was muddy, Blake’s thirst was too consuming to allow of criticism. What is disconcerting is that the mature Blake should retain his admiration of Macpherson and bracket him with the greatest poets of any age. We can only say that what we have loved with our whole heart in childhood, and has entered for better or worse into the very tissue of our being, we cannot criticize; and simple, trustful Blake to the end of his days would have reckoned himself guilty of impious disloyalty if he had admitted even to himself that there were spots in his sun.

Blake’s reading had effected an invaluable service for him—it peopled his world of imagination. There was terror in his first approach on the threshold, a terror never forgotten and often reproduced in his designs. But when he was pushed beyond the threshold and its covering shadow, he gradually grew accustomed to the changed lights, and he began to discern its forms and its outlines and its colours. These in their turn reacted on the outer world until he saw it not as a hard unsurpassable fact, but a mirror of the inner things which in reality were the substance, the form, and the foundation. Henceforth he valued the forms and outlines of things because they were a sign and pledge to him of the inner resplendent City which was not only built on an eternal foundation but was actually the home of his spirit. As soon as he apprehended the significance of outline he developed an ardent desire to draw.

This impulse was quickly observed by his father and encouraged by him. William was sent to learn drawing from a Mr Pars, who kept a drawing-school in the Strand. Here he copied plaster casts and odd-and-end plaster bits of the human body, the body itself being left severely alone. A certain amount of technical facility was thus acquired, but his education in art advanced more surely from his desultory wanderings in sale-rooms and in the private galleries of munificent noblemen. At the sale-rooms he bought prints often for a few pence, and his little store of prints was added to by gifts from his father, who also presented him with models of the Gladiator, Hercules, Venus of Medici. In this way he gained his first enthusiastic knowledge of Raphael, Michael Angelo, Martin Hemskerck, Albert Dürer and Julio Romano, who were exactly the right teachers for him. Michael Angelo and the Florentine School believed that drawing was the foundation of all great art. Albert Dürer and his great German successors were of the same opinion. William Blake, the little citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem, had known the horror of indefiniteness, and worked through his apprenticeship to joy only when he discovered that the blessed City stood four-square, and was bounded by great walls on its four sides. Hence his selection of prints was instinctive. He knew without being told what helped him to find himself, and he escaped once for all, while still a child, the seductive elegance of his own age.

These were happy years. His mind was already stored with unfashionable knowledge, gleaned chiefly from the robust Elizabethan age, and his spirit, like a mirror, reflected the things he saw with his spiritual eye. His happiness was creative, and he burst into song when he was only eleven in strains that savoured of Ben Jonson, but were wholly fresh and captivating because they were inspired by the first fresh vision of his childhood. There is surely nothing in any language written by a boy of eleven to touch the song: How sweet I roam’d from field to field. It is a sudden spring of sparkling water that can never lose its purity.

Blake remained four years with Pars, and then his father, willing that his son should become an artist, apprenticed him in 1771 to Basire in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

We who stand far apart from Blake’s day can see that this was the best thing that could have happened. Had his father been a rich man, able to pay a heavy premium that his son might be taught by one of the popular engravers of the day, we should have had the distressing picture of Blake moulded different and moulded wrong by a Woollett, a Bartolozzi, or an Angelica Kaufmann, and his whole soul in rebellious and ineffectual protest. As it was, Basire was master of the technical part of his craft, he believed in accurate, definite outline, and not being a man of genius, did not think it necessary that his pupils should turn out servile copies of himself. Blake learnt to handle his tools, to lay a good foundation, and technical proficiency. In after years, when engraving was to be a chief means of expressing his own original vision, he was saved from the painful necessity of having to unlearn much or all of his master’s teaching.

After two quiet years with Basire a providential thing happened. Two more apprentices were taken on by him. These were wholly products of the time, and Blake found himself in violent collision with them in aims, methods, and tastes. To keep the peace, Blake was separated from them and sent to draw in Westminster Abbey.

Gothic architecture was as intoxicating a revelation to Blake as the discovery of Michael Angelo and Albert Dürer in the sale-rooms of Christie and Langford. The Chapel of Edward the Confessor, recently piled up with sand-bags to protect it from the desecration of German bombs, became to Blake a little sanctuary. Here his thoughts travelled without fatigue many hundred years back, and the dim background of the Chapel became a fit setting for his bright visions of the past. He copied with silent intensity the monuments of the Confessor, Henry III, Queen Elinor, Philippa, and the beautiful work of Aymer de Valence. These days were decisive for his lifetime. Gothic architecture was germane to his own soul. Its spirit sank inwards and appeared again and again in the architectural fragments of his own designs. There remained for him one more great formative heritage from the past, and then, with his roots well set, he was to reach forward to the future and prophesy in rhythmic words that are meat and drink to us in the twentieth century.

Blake remained with Basire for seven years. During these years he had glimpses of a world different from the one in which his family moved. Oliver Goldsmith, with his fine head, came as a shining messenger, and actually walked into Basire’s. Oh! that he might grow up to have such a head! Woollett was a visitor, and a sufficiently frequent one to cease to be dazzling even to an overtrustful and enthusiastic apprentice. “One of the most ignorant fellows I ever met,” he wrote of him who never at any time could have been congenial to his spirit. Many others appeared there also—silently marked and measured in a way that would have astonished them had they been worthy to know.

Blake’s time was not wholly spent in copying the works of others. In his spare hours he threw off songs and designs of his own. These latter were sometimes partly copies of a much-loved master. Thus, Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion was suggested by Michael Angelo’s Crucifixion of St Peter in the Vatican, and the figure of Joseph is a copy.[1] Blake himself had written “engraved by W. Blake, 1773, from an old Italian Drawing”; “Michael Angelo, Pinxit.” But already there is more of Blake in this design than of his master. He wrote between the lines, “This is one of the Gothic Artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheep-skins and goat-skins; of whom the World was not worthy. Such were the Christians in all ages.” From which we may gather that Blake was fully conscious that his being a Christian—and his Art was inseparable from his Christianity—had already consigned him to a solitary life in which he might expect persecutions, but certainly not a resting-place.

Blake’s apprenticeship with Basire came to a peaceful end in 1778, when he was twenty-one years old. He was now a man, peering forward into a dim and cloudy future, looking backward on a childhood of clearest visions that were already passing, and as it was, according to all precedent, had overstayed their time. One thing was entirely clear—he must earn his own living. Another thing he was conscious of was that he was slowly and surely leaving the past behind. Yet so far, seated amidst the ruins of the Old World, he knew not whither his religious aspirations would lead him. He had fine memories, he had religious and art instincts that refused to be separated, he was finding himself daily in opposition to the admired religionists and artists of his time, and he felt within the strength of immense passion which would surely drive him to the building of the heavenly Jerusalem if he could but get his vision clear again, and know the path which God had before marked out for him to walk in. His vision was to clear after many years. Meanwhile there were tempests and storms to be endured that would reduce still more effectually to wreckage the last remains of the Old World. That World had spoken with dignity and power through the lips of Dr Johnson, who was himself breaking up and died in 1784. With the death of Johnson the Old World died, to reappear only in a kind of after-mirage; and young Blake was struggling through the tempestuous years of his passionate youth, turning with pain his eyes from the Past to the Future, and wistfully hoping that the mighty creative power that was already astir in him might fashion a new order in which he and his fellows could live at peace.

CHAPTER II

COMING OF AGE AND MARRIAGE

The Royal Academy is a British Institution which we all patronize once a year, and then abuse that we may keep our self-respect. We go, impelled by a sense of high duty; but we presently relax and take our pleasure in Bond Street. In 1778 Bond Street did not lay itself out to encourage revolutionary artists, and Burlington House was not yet finished. The Royal Academy was turned out of Somerset Palace and was still waiting to turn into its new quarters.

Blake, on leaving Basire, immediately joined the Academy and studied in the Antique School under Mr Moser. This was not an auspicious beginning. Moser had scant respect for Michael Angelo and Raphael, while he extolled to the skies the more fleshly works of Le Brun and Rubens. Some of us may wish that Moser had taught Blake to admire Rubens. But an angel from Heaven could not have done that. Clear outline was a necessity to keep him sane; blurred outline always gave him nightmare. Only the mystic who loves the flesh can rejoice in the roly-poly curves and tints of Rubens’ fat Venuses. Moser did his best, and being an old man of seventy-three, felt he might advise a young man in his art studies. But Blake had now known for some years what he really liked, and his impetuosity led him to speak to Moser as if their positions were reversed.

Blake drew at the Academy not only from the antique but from living models. This was distasteful to him, because it was never his aim to reproduce exact portraits of outward things. Always his imagination must pierce through and illumine the object before him, and he found the posed model baffled him in this attempt, and made him scent death rather than life.

These were crowded days for Blake. He could not continue to live under his father’s roof in Broad Street without contributing towards the household expenses, and therefore he must do work of marketable value. To this end he received orders for engraving from Johnson and other booksellers. It was drudging work, and Blake was not without his full share of drudgery. To engrave after Stothard was to set a lion to speak in a monstrous little voice. But Stothard had his uses for Blake. Through a fellow-engraver Blake was introduced to Stothard, who, still young, was making a guinea a piece for his contributions to the Novelist’s Magazine. Broad Street was in the thick of the Artists and Royal Academicians. Once Blake had pierced the magic circle and could meet them on equal terms, instead of merely watching their exits and their entrances through the doors of Broad Street, Poland Street, and Golden Square, they might prove of value to him, not by teaching him to paint as they painted, but by helping him to get customers for his own productions. Stothard had lately made the acquaintance of Flaxman, who had sought him out, and he introduced Blake to Flaxman, who in 1781 took a house at 27 Wardour Street and became Blake’s close friend and neighbour.

At this time, in 1780, Blake threw off one of his very own magnificent designs known as Morning, or Glad Day. It is the real Blake with only one foot on earth, his head in a flood of light, and the symbols of his grub state—caterpillar and moth—at his feet. The rays of the light are darting north and south and east and west. Blake had weary years before him to work out his salvation to Glad Day. This design makes it certain that he already had had his glimpse of the end, and we shall find that he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.

London was not without its excitements. Lord George Gordon headed the No-Popery Riots in 1780, and through the unruly violence of the mob, London was in a panic for a week. Lord George was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower, where he was visited by the ubiquitous John Wesley, who found him well instructed in the Bible and not disposed to complain.

It is impossible to trace accurately what books Blake read at this time. It is evident that he observed Wesley and Whitefield and admired much that he saw in them. But his own religious genius was far removed from theirs, and sought nourishment elsewhere. It is probable that he read Boehme, Paracelsus, Fludd, Madame Guyon, and St Theresa in his spare hours.

But there were other imperious needs surging up in him. The creative passion of love was driving him hither and thither. With his tendency to view all things in the light of eternity, he was passionately in love with the eternal feminine, into which any pair of bright eyes would serve as windows. The particular pair of eyes that captivated him belonged to “a lively little girl” called Polly Wood, with whom he kept company for a while. Polly’s conversation was probably no more suitable as a permanent entertainment to Blake than that of a modern flapper. Fortunately, she understood little affairs of the heart much better than he did, not taking them more seriously than they deserved; and when she saw symptoms of tremendously earnest love-making threatening to engulf her, she quickly shook him off with a sharp stroke, “Are you a fool?” and left him feeling very lacerated and sorry for himself.

Blake had not long to wait for another manifestation of the eternal feminine. Recovering from an illness at Kew, where he was staying at the house of a market-gardener named Boucher, he told his grief to the gardener’s daughter Catherine, who declared that she pitied him from the heart. There was the authentic voice of the eternal feminine. “Do you pity me?” he gasped. “Yes! I do most sincerely” the voice continued. “Then I love you!” and his fate was sealed. William Blake and Catherine Boucher were married quietly at St Mary’s Church, Battersea, on August 18th, 1782, and the happy pair, leaving their parental nests, made their first little home together in lodgings at 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields.

Blake’s worldly goods with all of which he endowed his bride were not plentiful. A portfolio of prints which had been growing in bulk during fifteen years was his darling treasure. Money he had none. But he had immense capacity for sustained application and work. His engravings made small but sure returns, and for the last four years he had turned his attention to water-colour, and in 1780 had even exhibited in the Royal Academy. And he was making friends. Friend Flaxman lived near in Wardour Street, friend Fuseli in Broad Street. Stothard was kind. A young man with sanguine temperament like Blake might expect anything to turn up.

His wife brought no gold with her; but she brought a faithful maternal heart, unlimited faith in her husband, a teachable spirit, and a willingness to turn her hand to all that was necessary to make and keep a little home for the man-child of her heart. She had made her mark in the marriage register of St Mary’s Church. A woman with such endowments, unspoilt by education, was virgin soil that would yield whatever her husband willed. It was no long time before she learnt of him to write, draw, and engrave, all of which acquirements she placed in perfect loyalty at his disposal.

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GLAD DAY.

We have seen that Blake’s circle of acquaintances widened much from the day he became a student at the Royal Academy. But artists are not necessarily in Society, and if one can believe what everyone says they are apt to be bohemian. Now that Blake was a married man, he could not be indifferent to the grades of the social ladder; and when Flaxman introduced him to the elegant and cultured Mrs Mathew at 27 Rathbone Place, he not only had hopes of a useful patron for himself, but also that the accomplished lady might be a kind friend to his wife. She had been truly kind to Flaxman for many years, and it is reasonable to suppose that while benefiting him she had herself benefited by his pure classicism and romanticism combined. Thus equipped, she needed only to extend her sympathies towards mysticism, and then she might include even Blake himself among her good works. But she and her sister Blue-stockings deserve a chapter to themselves.

CHAPTER III

THE BLUE-STOCKINGS

Posterity is spiteful towards those who do not make good their claim to immortality; and for a long time the Blue-stockings have been the butt of the superior modern. Yet they were remarkable women, and by their dash to capture for themselves some of the treasures of man’s learning they helped to open up a new way for the modern woman.

We can dispense no doubt with Mrs Montagu’s Essay, in which she defends Shakespeare against the rash onslaught of Voltaire. We may even forget her three Dialogues of the Dead, although Mrs Modish speaks with the genuine accent of the polite world: “Indeed, Mr Mercury, I cannot have the pleasure of waiting upon you now, I am engaged, absolutely engaged.” (There was a fourth Dialogue returned to her by Lord Lyttelton in which Cleopatra tells Berenice only what every woman knows.) But we cannot forgo without loss to ourselves her letters to the Duchess of Portland and many other friends, which are lively, witty, and entertaining, and second in her time only to those of that prince of letter-writers, Horace Walpole.

Mrs Montagu’s friends did their best to turn her head. Mrs Carter writes to her of “the elegant brilliancy of my dearest Mrs Montagu,” and not content with prose as a medium of praise, sends her an ode which leads up by a strong crescendo to these two verses:

“O blest with ev’ry talent, ev’ry Grace
Which native Fire, or happy Art supplies,
How short a Period, how confined a Space,
Must bound thy shining Course below the Skies!
For wider Glories, for immortal Fame,
Were all those talents, all those Graces given:
And may thy life pursue that noblest aim,
The final plaudit of approving Heav’n.”

Mrs Carter thought that Dr Johnson’s preface to Shakespeare was “very defective,” and she adds to Mrs Montagu, certain that her Latin will be understood without the aid of a dictionary: “Res integra tibi reservatur.” Elsewhere she writes: “you, who have proved yourself the most accurate and judicious of all his commentators.” This opinion was shared by the entire circle of Blue-stockings, and even outside that charmed circle the Reverend Montagu Pennington, nephew of Mrs Carter and godson of Mrs Montagu, felt that she was guilty of something like mortal sin in omitting to defend the British Public against the pernicious influence of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son.

Mrs Carter, loaded with languages, and much addicted to snuff and green tea, was scarcely inferior to Mrs Montagu. She was modest and almost apologetic for her much learning. She and the rest of the heady sisterhood were not without misgivings that in pursuing man’s studies they might become manly, and therefore they never ceased to express in season and out of season pious female sentiments. Indeed, Mrs Carter protested against being thought of as a walking tripod, and was what used to be called “a sweet woman.” Thus she writes of “the infernal composition of deadly weeds made up by Voltaire.” Candide was “so horrid in all respects.” Werther she detested. She is relieved to hear that Pascal is “very respectable,” for she considered him “a dangerous author to all kinds of readers.” Rousseau “quite sunk her spirits.” Of course her spirits were liable to the same shock during her extensive readings among the ancients, and, indeed, she said that Quintilian’s impiety was “quite shocking”; but very justly she considered that they were to be excused because they had not the light of revelation, while Voltaire and Rousseau were sinning against that light.

Mrs Carter and Mrs Montagu fully agreed in their admiration for Mrs Vesey, whom they familiarly called “our Sylph.” Hannah More in her Bas Bleu seems to reckon her the first of the Blues, and specially commends her for the skill she displayed in breaking the formidable circle that Mrs Montagu’s guests were forced to make. Her lively Irish nature was refreshing to Mrs Carter, her head full and aching after a strenuous tussle with Aristotle’s Ethics. She wrote to Mrs Montagu: “As little of the turbulent as there is in her (our Sylph’s) composition, the uproar of a mighty sea is as much adapted to the sublime of her imagination, as the soft murmurs of a gliding stream to the gentleness of her temper.”

The conversaziones of the Blue-stockings were as successful as might be. There was always a difficulty in procuring men. Dr Johnson could be baited from time to time. Horace Walpole, driven by curiosity, appeared and disappeared. At Mrs Ord’s, 35 Queen Anne Street, where Fanny Burney met “everything delectable in the Blue way,” one catches a glimpse of Mr Smelt, Captain Phillips, Dr Burney, Lord Mulgrave, Sir Lucas Pepys, and the Bishop of London. The kindness and patronage of Lord Bath and Lord Lyttelton could always be relied upon. Yet there was no full and easy interchange of ideas with men. The time had not yet come. In France it had been accomplished by the ladies who were willing to step beyond the bounds of strict propriety, but the pious English Blues were the last to wish to follow the example of their French sisters. And so their best chance of getting a man was to catch one young and struggling whom they might patronize and be kind to.

In this way all the luck fell to Mrs Mathew, of 27 Rathbone Place. If Mrs Montagu had the advantage of a rich and indulgent husband, Mrs Mathew excelled all in the respectability of hers. The Reverend Henry Mathew was incumbent of Percy Chapel, Charlotte Street, and afternoon preacher at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields. The latter church alone is sufficient to make a man’s reputation; but Mr Mathew had already made his both by his piety and his taste.

No one has such opportunities as one of the priesthood for discovering promising young men. Mr Mathew’s first find was little Flaxman struggling with a Latin book. Learning the nature of the book, he promised him a better and invited him to his house. Mrs Mathew herself was well read in Latin and Greek, and here was a boy of genius thrown into her very lap. Rising to the great occasion, she taught him, read to him while he sketched, and by her treatment of him alone made more than amends for being a Blue.

When Flaxman was full grown he did all in his power to show his gratitude. Mrs Mathew was desirous to turn her back parlour into a Gothic chamber. Here was an opportunity. Flaxman modelled little figures of sand and putty and placed them in niches. Another protégé, Oram, son of old Oram and Loutherbourg’s assistant, painted the windows, and between them they made the book-cases, tables, and chairs to match. With such a room, Mrs Mathew might ask whom she would and not be ashamed. To her tea parties came Mrs Montagu, Mrs Carter when staying in Clarges Street, Mrs Barbauld, Mrs Chapone, Mrs Brooke, and many others.

Blake and Flaxman first met in 1780 and soon became friends. Flaxman, by native bent and Mrs Mathew’s teaching, was steeped in Greek. By this time he had shown himself wonderful alike in his designs and sculptures, and already held a high place in what has been called the Second Renaissance.

Blake was a romantic rather than a Greek, but as a later Greek, Goethe, has assured us that there is no antagonism between a true romantic and a true Greek, it is not surprising that the two men found a deep congeniality of spirit. There was an even deeper fellowship, which became explicit later on when both concurred in admiring Swedenborg.

Flaxman, generously anxious that his friend should get on, introduced him, in 1782, to Mr and Mrs Mathew, who asked him and Mrs Blake to their evenings. And so at last we see rebel Blake and his illiterate wife in the midst of a charmed circle of Blues who were mistresses of everything that was learned, cultured, elegant, decorous, and du bon ton.

Our first glimpse of Blake in Society we owe to John Thomas Smith, Keeper of the Prints at the British Museum and frequent visitor at Mrs Mathew’s. He says in his Book for a Rainy Day: “At Mrs Mathew’s most agreeable conversaziones I first met the late William Blake, the artist, to whom she and Mr Flaxman had been truly kind. There I have often heard him read and sing several of his poems. He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit.”

That is a pleasant picture. Would that we had been there! But as time went on several things became clear to Blake and likewise to the company, only their interpretation of the situation differed. Mrs Blake proved a touchstone to the other ladies. They of course could see at once that she was not a lady, but that they must be kind to her. She, not having read Mrs Chapone on the improvement of the mind or practised the elegancies, was quite unable to imitate their manners and catch their tone. She was throughout a simple, direct, noble woman set down in the midst of an artificial society, and she was made to suffer accordingly. These things sank deep into Blake, to reappear again as poems in his Ideas of Good and Evil. Many times he himself felt the same discomfort both at Mrs Mathew’s and later at Mr Hayley’s. The words he puts into Mary’s (Catherine’s) lips he speaks in his own person in lines that he afterwards addressed to Flaxman:

“Oh, why was I born with a different face?
Why was I not born like this envious race?
Why did Heaven adorn me with bountiful hand,
And then set me down in an envious land?”

Still Blake was “allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit.” The songs he sang were inspired by his reading of the Elizabethans, whom the Blues could appreciate. The Poetical Sketches came within the purview of professed admirers of Ben Jonson and Spenser; and therefore Mrs Mathew could genuinely agree with Flaxman that it was worth helping Blake to get them published. The Poetical Sketches were gathered together and printed at the expense of Flaxman and the Mathews, Mr Mathew himself writing an apologetic Advertisement which would save his skin and lack of discernment if the pieces were unapproved by the great Public. Since it is short, I will quote it entire:

“The following sketches were the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year; since which time, his talents having been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession, he has been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye. Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a poetical originality, which merited some respite from oblivion. These their opinions remain, however, to be now reproved or confirmed by a less partial public.”

It was hardly want of leisure that had prevented Blake from polishing his verses. Mr Mathew had argued with him on the necessity, and he had proved tiresomely obstinate, and, what is worse, remained of the same opinion eight years afterwards when he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.”

Mr Mathew was but one of those Bunglers that “can never see perfection, but in the journeyman’s labour.” However, he saved his name for his generation and lost it for posterity.

Blake’s Poetical Sketches were printed but not published. The copies were handed over to him to give or sell, but they brought him neither fame nor money.

It is long since anyone doubted the worth of the Poetical Sketches. The twentieth century wholly endorses the glowing and just criticism that Swinburne wrote fifty years ago. It must have startled the stolid bookish people of the ’sixties to be told that the best of Blake’s Poetical Sketches—To Spring, To Memory, To the Muses, To the Evening Star—were comparable to the world’s best in any age. Swinburne frequently exaggerated in his excitement; but here was no exaggeration, and the poems which were once thought by a partial friend “to merit some respite from oblivion” are now reckoned among the chief pearls of great price in England’s rich treasury of Songs.

There remains little more for the critic to say, but the biographer turns to these Sketches for any intimation of Blake’s spiritual and mental growth.

We must not be misled by the “scent and sound of Elizabethan times” that is upon them. It is of course interesting to the literary mind to discover Ben Jonson in How sweet I roamed, Beaumont and Fletcher in My Silks and fine Array, Webster in the Mad Song, and Shakespeare in King Edward the Third; but these intimations of kinship are only such as are found in original geniuses of the same age. That which gives life and immortality and irresistible sweetness to the songs is Blake’s own child-spirit seeing with wide-eyed simplicity the simple commonplace things of this world that God made, and that are to the pure in heart the immediate revelation of Him. If in fashioning into Song the things that he saw Blake refuses the artifice of his time and catches the scent and sound of a more robust age, yet the prime inspiration was entirely his own; and we can only wonder that such inspiration should have come to him while still a mere boy.

The other pieces in the collection, though of much less importance, have their interest. Fair Elinor with the “silent tower,” the “castle gate,” the “dreary vaults,” and “sickly smells,” like Horace Walpole’s Mysterious Mother and Castle of Otranto, is not of the time but anticipatory of the romantic horrors that Mrs Radcliffe was to make entirely her own. Gwen King of Norway and King Edward the Third are remarkable for their martial language. This was no accident. Blake was a born fighter. The heroic side of War stirred his spirit, even though

“The God of War is drunk with blood;
The Earth doth faint and fail:
The stench of blood makes sick the Heav’ns;
Ghosts glut the throat of Hell!”

His feeling for England recalls old John of Gaunt’s speech:

“Lord Percy cannot mean that we should suffer
This disgrace: if so, we are not sovereigns
Of the sea—our right, that Heaven gave
To England, when at the birth of nature
She was seated in the deep; the Ocean ceas’d
His mighty roar, and fawning play’d around
Her snowy feet, and own’d his awful Queen.”

Grim War is a means to glorious liberty:

“Then let the clarion of War begin;
I’ll fight and weep, ’tis in my country’s cause;
I’ll weep and shout for glorious liberty.
Grim War shall laugh and shout, decked in tears,
And blood shall flow like streams across the meadows,
That murmur down their pebbly channels, and
Spend their sweet lives to do their country service:
Then shall England’s verdure shoot, her fields shall smile,
Her ships shall sing across the foaming sea,
Her mariners shall use the flute and viol,
And rattling guns, and black and dreary war,
Shall be no more.”

Later on the War spirit in him, without diminishing, underwent a change. It is still England’s green and pleasant fields that he loves, and he still longs for glorious liberty. This shall be effected by the building of Jerusalem. But as the root of the evil is in man, the weapons of his warfare become spiritual. Casting aside the rattling guns, he shouts:

“Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire;
Bring me my spear; O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.”

For War breeds hate and every evil thing. Until we arouse ourselves and fight like warriors the evil that is in ourselves, there can be no glorious liberty, whether for England or any other nation of the world.

The Poetical Sketches were a failure. Mrs Mathew had generously tried to help, but her influence was not wide.

A magnificent opportunity had come to the Blue-stockings, and to Mrs Montagu in particular, who with all her money and wide influence, which she was always ready to use for her needy friends, might have helped quite incalculably when Blake most needed it, and earned our undying gratitude. Yet we must be just and not blame them for their lost opportunity. Their significance lies in the fact that they objected to being perfect dunces like the rest of their English sisters, and so they made a bold dash to understand the things that men understand. They were not the first learned women the world had seen. The ladies of the Italian Renaissance could have given them points all round. Their work was that of restoration and not revolution, and that was more than sufficient to occupy their thoughts and energies without their peering into the new world that was at work in Blake. When whiffs of the new spirit blew on them from Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, and Hume, they were chilled and shocked, and thanked Heaven that in Dr Johnson there was a champion who knew all about the new and stoutly maintained the old. That was sufficient for them. Unfortunately they lived at a time when Society was more than usually artificial and woman suppressed, and the odd contrast between them and their sisters made them appear to men somewhat as monsters, like singing mice or performing pigs. The charge of being a Blue-stocking must always brand with a stigma, but happily now that women are establishing their right to meet men on an equality, the charge need never be made again.

CHAPTER IV

EARLY MARRIED LIFE AND EARLY WORK

We saw that William and Catherine Blake after their marriage settled at 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields. This was in 1782. Here they remained for two years, learning, not without pain, to adjust themselves to each other. Mrs Blake’s love was maternal and whole-hearted. Hers was not a nature to question why love should involve the accepting of immeasurable cares. The cares came one by one and not always singly, and she meekly and bravely accepted them, contented to live her life in her husband’s life, and happy when she perceived that she could smooth his path and shelter him from rough blasts.

Blake at this time was an extraordinarily difficult man to live with. He was by turns vehement, passionate, wildly self-assertive and submissive to others far inferior to himself. His visions were less bright than they had been, and his mind was choked with theories about the elemental things of life that every woman understands by instinct. He was conscious of his own genius and of the shortcomings of his successful contemporaries. His rampant egotism sowed his consciousness with resentments that poisoned his blood and bred bitterness. He made frantic efforts to grasp the liberty he had seen from afar, but he only succeeded in confounding liberty with licence, and peremptorily demanding the latter with his wife in a way that was bound to give her pain. I will not attempt to lift further the veil of their early married life. We have no right to pry. Mr Ellis has constructed this period as far as is possible from the poems of Blake, and to his Real Blake I must refer the curious reader; but for my own part I am content to note the signs of trouble in the various poems and not to probe deeper into the secret things which no right-minded person can ever wish to be proclaimed on the house-top. Suffice it to say that Mrs Blake’s self-forgetful love won the day, and when the early storms had passed, and the adjustments been made, they were united by a bond which, untouched by the fickleness of the flesh, could defy all shocks and changes because it was founded on the enduring reality of the spirit.

In the early years of married life Blake continued with his wife’s company the long walks which had been an early habit. Nothing could have been better for him. Walking till he was tired, rhythmic swing of his arms, unchecked sweating, did more than all else to cleanse his whole being and to cause that uprise of the spirit which was eventually to bring unity and peace to his chaotic and divided self.

His marriage had disturbed another elemental relationship of life. His father disapproved of it, and this led to an estrangement. We must admit that the father had not acquitted himself badly of his paternal duties. It is true he had foolishly wished to thrash him for reporting his visions, believing that the boy lied; but he had helped him to be an artist, and had never really opposed him when a boy. No one can reasonably demand more of a father. Nature has no superstitions about parent birds when their young have left the home nest. Gratitude and reverence to parents is still a beautiful thing, and would doubtless be given spontaneously to them if they could learn not to interfere when their children have grown up.

It has often been affirmed that the old man was a student of Swedenborg. If so, there had been at once a bond of sympathy between father and son. But the truth is that he had not read much of Swedenborg for the simple reason that he died four years before any theological work of importance by Swedenborg was translated into English. Everything shows that the father could not understand the son, who must have appeared to him eccentric, headlong, and obstinate. When William heard on July 4th, 1784, of his father’s death, he paid all due respect to his memory, but he was not moved by any violent grief.

We do not suppose that Mr Blake made his fortune by hosiery, but he left a little money which was divided among the sons. James took on the business and the mother lived with him. William, assisted by Mrs Mathew (if we may trust the testimony of J. T. Smith), took the house Number 27, next door to his brother, and there he opened a print shop in partnership with Parker, who had been a fellow-pupil at Basire’s. Robert, who was teething when we last saw him, was now grown up and proved understanding and sympathetic of William’s visionary point of view. It was agreed that Robert should live with William at Number 27 and become his apprentice.

Once more Blake was all mixed up with his immediate kith and kin. When one remembers that he had no illusions about fathers and saw clearly that the father of one’s flesh might be the enemy of one’s spirit, it seems incredible that he should have planted himself and his wife next door to a brother who was, he knew, an enemy to his spirit, and to a mother who would hardly approve of the young wife, and who would not be behindhand with her advice; but Blake was not strong in common sense, nor could he keep his neck out of a noose until it had first nearly strangled him.

Robert was a comfort to him, but he can only have added to Mrs Blake’s cares. For at this time William was passionately devoted to Robert, and his feeling to his wife had not yet quite resolved itself into that enduring comradeship which was to be his priceless treasure to the end of his days. The oft-repeated tale of Mrs Blake’s obedience when her husband said peremptorily: “Kneel down and beg Robert’s pardon directly, or you will never see my face again,” throws a searchlight on the whole situation. One sees William’s peril and Catherine’s care, and how her self-forgetful love was the one thing that could bring these discordant elements into a lasting harmony.

This arrangement lasted for two and a half years, when Robert fell desperately ill. William nursed him tenderly, and during the last fortnight sat with him day and night. At the end he saw Robert’s soul rise from his body, clapping its hands for joy as it ascended to its perfect life of liberty. Then William, tired out, went to sleep, and did not wake up till after three days and three nights.

The print shop was not successful. Blake lacked the necessary business quality, and the failure was aggravated by disagreements with Parker. The partnership was dissolved, Parker going his own way, and engraving chiefly after Stothard, and Blake closing the shop and retiring with his wife to the other end of Poland Street, which joins Broad Street with Oxford Street. There at Number 28 (now pulled down and replaced) the two, having lost everything, set about in a nearer fellowship to retrieve their fortunes and face the unknown future with as much courage as might be.

Here it is necessary to review briefly Blake’s works in engraving and design. We have seen that his instinct when a boy led him directly to the Masters of the Past who could guide him best until he came to himself. The greatest of these were Michael Angelo and Albert Dürer. He did not at first study these demigods and then adopt their principles. He formulated his principles from his immediate experience of Reality, and then rejoiced to find that the men he worshipped produced splendid examples of his principles. First among these was the value of outline. His spiritual eye being opened at a very early age, it was always self-evident to him that the outer world was a vegetable mirror of the inner, and corresponded with it even in the minutest details. If he saw in the outer colour and form, he immediately looked at the inner for the reality of both; and to his inexpressible joy he not only found what he sought, but also that they so far transcended the outer things that he who saw only the outer could have only the dimmest idea of the wondrous beauty and glory of the archetypes. Hence, with his eye on the eternal outline, he declared consistently all his life that the essence of a body is in its form, and that no man can be a great artist who does not build up his art on the foundation of good drawing. Oil as a medium blurred the outline, and therefore he preferred to work in water-colour. But engraving even better than water-colour, enabled him to apply his principle. It was simply incredible to him that any engraver could undervalue drawing. If engraving lost drawing, it lost all character and expression, and therefore his indignation was aroused with the Woolletts and Bartolozzis, who in this respect were mortal sinners. We can see that such a principle was a necessity for Blake with his peculiar mind, and was even a safeguard to its sanity; but we have a perfect right to observe that whatever obscures the outlines of things, as twilight, also removes the barriers that hinder our approach to the unseen, and therefore we may enunciate another principle, that one property of a body is its contribution to atmosphere, with its power to evoke our subjective selves. Holding this as a correlative to Blake’s axiom, we can do full justice not only to Michael Angelo, Albert Dürer, Raphael, and Blake, but also to Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt, whom Blake despised. Unfortunately, Blake held to his principle so rigidly that it was apt to lead him into false admirations. We have seen how unduly he admired Macpherson, and here we have to note further that whomsoever of his contemporaries drew the human figure correctly he immediately extolled to the skies, and always with oblique reference of disdain to others whom we have come to think were intrinsically better artists. Hence he admired Mortimer, whom we just remember as the illustrator of Fanny Burney’s Evelina, whose substantial immortality gives him vicarious and ghostly existence. He also admired Hamilton. In the violent alternations of his mood we have seen how submissive and meek he could be. In such a mood he allowed Mortimer and Hamilton to influence him to such a degree that he actually distrusted the genius in himself which could inspire Glad Day, and produced such lifeless imitations of Mortimer’s historical style as the Penance of Jane Shore (1778), King Edward and Queen Elinor (1780), and Earl Godwin (1780).

Blake’s deferences were not always thus unfortunate. He appreciated Hogarth for his intrinsic value at a time when respectable people patronized him for pictured moralities. We cannot imagine a greater contrast than Blake the frugal seer and Hogarth “the typical carnivorous Englishman.” Outline was their meeting-ground. Hogarth saw, we may say detected, in the scenes that marked the progresses of the Rake and the Harlot, a full pulsing life and an unexpected beauty. When he would express what he saw, with a mighty stretch he shook off all foreign influences and set about to express himself naturally and in his own way. His hand appropriated to its use the power of the line, more particularly the vitality of the curved line, with the amazing result that the moment we forget his “moralities,” we see in him an exuberant artist of the beautiful. Blake was wholly with him in all this. We rejoice for the seeing eye that Blake and Hogarth cast on the shady side of life, but our wonder and amazement pass into worship when we perceive that this was included in the vision of Him who was called in derision the Friend of Publicans and Sinners, but was contented to speak of Himself as the Son of Man.

Blake affirmed that Hogarth’s execution could not be copied or improved. He borrowed from his Satan, Sin and Death at Hell’s Gate, which is hardly one of Hogarth’s masterpieces, for a water-colour of the same subject, and he engraved, after Hogarth, When my Hero in Court Appears in the Beggar’s Opera (1790).

Blake produced two water-colours in 1784 which show that his thoughts on war were already undergoing a change. These are War unchained by an Angel—Fire, Pestilence and Famine following, and A Breach in a City—the Morning after a Battle.

Blake had been watching closely the course of affairs on the other side of the Atlantic. While men’s minds were becoming more and more inflamed with the thought of war, he was criticizing it with the searching rays of his spiritual vision and finding himself compelled to revise his ideas, which he had taken without question from Shakespeare, and had expressed in the Poetical Sketches. Then, in spite of seas of blood, he glorified war; now, as he began to consider the abominations that it lets loose on overburdened mankind—Fire, Pestilence and Famine—he included it in the abominations as a thing altogether useless and despicable. He felt a peculiar joy when peace was this year signed with the North American States.

During these years (1773-84) Blake accomplished an immense amount of engraving, chiefly after Stothard. These engravings must come as a surprise to those who only know his own sublime designs, that reveal might, power, terror, and immense energy, and not the softer things that we associate with grace. It is sufficient to mention those plates that Blake engraved after Stothard in Ritson’s English Songs to show that he, like Michael Angelo and Milton, could do not only the works that call for massive power, but also the graceful and lovely things that can be done by genius not quite so rare. But I must leave the consideration of Blake’s relation, personal and artistic, to Stothard to a later chapter, when I come to speak about the Canterbury Pilgrims.

Blake’s songs, poems, and designs came to birth side by side. Where the engravings were not after his own designs, but after other artists, he knew exactly what to do with them. But sooner or later, as his own productions of wedded poem and design grew under his hands, the anxious question of publication arose, and by this time it was perplexingly clear to him that his spiritual productions were not for every taste, and that it would be difficult to find anyone who would run the risk of being his publisher. His Poetical Sketches were printed, though not published, through the kindness of Mrs Mathew, but there was no likelihood that any of the Blue-stockings would be kind in a helpful way to him again.

While pondering this difficulty day and night, and increasingly urged by poverty, his brother Robert came to him and directed him what he was to do. He told him to write his poems and designs on copper with an ineffaceable liquid, and with aquafortis to eat away the remainder of the plate until the writing and designs were left in clear relief. Then he might take as many copies as he liked, and just touch them up by hand.

According to Gilchrist, Mr and Mrs Blake possessed just half-a-crown, with which Mrs Blake went out and bought the necessary materials, returning with eightpence change in her pocket. At once they set to work, the wife proving an apt pupil, and thus, with the exception of The French Revolution, Blake engraved and published his own creations, experiencing the rare joy of being at once both the creator and the handicraftsman of his works.

Robert visited William continually to the end of his life, bringing him consolation and encouragement during times of anxiety and stress.

These supernatural happenings in the life of Blake read as simply and naturally as the beautiful stories of St Francis converting brother Wolf or receiving the sacred stigmata. There was nothing of the modern spiritualist’s paraphernalia—no medium, no trance, no tappings. Blake was born with his inner spiritual eye open, his outer bodily eye, contrary to general custom, proving sluggish. Hence he was able to keep a natural simplicity amidst things which are too apt to stir only the thaumaturgic appetite of other people.

CHAPTER V

WESLEY, WHITEFIELD, LAVATER, AND SWEDENBORG

Blake’s manifold nature lacked, so far, a co-ordinating principle. From his earliest years religion had been a reality to him, and so had art, music, literature, but not one of these was so dominant over the rest as to make them subservient. Each lived its separate life and was likely to continue to do so, unless his religion could become forceful and definite enough to penetrate the others and bind them into a higher unity.

His religion had been fed by vision. His visions came to him so naturally that it never occurred to him that others might regard them as symptoms of abnormality or insanity. The thrashing that his father gave him when he told at home what he had seen at Peckham Rye was a memorable occasion, like conversion to some people, only it opened his outer eye and not his inner.

The visions made several things clear to his understanding. He early distinguished between inner and outer vision, supernatural and natural religion. Religion was never a matter of opinion, always of experience. Christ’s language was also his own, “We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen.” He felt the same mild surprise at hearing religion denied as he would at the denial of the sun by a blind man. But the reason of such blindness was also quite clear to him. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man sought no other evidence than that of his spiritual discernment. If the natural man were ever to arrive at spiritual vision, it must be by a new birth of the Spirit. Thus Blake knew from the beginning the inward meaning of Christ’s words to Nicodemus, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of Heaven.... That which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” Blake was never in danger at any time in his life of becoming enmeshed in natural religion. His escape was more instinctive if less effectual than that of his philosophical contemporary who sought to combat his difficulties by working out an elaborate analogy between natural and revealed religion.

The man who knows by experience what it is to be born again knows also how clamorous the new life within is for nourishment. Blake was driven to the mystics for food. We know by his repeated references in his long poems that St Theresa, Madame Guyon, Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme fed his supersensual life. But besides appealing to the past, he looked around to listen to what his contemporaries had to say to him. It is evident that he would listen only to those who were as clear as himself on the experience of the new birth.

It is not surprising that the high church divines of the eighteenth century had little to say for him. They were more eager to show to the leaders of the enthusiastic methodist party that regeneration took place in Holy Baptism than to make sure that they had exhausted its meaning in their experience. Their views might be extremely correct; but anything more dull and uninspiring than their sermons and collected works could hardly be found. Blake had no need to examine them particularly, for the best high churchman of the time was Dr Johnson, and he already had his eye on him.

Dr Johnson to the end was a particular kind of grand schoolmaster. He believed in the Christian revelation fervently, and he believed, also with fervour, in the rod, in Latin, in scholarship, and in the drastic repression of the young. He who declared that he would never disgrace the walls of the Abbey by writing for it an epitaph in English, could hardly have seen anything worth his notice in the ignorant Blake and his still more ignorant wife; and Blake in his turn, unnoticed and unknown, living a severely abstemious life, was too apt to ruminate on Johnson’s gluttony and pension, and to conclude that the latter was a reward for barren learning.

It is as well that Johnson and Blake never met. Neither could have worked through his prejudices. They lived in a different world, and moved from a different centre. Johnson viewed the wreckage of the Old World, and then with undaunted courage and indomitable will set himself to build out of the wreckage a covering for himself and his friends. Blake, conscious that dawn was stirring on the wreckage of the dark night, was straining his vision to catch the outline of the new emerging world. Johnson’s was a superb mind working within too narrow bounds. Blake’s was so far the promise of an unimagined type. We who look backward over the lapse of a hundred years can reverence both men, but it is Blake who is the more inspiring and fruitful.

One other high church divine, William Law, Blake should have read, but strangely makes no mention of. Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life and his Christian Perfection were more likely to appeal to Johnson than to Blake, but the later books, The Spirit of Prayer and The Spirit of Love, written after he had come under the influence of Boehme, while estranging him from Johnson and Wesley, might have brought him and Blake face to face. Both books are more beautiful than anything written by Wesley, Whitefield, or Swedenborg. Perhaps, as Blake already had read something of Boehme, he found that Law had nothing to add to his knowledge.

There is ample evidence that Blake turned his full attention on to Wesley, Whitefield, and Hervey, and watched them with sympathy. These men were proclaiming everywhere the need of being born again. No one met Blake so definitely on what he had always seen clearly, with large, childlike vision. When Samuel Foote, representative of a thousand others, carelessly threw the epithet “hypocrite” at Whitefield’s head, Blake was indignant, and accurately designated the actor as the hypocrite. With perfect justice he pointed out that if Whitefield confessed his sins before all the world, and never pretended to be free from the passions that burn in other men, he was certainly an honest and sincere man. To pounce on a Christian who inadvertently falls, and call him a hypocrite, is as usual now as in Blake’s day, but it comes with astonishing gracelessness from the lips of those who have spent their youthful passions in wanton waste, and, wearied and bored, are bidding for a respectable middle age.

Whitefield had pungent things to say to respectable moralists. He had no milder term than “filthy rags” for their dull moralities. If he sought to cover his nakedness with the garment of Christ’s righteousness, Blake, while using a different phrase, perfectly understood him and sympathized. But then came the divergence. Whitefield’s doctrine of the new birth was inextricably bound up with crude doctrines of Christ’s substitutionary death and imputed righteousness, and Blake, who had experienced the new birth quite apart from faith in these particular Calvinist dogmas, felt no need to cling to what his instinctive feeling rejected; and, what with him was final, he found that Whitefield not only left his æsthetic faculties starved, but actually believed that as the arts came from Tubal and Tubal-cain, and they were descended from Cain, who had been cursed, they must necessarily have their origin from hell.

Hervey carried Blake as far as Whitefield, and no farther. Some years later, when Blake had diverged widely from Whitefield and Hervey, he still remembered them with tenderness and affection; and placing them with Fénelon, Madame Guyon, St Theresa (an odd assortment!), saw them at Los’ South Gate, “with all the gentle souls who guide the great Wine-press of Love.”[2]

Blake found that he could keep company with Wesley for a longer time. Wesley had no rigid Calvinism, and he was not content unless imputed righteousness should pass by a second blessing into imparted holiness. Here also Blake’s language was wholly different from Wesley’s, but the thing he arrived at—the unification of all his powers under the inspiration and creative force of his imagination—led him along a path very like that trodden by Wesley and his methodists as they pressed towards the goal of entire sanctification. It is important to go behind words to things, but it is equally important to come back to a form of sound words. The methodists have been imprisoned by their wordy formulæ, while Blake by his vision of the things behind words not only preserved his freedom, but also, by freeing his imagination, was enabled to create beautiful rhythmic words which invoke instead of imprison.

[Larger Image]

JOHN GASPAR LAVATER.
Engraved by Blake.

Among his contemporaries Blake discovered a deeper kinship with Lavater than with any of these. Whitefield and Wesley had succeeded in reviving in themselves the first glow and enthusiasm of protestantism. Lavater is once removed from his zealous protestant forefathers, and the things that they had repressed were making their reappearance in him. Among these was the feeling for the beautiful, which, as he welcomed and nourished it, deepened his sympathies and enlarged his outlook. What he lost in fiery zeal he gained in geniality. He had a constant perception of the truth that outward things are an index to inner conditions and correspond with them. This prompted him to observe the faces of his fellow-creatures and to attempt a system of physiognomy. His instinctive reading of faces was often astonishingly correct; but his makeshift system has no value. More to the point are his aphorisms, which were read and annotated by Blake, and these are sufficient both to reveal Lavater and bring certain lasting convictions of Blake’s into a clear light. I will take a few of the more important.

Sin and destruction of order are the same.

Blake comments: “A golden sentence.” He had felt for many years that all repression was futile. What is repressed comes out again in the wrong place. The last state of the repressed man is worse than his first. Blake was not yet quite clear about what was the alternative to repression, but he was sure that sin was disorder. How he resolved the disorder we shall see later on.

As the interest of man, so his God. As his God, so he.

Blake: “All gold.”

He preferred the word “will” to “interest.” “Will” is identical with Swedenborg’s “affection” and Boehme’s “desire.” No one has worked out the correspondence of the “heart” with the “will” so effectually as Swedenborg. Blake knew that to discover the will was to discover the man. A man can change only as he changes the object of his will. When his will is towards God, his powers fall into order and he becomes a saint.

The greatest of characters no doubt would be he who, free of all trifling accidental helps, could see objects through one grand immutable medium always at hand and proof against illusion and time, reflecting every object in its true shape and colour, through all the fluctuation of things.

Blake: “This was Christ.”

He knew both as an artist and a mystic that the appearance of objects is according to the state of the beholder. This is true of the objects not only of the outer world but also of the inner, and therefore only the witness of a perfect man is trustworthy. The visions of all others must be corrected by the vision of the Christ.

Who has witnessed one free and unrestrained act of yours has witnessed all.

Underlined by Blake.

Strained action was an abhorrence to Blake. Only those acts are beautiful that are impulsive, and they are they that reveal the man.

Between the best and the worst there are, you say, innumerable degrees—and you are right. But admit that I am right too in saying that the best and the worst differ only in one thing—in the object of their love.

Blake: “Would to God that every one would consider this.”

It was considered and maintained by Swedenborg, Boehme, Fénelon, and constantly by St Catherine of Siena, who to the “God is Love” of St John added “Man is love also.”

Keep him at least three paces distant who hates bread, music, and the laugh of a child.

Blake: “The best in the book.”

He who adores an impersonal God has none, and without guide or rudder launches on an immense abyss that first absorbs his powers and next himself.

Blake: “Most superlatively beautiful, and most affectionately holy and pure. Would to God that all men would consider it.”

His faith in a personal God was his lifelong inspiration in religion and art. This must guard him against the charge of pantheism made against him by the Swedenborgian Garth Wilkinson and our fleshly poet Swinburne. Yet he never thought out his position clear of pantheism. Swedenborg worshipped a personal God and regarded man and nature as emanations from God removed by varying degrees. But no matter how many degrees, continuous or discrete, one removes ultimates from God, yet if they are essentially emanations from Him, they must be of the same substance, and this is pantheism. Catholic theology has grappled far more effectually with this ancient difficulty than either Swedenborg or Blake.

All abstraction is temporary folly.

Blake: “I once thought otherwise, but now I know it is truth.” Let those who confound mysticism with abstraction note this.

Blake perceived in Lavater the innocence of a child, and loved him accordingly; but he had already surpassed him, and thus was able to criticize him with true discernment. He said that Lavater made “everything originate in its accident.” But a man’s sins are accidents and not a part of his real nature. They are a denial of his real man, and therefore are negative. Hence he says: “Vice is a great negation. Every man’s leading propensity ought to be called his leading Virtue and his good Angel.” This last sentence contains Nietzsche. Every positive act is virtue. Murder, theft, backbiting, undermining, circumventing, are vicious because they are not positive acts, but prevent them in the perpetrator and the victim. He put his finger on Lavater’s other mistake, which was also shared by his contemporaries. “They suppose that Woman’s Love is Sin. In consequence, all the loves and graces, with them, are sins.” Blake not only here outstrips his contemporaries, but at a leap reaches what are the conclusions of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth, men and women racked their brains over the irreconcilable dualism of art and religion, and they chose one or the other, with baneful results. Blake reconciled the two when he saw that the new man in us, unveiled by regeneration, worked by direct vision (religion), and that the new man’s prime quality was imagination (art). Once he grasped this, the problem ceased for him.

Here we get at the reason why Lavater has ever failed to keep his lovers. Moses Mendelssohn, disciplined in the severe scholastic methods of Maimonides, easily vanquished him in religious controversy; but men who were less directly concerned with his religion, like Goethe, began by exaggerating his qualities and ended by quietly dropping him. It is clear to us that Lavater could keep our allegiance only if he had taken a big step forward in the same direction as Blake. This was impossible, and so we find ourselves obliged to follow Goethe’s example.

Swedenborg’s influence was the greatest and most lasting on Blake’s mind.

It is not clear when Blake first took to reading Swedenborg. There is no trace of his influence until The Songs of Innocence and Experience. Some of Swedenborg’s early scientific works had been translated into English. But of his theological works only one volume out of twelve of the Arcana Celestia was published in English; and, for the rest, those who could not read Latin had to be content with samples. Since Swedenborg bulked so largely in Blake’s life, it is necessary to give here some details of his mental and spiritual development.

Swedenborg’s father was a Lutheran Bishop. Thus the son, in his most impressionable years, was thrown among Lutherans, who maintained a strenuous protest against the errors of the papacy, and fed or starved their souls with dreary doctrines of justification by faith only, imputed righteousness, and other forensic privileges that came to them through the substitutionary death and merits of Christ. In all these dogmas the young Swedenborg was well drilled. But his first bent was in quite another direction. While still a boy he manifested a scientific mind of immense energy and curiosity that peered searchingly into all the sciences of his time, and won for himself a wonderful knowledge of anatomy, astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, mineralogy, and led him to make interesting experiments in invention, such as water-clocks and flying machines. He wrote many books on these subjects, the best known of which in England is The Animal Kingdom. Here his interest is greatly stirred by things physical and psychological, and he is fired with the ambition to unite the two. Not, however, till he was fifty-four did his first interest pass over to the things of the soul. When this transition took place, he peered with the same intense scrutiny into supersensual things, and brought to bear on them a mind formed and informed by science and scientific methods.

He took up the Lutheran tenets precisely where he had left them, but, no longer a child, he was forced to criticize what he had once felt, and he set himself to rationalize Lutheran theology and such elements of catholic theology as had survived through Luther. In this he was not always so successful as he imagined. His doctrine of the Trinity, that Jesus Christ is the One God and that the Trinity is in Him, gets over an arithmetical difficulty, but finally leaves the imagination baffled, trying to make out how Jesus carried on the government of the universe while He lay a helpless infant in the manger or His mother’s arms. His reaction against all outside views of Christ’s death, imputed righteousness, and faith only, was more successful, but not new, since in this the quakers in England and Jacob Boehme were before him. Nor was his contention that love was the supreme good new to those who had read through the New Testament. His doctrine of uses was merely a theological variation of that utilitarianism which is inseparable from rationalism, and which casts over everything a drab veil that only the artist can remove. He is really at his best when he expatiates on love and wisdom. Love corresponds with the heart, wisdom with the lungs. As the heart sends the blood to the lungs, where it is purified by the oxygen, so love feeds the understanding, and is in turn purified by it. Swedenborg’s perception of wisdom begotten of love inspired his best passages and gave them their authentic import.

Swedenborg gazed inwards so intently that after an initial period of unrest, terrors, and nightmares his inner eye opened, and he saw into the realities of the inner world. For the moment I take his word for it, and will question later on. His open eye saw into heaven and hell, gazed into the faces of angels and of God, and his opened ear heard the angels speaking things he could understand and utter. At once he rationalized. He stripped even the celestial angels of all mystery as well as of garments, and traced them back to an earthly pedigree. Angels are men, and when they talk they are no more interesting than the elders of a Lutheran congregation. God also is a man—not, be it observed, the Man of a crude anthropomorphism, but infinite, omnipotent Man, from Whom each man, created in His image (will) and likeness (understanding), draws his real manhood. He carried this doctrine into his rationalized version of the Incarnation. Christ assumed human nature in the womb of the Virgin, and by His conquering life put it off, replacing it by the Divine Humanity. The last phrase has accomplished yeasty work in modern religious thought. How many are aware of its origin?

Swedenborg throws out many suggestive remarks about hell. Certainly it was high time that it was looked into, for the protestant hell was as horrible and revolting as the catholic. He began by lifting himself out of space and time. He was soon brought by necessity to perceive that when these no longer exist, then all appearances depend upon a man’s state, and therefore state governs the perceptions whether of the angels in heaven or the devils in hell. Hell, like heaven, is peopled entirely from earth. No one goes there but by his own choice, and he chooses because he finds there exactly what is congenial to his own condition. Swedenborg eliminated anything arbitrary in man’s destiny. Fitness decides by an inexorable law that God could evade only by ceasing to be God. Swedenborg’s hell is a filthy and insanitary place, but the filthy inhabitants are no more disturbed by that than rats in a sewer. He further declared that heaven and hell were born together, and that they are contraries necessary to each other’s existence. Blake underlined and commented on this in his copy of the Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love. How the suggestion worked in him we shall see later on.

Swedenborg’s hell is filthy and his heaven dull. There are further surprises when we through his mediumship glimpse their inhabitants. The angels, of course, are all sound Swedenborgians, and are attractive or repellent according to Swedenborg’s attraction or repulsion for us. But the devils, not being Swedenborgians, can command an audience of the majority of Christians who agree with them in their non-allegiance. What Blake discovered in them was a wonderful energy and exuberance which made them not only more attractive than the angels, but also, except for the stenches, might almost have transformed their hell into heaven.

By this time Swedenborg had explored many kingdoms—mineral, vegetable, animal, human, divine, hellish; and his knowledge of the kingdoms informed him of universal correspondences, the law of which came to him thus freshly from his own observation. It was probably this which made him assert so often that he was announcing something new, for with his culture he must have known that Paracelsus had perceived the same law like hundreds before him, and that Boehme wrote a treatise on the Signatures of all things.

Perhaps Swedenborg’s most fruitful apprehension was that of the Divine Influx. All creatures live as they receive out of the Divine fullness. They have no inherent or self-existent life of their own. The Lord alone is self-existent, and they live by a derived life. This happens to be catholic theology too, and it kept Swedenborg away from a misty pantheism. Men and angels live, move, and have their being in God. They are immersed in an ocean of life and light which pours forth from the Lord of the Universe. The moment they feel their need and are humble enough to turn to the Lord they become receptive. Filled with the spirit of life and light, they love and understand, and remain full so long as they humbly abide in Him. Perhaps no modern has grasped this truth so completely as Swedenborg. It almost made him a mystic. Almost, yet not quite, for his fundamental desire was to bring all the mysteries of the faith down to the level of man’s understanding. He eschewed a faith that rested on what could not be understood. He did not see that in tearing away veil after veil he turned heaven along with earth into a laboratory. The true mystic loves to know that all things, including his faith, run up into mystery; and if an angel succeeded in laying bare the last mystery, the mystic would find himself in hell.

Swedenborg attempted to bring reason and order into things spiritual, and he believed that he had succeeded; but what really happened was that he confounded the workings of his own subliminal mind with the action of the Lord’s, and in 1775, when he had effected reason and order in the intermediate world of spirits to his own satisfaction, he declared that the last judgment had taken place, that the New Jerusalem had descended down out of Heaven, and that he was the divinely appointed prophet of the New Church.

He was not long publishing the doctrine of the New Church concerning the Sacred Scriptures. He knew as well as any modern critic what are the difficulties in the way of accepting the doctrine of verbal inspiration, yet he affirmed it. There is a further difficulty that we feel more acutely than he in the protestant dogma “the Bible and the Bible only.” If we are cut off from memory or tradition, and are obliged to form our image of the historical Jesus from the Bible only, it is next to impossible to make that image shine forth with clear, sharp outlines. The difficulty is still further increased when protestantism, pushed to its logical extreme, eliminates the supernatural element, and tries to piece together the character of Jesus from the fragments that remain.

The Bible imperiously demands a theory that shall make its heterogeneous contents cohere. The four evangelists presuppose a knowledge of Jesus that they aim at making more perfect. These are difficulties that protestantism was destined to feel acutely from the day it proudly rejected tradition. No doubt, if Providence had so intended, the portrait of Jesus would have been drawn so completely that without the aid of memory we could have gained a knowledge of Him such as we have of no other man that ever lived. But the fact remains that Jesus wrote no book and no letters, and He founded nothing but a handful of illiterate disciples to preach His gospel and perpetuate His memory. These were so confident that Israel would repent and believe the Gospel, and so make possible the immediate return of their Lord, that they never thought of taking to their pens; and it was only when they grew alarmed at the increasing thinness of the apostolic ranks that they committed their memories to wise scribes or to parchment. Thus we owe the Gospel accounts not to the express commands of Jesus, but to the first bitter disappointment of the apostolic band.

The simple truth, of course, is that the New Testament Scriptures cannot be understood apart from the Catholic Faith that gave them birth, and therefore when the faith is not confessed a theory must be found to take its place.

The history of higher criticism is the history of a succession of theories. Dr Paulus, forgotten father of German critics, supplied a rational one, for which he was obliged to make a super-historical use of the Essenes. It has reappeared in George Moore’s Brook Kerith.

Renan, pantheist, artist and sceptic, tried to supply a subjective artistic explanation which soothed the subject, but turned the Object into a Frenchman. Strauss, Keim and Bousset, learned and painstaking, with hardly less success made Him into a dreamy cosmopolitan German of a now obsolete type. Schweitzer, better informed of the apocalyptic and eschatological medium through which the mind of Jesus worked, comes nearer to the apostolic mind that drew the picture of Jesus, yet, for want of the key, portrays Jesus as the tragic victim of the illusory time-spirit.

Swedenborg never gave any serious consideration to the catholic theory, but supplied its place out of the store of his supersensual revelations. Loaded with these, and with a vague memory of the gnostic teaching of the threefold meaning of the Scriptures, he was able to evade every literal difficulty by turning to the spiritual meaning, and if need be to the celestial, which could be reached only through his own specific revelation. It is true that he tried to bring a steadying factor into his subjective interpretation by introducing his doctrine of correspondences; but as he has never been able to convince any but his elect followers that his correspondences, beyond some obvious ones, are other than arbitrary, he has succeeded only in making his commentaries on Genesis, Exodus, and the Apocalypse unreadable to the vast majority of Christians.

I have said enough about Swedenborg to make it clear that there was some affinity between him and Blake.

Blake’s imperfect knowledge of him was much deepened in 1788, when he read his Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and concerning the Divine Wisdom. This he marked and annotated, and so we are able to trace the affinity in considerable detail.

On the whole Blake gives almost passionate approval to The Angelic Wisdom. Only in rare instances does he differ. Swedenborg’s doctrine of state made explicit what Blake had vaguely perceived all his life. It also helped him to formulate a theoretic explanation of his own supersensual vision. This is so important that I must quote an entire paragraph from The Angelic Wisdom, for the sake of Blake’s comment and the reader’s understanding.

69. The Divine fills All the Spaces of the Universe Apart from Space. There are two things proper to nature, Space and Time. Out of these man in the natural world forms the ideas of his thought and therefore his understanding. If he remains in these ideas and does not raise his mind above them he is nowise able to perceive anything spiritual and Divine, for he involves them in ideas which derive from space and time; and in proportion as he does this, the light—the lumen—of his understanding becomes merely natural. To think from the lumen in reasoning about spiritual and Divine things, is like thinking from the thick darkness of night concerning the things which appear only in the light of day. This is the origin of naturalism. But he who knows how to raise his mind above the ideas of thought which derive from space and time, passes from thick darkness into light, and apprehends spiritual and Divine things, and, at last, sees those things which are in them and from them, and then by virtue of that light he disperses the thick darkness of the natural lumen, and relegates its fallacies from the middle to the sides. Every man with an understanding is able to think, and actually does think, above those properties of nature; and then he affirms and sees that the Divine, being omnipresent, is not in space. He is also able to affirm and to see those things which have been adduced above. But if he denies the Divine Omnipresence and ascribes all things to nature, then he is not willing to be elevated, although he is able.

In the above Blake changed the word middle into centre, and sides into circumference, commenting: “When the fallacies of darkness are in the circumference they cast a bound about the infinite.” In paragraph 70, Swedenborg adds what is a corollary to the above: Angels do not comprehend when we say that the divine fills spaces, for they do not know what spaces are, but they understand when we say that the divine fills all things. On this Blake makes the comment “Excellent.”

Since the inhabitants of heaven have no idea of space and time, their perceptions and modes of thought are entirely governed by their state. This is true also of the visionary, and it decides what he reports of the other world. Everyone will easily perceive from this of what paramount importance his state is in assigning the right value to his visions. As Swedenborg says: “Spaces and times in spiritual life have relation to states of love and are mutable with these.”

Blake fully approved of Swedenborg’s doctrine that the heart and lungs correspond to the will and understanding. Those who would understand Blake must remember this while reading the prophetic books.

But there are signs of disagreements that deepened with time.

Swedenborg wrote (237): Man at birth comes first into the natural degree, and this increases in him by continuity, according to his various knowledge ... until he reaches the highest point of the understanding which is called the rational. But still the second degree, which is the spiritual, is not opened by this means. This is opened by love towards the neighbour ... the third degree by love towards the Lord.

With all Blake’s devout admiration for Swedenborg this was too much for him. A child born solely into the natural degree! That! after all Blake knew, and all Christ had said about little children! Heaven save us all, especially Swedenborg! Blake’s comment is important. Note that even when he is differing from his teacher, his language is Swedenborgian. He says:

“Study science till you are blind. Study intellectuals until you are cold. Yet science cannot teach intellect. Much less can intellect teach affection. How foolish it is then to assert that man is born in only one degree, when that one degree is receptive of the three degrees: two of which he must destroy or close up or they will descend. If he closes up the two superior, then he is not truly in the third but descends out of it into mere Nature or Hell. Is it not also evident that one degree will not open the other, and that science will not open intellect, but that they are discrete and not continuous so as to explain each other, except by correspondence, which has nothing to do with demonstration, for you cannot demonstrate one degree by the other, for how can science be brought to demonstrate intellect without making them continuous and not discrete?”

There are three comments in which Blake introduces an element lacking in the voluminous writings of Swedenborg. On Swedenborg’s statement: “A spiritual idea does not derive anything from space, but it derives its all from state,” he remarks: “Poetic idea”; on paragraph 10, Blake comments: “He who loves feels love descend into him, and if he is wise, may perceive it from the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord”; on Swedenborg’s phrase: “The negation of God constitutes hell,” he remarks: “The negation of the Poetic Genius.”

Here we get a hint of a small seed of difference which when fully grown was to sever Blake from Swedenborg for ever.

I must give one more, very pregnant, passage from The Angelic Wisdom.

68. Man out of his hereditary evil reacts against God. But if he believes that all his life is from God, and all good of life from the action of God, and all evil of life from the reaction of man, then reaction becomes the offspring of action, and man acts with God as from himself. The equilibrium of all things is from action and joint reaction, and everything must be in equilibrium.

The last sentence makes hell an eternal necessity to preserve the equilibrium of heaven. Strictly it makes also the devil an eternal counterweight to God, and what else follows we may learn by studying Zoroastrian dualism. Blake’s comment was:

“God and evil are here both good, and the two contraries married.”

Blake was early occupied with the marriage of contraries. Swedenborg’s word was a sanguine seed in prepared soil, and when it brought forth fruit a hundredfold, the rich return was not the logical outcome of Swedenborg’s dualism, but a marriage of heaven and hell, of religion and art, which is showing a fertile capacity for endless reproduction.

So far, then, Swedenborg’s attraction for Blake far exceeded his repulsion, and he embraced him with impetuous affection. Here was a teacher who could understand by experience both the new birth and vision. By his help he disentangled himself from the particular explanation and theory of the atonement as given by Whitefield and Wesley. Here was a visionary who could not only understand his own visions, but who could give a reasonable explanation of the working of the visionary faculty. Swedenborg brought order, reason, and system into Blake’s chaotic mind. Isolated from the churches, yet ardently desiring fellowship as the substance of his faith and wisdom, it appeared to him that there was nothing else to do but join the New Church of Swedenborg, and accordingly, in 1788, he and Catherine signed their names in token of membership and assent to the distinctive doctrines of the New Church. The curious may find this reported in the Minutes of the first Seven Sessions of the General Conference of the New Church, published by James Speirs, 36 Bloomsbury Street, 1885.

Let us turn to Blake’s two poems, Tiriel, 1788, and Thel, 1789, which have special interest as they were written about this time that he subscribed to the Swedenborgian Church and Swedenborg’s influence was paramount.

Tiriel—old, bald, and blind—is related to Urizen, but Urizen in Blake’s completed mythology is the symbol not only of the law with its prohibitive commandments, but of the reason formed by the five senses, and therefore ever ready to stamp out imagination and inspiration, which derive their source from beyond the senses. Tiriel is the product of the law, and is the antithesis of love. Swedenborg’s natural man was justified and saved by love, Luther’s faith not being sufficient, and so in Blake’s Tiriel there is besides St Paul’s law the Lutheran’s pharisaism, and just a suggestion of that contempt for the beautiful which was to make Urizen such a terrible figure, and was eventually to lead to Blake’s estrangement from Swedenborg.

Tiriel at the hour of his death realized why his paradise was fallen, and he had found nought but the drear sandy plain. His description of his own upbringing, shocking as it is, is that of the great bulk of mankind. The instant a child is born, the dull, blind father stands ready to form the infant head; and if the child, like Blake, has vision, the father, like Mr Blake, uses the whip to rouse the sluggish senses to act and to scourge off all youthful fancies.

“Then walks the weak infant in sorrow, compelled to number footsteps
Upon the sand. And when the drone has reached his crawling length,
Black berries appear that poison all round him. Such was Tiriel
Compelled to pray repugnant, and to humble the immortal spirit;
Till I am subtle as a serpent in a paradise,
Consuming all, both flowers and fruits, insects and warbling birds.”

Blake was thinking of his father and his own early whippings. But really fathers are not absolutely necessary, for the mother, the nurse, the elder sister, and the public school, can do the job a great deal more effectually. The other poem, The Book of Thel, 1789, is Swedenborgian throughout. Thel, youngest daughter of the Seraphim, bewails the transitoriness of life and all beautiful things, herself included. Then the humble Lily of the Valley, a little Cloud, a Worm, and a Clod of Clay, all in their respective ways preach to her that “Everything that lives, lives not alone nor for itself.” When she has reached the utter selflessness of a Clod of Clay, then only will she be able to behold steadfastly the seeming transitoriness of youth and beautiful things; seeming, for like the lowly lily they melt to flourish in eternal vales.

Here Blake endorses the Swedenborgian selflessness, and extols the Swedenborgian lowliness, modesty, and humility. Swedenborg believed in no doctrine of self-realization. To him the self was always an evil till lost in the Lord. It was the remains in him of German mysticism. Blake slowly and surely came to set a high value on the true self. But unlike the more modern preacher of self-realization, he believed that a man found his real self only after he had given himself passionately to Jesus the eternal life and the eternal imagination. Then he was no longer to value the humility and modesty attached to selflessness. Their place was to be taken by a new kind of humility and a new kind of modesty of such flaming quality, that he wished to drop the old names and find others that more nearly described their sovereign reality.

Thel is finally invited by the matron Clay to enter her house, with the assurance that she may return. Immediately the terrific Porter of the Eternal Gates lifted the northern bar.

This is a well-known gate, among Swedenborgians, into the unseen world. But it is very terrible. According to Garth Wilkinson it was the only gate that Blake knew, and he accounts by this means for Blake’s apotheosis of the self and the passions. At this time Blake saw through this gate what Swedenborg saw; but later, when he had shaken him off and changed his state, his vision changed accordingly, and the objects were stripped of their horror. He was also to know all the four gates leading into the unseen.

Thel, entering, “wandered in the land of clouds through valleys dark, list’ning dolours and lamentations” till she came even to her own grave-plot. Through such a gate it matters not whether one views this world or the other. Both must appear sad and joyless in the extreme, and enmesh the beholder in blackest pessimism. Thel, hearing a voice wailing like the ecclesiastic dirge of the disillusioned King, shrieked with terror, and fled back unhindered into the vales of Har.

Thel is sweet, even heavenly in the Swedenborgian sense. But its sweetness cloys. Christ, like the Law before Him, made a sparing use of honey, preferring the more indispensable salt, which He enjoined His disciples to have in themselves at all times. Blake was to recover plentiful salt, but not until he had drawn Swedenborg’s line between heaven and hell in a wholly different place.

Swedenborg’s influence is pleasantly found at work in the Songs of Innocence. Innocence was a favourite word, and Swedenborg saw the celestial angels both innocent and naked. There is nothing more innocent than a lamb, and therefore Blake by a sure instinct and in childlike joy piped his song about the lamb, satisfying at once his feeling for the lamb, the child, and the Maker of the lamb who was called the Lamb of God.

The song called The Divine Image shows Swedenborg’s influence at its best. So many men with Blake’s mystic proclivities rush into vague abstractions. To-day we hear of Infinite Love and Infinite Wisdom, Infinite Life, and all personality denied to God. Yet these are mere high-sounding abstractions, and are quite meaningless apart from concrete personality. Swedenborg was clear as day here, and it was he who taught Blake the pure wisdom contained in his verses:

“For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our Father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is man, His child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.”

Swedenborg’s teaching continues in The Songs of Experience, but with a question mark.

Blake sings to the Fly:

“Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?”

To see humanity in a fly is Swedenborgian; and Blake answered his question in the affirmative.

In the next song there are many questions; and it cannot be doubted that Blake’s answers would have been the exact contrary to Swedenborg’s.

Swedenborg, like his theosophical predecessors, had a way of denying that God created the particular animals that man finds inconvenient. Tigers, wolves, rats, bats, and moths are so obnoxious, that it soothes man’s vanity to suppose that they are embodiments of evil exhaled from hell. They have served as restful homes for vampires and other creations of Old Night. And so Swedenborg, governed by mental habits of reason and use as measured by man, drew a sharp line between animals of a heavenly and hellish origin. When Blake saw the tiger he saw differently. His æsthetic eye instantly marvelled at its “fearful symmetry,” the fire of its eyes, the sinews of its heart; and he cried, “Did He who made the Lamb make thee?” He gives no answer. But there was no need. “In what distant deeps or skies” the tiger had his origin had no further perplexity for him once he had married hell to heaven.

The Little Vagabond, though hardly within the ken of Swedenborg, contains what every vagabond knows. Blake was able to rescue vagabonds as well as tigers from an exclusively hellish origin.

Blake remained an orthodox Swedenborgian for nearly two years, and then came reaction and rebellion, not without resentment and bitterness. What was the cause of Blake’s permanent repudiation of Swedenborg? Various reasons are given by Swedenborgians to prove that Blake was wholly in the wrong. Mr Morris gives a beautifully simple explanation. Quoting Blake’s saying that he had two different states, one in which he liked Swedenborg’s writings and one in which he disliked them, he says, “The latter was a state of pride in himself, and then they were distasteful to him, but afterwards he knew that he had not been wise and sane.” That is the way that we all at some time in our life account for the obstinacy of those who will not worship at our altar.

Mr Garth Wilkinson, who of Swedenborgians most deserves to be heard, wrote in the preface of his edition of The Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1839, that Blake entered the “invisible world through the terrific porter of its northern gate.” Like Shelley, he verged towards pantheism, not a spiritual pantheism, but a “natural spiritualism” or “ego-theism.” His genius “entered into and inhabited the Egyptian and Asiatic perversions of an ancient and true religion,” and thus “found a home in the ruins of Ancient and consummated Churches.” Wilkinson discovered a great deal of the ego and of hell in Blake. All of this criticism, which is ingenious, I cannot accept. To begin with the ego. Swedenborg believed that every man in his own proprium was consumed with self-love, and that only love to the Lord could enable him entirely to overcome his love of self. Blake believed that the real self was made in the image of God, and therefore it must be loved, reverenced, and obeyed. The recognition of the same divine principle in others enables one to love one’s neighbour as oneself. All German mystical talk of hatred to self and death to self was repudiated by Blake as artificial and unreal.

It is true that Blake came nearer to pantheism than Swedenborg did. He had come, through his teacher, to regard the universe as an emanation from God, and in working from this doctrine to its logical outcome in pantheism he was more consistent than Swedenborg, who tried to evade the consequences of his own theory.

That Blake found a home in an ancient and consummated Church is true only if Swedenborg’s New Church is really the New Jerusalem predicted by St John! For the rest, we hail with joy the element of “hell” in Blake.

Blake himself makes some short incisive remarks on Swedenborg, which will carry us a little farther to an understanding. “Swedenborg has not written one new truth.” “He has written all the old falsehoods.” Blake had ardently welcomed Swedenborg as a new teacher with a new message. In these sentences he betrays disappointment, anger, and resentment. “Any man of mechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s, and from those of Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number.” If Blake had had a wider culture, he would have known this when a boy, and blown off his fumes at the proper season. We shall encounter again and again his lack of grace when dealing with his successful contemporaries.

We see, so far, that Blake reckoned that Swedenborg had failed him, and that anything of value he found in him, he could find in the old masters. But there was something he could find in them—a spirit of beauty and a beauty of form—that was wholly lacking in Swedenborg, and an energy and exuberance that appeared only in Swedenborg’s hell. That this should be the net result of Blake’s expectations and Swedenborg’s pretensions was too much for Blake’s patience; hence the violence of his reaction.

Blake must have felt vaguely all along the lack of the æsthetic faculty in Swedenborg. It was Swedenborg who helped him finally to understand the exact value of his visions and thus to place him.

We have seen that Swedenborg, by abstraction from space and time, arrived at a doctrine of state which takes their place in heaven and hell. From this it follows that man’s vision is wholly dependent on his state, and also that a man’s visions cannot be trusted unless he has a perfect organ of vision resting on a sound state. It is always fatuous for a religious teacher to appeal to his visions to enforce his doctrines, since they depend on the man himself, and we must form our judgment of him apart from his visions. To appeal to a vision for the truth of a doctrine, and to the doctrine for the truth of a vision, is merely to whirl oneself round in a vicious circle; and therefore Swedenborg’s whole make-up—will and understanding—must be laid bare and measured by some standard with which we may try the spirits and the prophets before we can begin to approach his visions and gauge their value.

Swedenborg’s state was a state of reason, whether he viewed this world or the other. His early scientific studies, unbalanced by any real appreciation of art, moulded his mind into a rigid state which was impervious to any outside stimulus. When he turned to religion, he made the barren attempt to trim the mysteries of the Faith until they came wholly within the grasp of the understanding. This is a rationalizing process. Swedenborgians may object to hear their master called a rationalist. It is true that that term is usually applied to those who have no supersensual vision, and even deny its existence. Swedenborg is, of course, sharply distinguished from all such, but he has with them the same fundamental trust of reason, which in their case is used to gauge the things of this world, in his the things of the other. Hence when he has raised our expectations to a dizzy height, as he is about to report on things seen and heard in heaven and hell, there is a ludicrous anticlimax when we find that the angels are simply religious and talk theology everlastingly, that heaven is like a well arranged Dutch tulip field, and excepting one or two phases of hell the whole is just as exciting as a problem in Euclid and as dull as a sanitary report. Hell alone stirred some interest because its inmates had energy and blood. And therefore one sympathizes with those spirits who, allowed to peep into heaven, immediately chose to plunge themselves head-first into hell.

Now Blake, being a visionary, knew that vision depended on will, and he learnt further from Swedenborg that it depended also on state, and so, as a man’s state changed, his vision changed also. Blake’s state was the imagination of the poetic genius (Los), Swedenborg’s the dry logical faculty of the unassisted reason (Urizen), and as Blake looked at Swedenborg’s heaven and hell, he saw them approaching one to the other and finally with an impetuous rush locked in a marital embrace.

This is the most significant vision of modern times, after which it is easy to judge Swedenborg. He had given for life, theology; for beauty, ashes; and instead of emancipating the modern world he condemned it to the appalling tedium of an everlasting Sunday School. The doctrine of the New Jerusalem was not half so beautiful as that of the Old Jerusalem. Christ come again in Glory was stripped of that beauty that men had perceived in His first lowly coming. Blake’s indictment of Swedenborg was severe. It was also an indictment of the whole of protestant theology. The magnificent fruit of Swedenborg’s action and reaction, attraction and repulsion for Blake was The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake was fresh from reading Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, and this and not the ecclesiastical was continually in his thought as he wrote. At the same time it is necessary to remember that Blake was not merely criticizing Swedenborg. Swedenborg gave a rationalized version of the Lutheran doctrine, and therefore to reject him involved a rejection of much of Luther’s teaching and of the protestantism that has flowed from him.

Heaven, then, consists of the passive obeyers of reason, the religious, the good; hell of the active obeyers of Energy, the irreligious, the evil. Here let it be well marked and remembered that by the religious Blake always meant those who repress their energies or passions until they become passive enough for them to obey reason.

Hell’s prime quality is passion or energy or desire. This in itself is neither good nor evil in the abstract sense in which these words are generally understood, but considered absolutely it is good, for it is the native energy of the man made in God’s image and likeness. Energy works according to the object of desire. If a man’s object is the flesh, he becomes an adulterer; if things of beauty and delight, an artist; if God, a saint. Religious people, frightened and mistrustful of their desires, restrain them until they are passive, and in doing so they are destroying the motive power of their lives. They are wholly successful when they become dead souls, and it is then, strictly speaking, that they are fit, not for heaven, but for hell. The stronger the desire, the greater the man. Once direct the energy by fixing its desire on God, it will drive the man to greatness. Thus the typical restrainer or devil is the priest, the typical man of passion or energy is the artist. Those who restrain their energies in the name of Christ have identified Him with the reason, and they have never caught so much as a glimpse of Him as He is. Swedenborg and Milton worshipped a rational Christ, and therefore in Blake’s eyes, as also in the catholic’s, they were heretics. The Book of Job and Shakespeare see inspiration and imagination working with energy as the highest good. The restrainer in the Book of Job is called Satan. Blake alone in his time saw Christ as the supreme symbol of the passionate-imaginative life.

Those who have followed Blake thus far will at once understand the Proverbs of Hell, and perceive in them the glorification of energy and all things belonging to it. Excess, pride, lust and wrath are evidences of great energy. Therefore “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” “the pride of the peacock is the glory of God,” “the lust of the goat is the bounty of God” “the wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.” Generosity, prodigality, open-handedness, impulse, show a rich full nature. Prudence, number, measure, weight, betray poverty and are fit “in a year of death.” The animals of abounding energy are the noblest, like the lion, tiger, eagle. The animals lacking great energy take refuge in cunning, like the fox and the crow. (Blake no longer questions who made the tiger.) Blake extols fountains, not cisterns or standing water, courage not cunning, exuberance not reason-broken passion. Even an energetic “damn” braces, while a pious blessing induces a flabby relaxation.

Man’s most valuable gift of God is passion. What a man makes of his life will depend on how he regards his passion, and into what channels he directs its course.

Thus Blake unites contraries. But just as all is going merry as a marriage bell, he suddenly declares that there are some contraries that can never be married. The modern immanentist world is trying to unite good and evil, beauty and ugliness, with baneful results. We are told that there is nothing ugly to the discerning eye, and one wonders why one should take pains to improve ones crude daubs. Blake says that religious people are always trying to make these false matches. He gives as a typical example the prolific and devourer—the active and passive. Each is necessary to the other’s existence. Union destroys both. It is easy to multiply examples. Black and white produce grey, beautiful in art, but depressing in life. Dark and light, twilight, beautiful, but sad and lowering. Cold and heat, lukewarmness, which is hateful. Hard and soft, slush, which abounds in modern thought. Hate and love, unctuousness or slime, which is particularly obnoxious in some religious people.

Blake hated these mashes. He had no faith in the love that could not hate. Just as he seemed on the brink of sweeping away hell like an amiable modern, he discovered that though he had made quick work of the Swedenborgian and protestant hell, yet hell as Christ thought of it remained and must remain. “Note.—Jesus Christ did not wish to unite, but to separate them, as in the Parable of sheep and goats. And He says, ‘I come not to send Peace, but a Sword.’” Thus Blake kept his perception clear and sharp. In following his own mental energy he was able to shake off all pantheistic distortions of good and evil, and to see that though with the majority these are mere abstractions, yet there is ultimately an eternal distinction between them, and therefore heaven and earth may pass away, but Jesus Christ’s word concerning heaven and hell will abide for ever.

Christians have thought of heaven and hell too much as of future places. Blake thought of them primarily as present states. Here a man’s state is obscured by its intermingling with conditions of space and time. Hereafter the state creates the environment. The man in a state of hell, and therefore in hell, is the one whose energy or vital fire is dead. The man in a state of Heaven is the one who lives the more abundant life in which his religion, art, and philosophy have become one. The real hell and the real heaven can never be married, for any attempt to marry them results in moral loss. But a man can pass from a state of hell into a state of heaven, and the way to do it is the old way of repentance and faith—repentance which changes heart and mind by giving them a new object, and faith that takes and receives the glad tidings of the Kingdom of God.

Blake gave a curious illustration of his doctrine of state. A Swedenborgian angel came to him, and condoled with him because of the hot, burning dungeon that he was preparing for himself to all eternity. The angel at his request undertook to show him his place in hell. Truly it was horrible, and Blake describes the ideal Swedenborgian hell with a power and vividness to which Swedenborg could never attain. The angel, not enjoying the sight, decamped; but no sooner was Blake alone than the horrible vision vanished, and he found himself “on a pleasant bank beside a river, by moonlight, hearing a harper, who sung to the harp.” The angel had drawn him into his state, and he saw what the angel saw. When he regained his real state, the vision was pleasant enough. Afterwards he rejoined the angel and undertook to show him his lot. An angel is necessarily above the modes of space and time. This one being religious, and therefore repressed to passivity, was shown a timeless, spaceless void, which was an eternal nightmare more unutterably fearful than anything in Swedenborg’s filthy sewer.

Finally Blake overheard a marvellously rich and splendid bit of conversation between a devil in a flame of fire and an angel seated on a cloud.

The devil pointed out how Jesus Christ was obedient to impulse, and how His obedience to His passionate energies—to the Voice of God within Him—made Him the Great Rebel and Law Breaker, mocking the sabbath and the sabbath’s God, guilty of the blood of His martyrs, exonerating the woman taken in adultery, living on the labour and sweat of wage-slaves, acquiescing in a false witness by His silence, coveting the best gifts for His disciples. It was a Pharisee who said, “All these laws have I kept from my youth,” and he became a dead soul. Jesus on the cross looked back on a pathway strewn with the corpses of the religious people He had killed in His fiery impetuous course, and instead of a death-repentance, He uttered the audacious word, “Father, into Thy Hands I commend My Spirit.”

The angel was converted. Embracing the flame of fire he was consumed, and rose again as Elijah—the prophet of spirit and fire.

And thus Blake took his leave of Swedenborg. He had expected too much of him and was disappointed. It was more than enough to hear his name on the lips of his pious, commonplace brother. He was indignant that he had not fulfilled his high-sounding pretensions, and “the voice of honest indignation,” he wrote, “is the voice of God.” But we who calmly look on can detect the voice of resentment too, which robs his departure of grace. But for Swedenborg The Marriage of Heaven and Hell had never been written. Swedenborg was the Goliath, strong in reason, logic, system, science, intellect, slain by the stone from David’s sling. Blake and not Swedenborg was “the true Samson shorn by the Churches.”

CHAPTER VI

THE REBELS

Blake was thirty-three when in 1790 he wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

It marked a crisis in his life. Hitherto, with all the generous exuberance of youth, he was striving to leave the past behind, and reach forth to something new that by sheer glory and beauty should sweep up in its course the youth of the ages to come.

For a time he believed that Swedenborg could supply him with the fire to fashion and direct his own genius; but after poring long over his pages, he began reluctantly to discover that the fire of his imagination had either never been kindled or it was long since extinct. Whatever else remained in Swedenborg—and there were undeniably many good things—was impotent for the supreme task of supplying the creative spark.

Blake was disappointed and disillusioned. Never again did he make an impetuous rush to embrace any man, however dazzling his gifts. But not yet had he learnt the vital value of the past. If no new prophet arrived, there was still himself, and if he trusted himself with passionate faith, he might yet accomplish the desired thing.

In 1791 the outer events of his life ran a new course. Some time previously, Fuseli had introduced him to a bookseller and publisher named Johnson, living at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard.

This Johnson was a remarkable man. His sympathies were with rebels, whom he detected, welcomed, and encouraged. But he had none of the hard narrowness of advanced liberals, and his eye and heart were quick also to discover and cheer such a shy, diffident, conservative genius as Cowper. He was a friend to the authors whose works he published; and in a little upper chamber he gave weekly dinner parties, to which were bidden William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, Dr Price and Dr Priestley, and now Blake himself. In the ’eighties Blake had moved among elegant Blue-stockings who were above all things anxious to show themselves true daughters of Sarah: now in the ’nineties he was one of a party of rebels who despised the past, and were hailing the French Revolution, believing that after a few more of such upheavals a millennium would surely come in which man would be perfected.

Foremost among the rebels was William Godwin. Ten years younger, Blake might have been captivated by Godwin, as later on Shelley, Coleridge, and Bulwer Lytton were to be. There was always something clean and fresh about Godwin, and his hopes and aspirations for mankind were generous. Brought up in the narrowest sect of Calvinism, and believing while still a boy that he was assuredly one of the elect, he rebounded in later life to a liberal humanism, and retained little of his Calvinism except an unshaken belief in his own election. The first edition of his Enquiry concerning Political Justice appeared in 1793, which he stated all his first principles. These can be summarized briefly:

The characters of men originate in their external circumstances, and therefore man has no innate ideas or principles, and no instincts of right action apart from reasoning. Heredity counts for almost nothing. It is impression makes the man. The voluntary actions of men originate in their opinions.

Man is perfectible.

Man has negative rights but no positive rights.

Nothing further is requisite, but the improvement of his reasoning faculty, to make him virtuous and happy. Freedom of will is a curse. It is not free or independent of understanding, and therefore it follows understanding, and fortunately is not free to resist it. Man becomes free as he obeys it. It follows that our disapprobation of vice will be of the same nature as our disapprobation of an infectious distemper.

A scheme of self-love is incompatible with virtue.

The only means by which truth enters is through the inlet of the senses.

Intellect is the creature of sensation, we have no other inlet of knowledge.

Government is in all cases an evil, and it ought to be introduced as sparingly as possible.

Give a state but liberty enough, and it is impossible that vice should exist in it.

Thus Godwin was rationalist, altruist, anarchist, and non-resister. It is not probable that Blake ever read Political Justice, his patience not being equal to the task. While ardently desiring political justice and liberty, it was soon plain to him from his personal knowledge of Godwin that all his first principles were false. It was not true that man’s character originates in his external circumstances, although these do act on him. The differences between men are traceable to a fundamental inequality. One man turns everything he touches into dross, another into gold. Why? Blake had no need to argue. Being a mystic, he knew that man’s innate principles, ideas, and instincts differed, that heredity could not be ignored, that beyond the five inlets of the senses which reason alone recognizes, there are a thousand inlets for the man whose spiritual understanding is awakened.

He shivered at the thought of what the world would become if the rationalist had his way; for though he would sweep away superstitions, injustices, cruelties, yet from his invariable lack of discrimination he would crush with these the flowers and fruits of imagination, intuition, and inspiration. Besides, whether State or no State, what sort of life would man’s be when his fundamental instincts and passions were allowed no expression? Blake had not the statesman’s power of looking at men in the mass, but he knew that the individual was of extreme importance in any community, and also that the individual’s value lay in his power of passion, and therefore Godwin’s calm, reasoned, doctrinaire scheme for bringing the Millennium made no appeal to him whatever, and the two men went their separate courses.

It is interesting to note later that Shelley attained to liberty and song just so far as he shook off Godwin. When he talked with exaggerated nonsense about kings and priests, he was but repeating what he imbibed from Godwin in his early undiscriminating youth.

Mary Wollstonecraft was something quite new in the feminine way. Suffering in youth all the torments of a repressed and restricted woman-child, and possessing a full, passionate nature, she rebelled. Everywhere she turned she saw woman set in an utterly false position, and, as a consequence, silly, affected, degraded. Even those who made a bid for some solid knowledge simpered, and too often, like Mrs Piozzi, repeated by rote, and in Johnsonian periods, what they did not understand. Mary never doubted for a moment that woman enfranchised economically would rise to great things. Unerringly, she detected the true cause of woman’s failure. “It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.” “Women must have a civil existence in the State.” Poor Mary was terribly alone, and had to work out her new faith in woman without any human assistance. Fearlessly she exposed the delicate immorality of Dr Gregory’s Legacy to his Daughters, the “most sentimental rant” of Dr George Fordyce, the oriental despotism of Rousseau; and not content with such small game, she entered the lists against the arch-conservator Edmund Burke, for which Walpole named her “a hyena in petticoats,” and Burke himself reckoned her with the viragoes and poissardes. Mary’s wide sympathies were not only for women. Her knowledge of children had convinced her that they too had rights, and she had an irresistible faith that with tyranny put down and political liberty won, the oppressed peoples of the world would prove themselves capable of the highest things. And therefore she flung herself into the cause of the French Revolution, and made that her bone of contention with Burke.

There is no finer contrast than Fanny Burney for bringing into relief the special characteristics of Mary Wollstonecraft as a type of new woman. Fanny welcomed with breathless interest the French emigrants as they arrived one by one at Juniper Hall, and listened with horror as Talleyrand, M. d’Arblay, M. de Narbonne recounted the atrocities of the people. Mary took a room in Paris and watched their progress through her window. Fanny was completely overcome at the news of Louis XVI’s martyrdom. Mary watched him go to his death, and would not allow a momentary pity to make her forget the down-trodden poor.

Fanny was a slave to conventions. Mary followed her own nature. Fanny refused to correspond with Madame de Genlis, and asked Queen Charlotte whether she had not done right, and at her father’s bidding dropped Madame de Staël, to whom she was attracted. Mary consulted no one about her friendships, and in defiance of legal bonds was willing to be the mother of Charles Imlay’s child because she loved him.

Alas! Charles Imlay was faithless; and when Mary returned to England with little Fanny Imlay, alone and broken in spirit, it was bookseller Johnson who befriended her as he had our lonely Blake. Obviously there was much in common between her and Blake. He was with her in her hope for women, and children, and the poor. She had found herself in spite of mistakes, and her character and her works were informed with vital passion. Had Blake been single, and she drawn into friendship with him, she would have become the perfect type of new woman, imaginative, understanding, impassioned, inspired; as it happened, it was into Godwin’s arms she fell, and not Blake’s, and while Godwin took her in like a wandering dove, and gave her shelter and sympathy, yet the slight chill of his marital deportment and reasoned ways would have hindered her, had she lived, from bringing her fine character to full fruition.

Tom Paine presents another type of rebel with whom Blake came into contact. He had already made for himself fast friends and bitter enemies by aiding and abetting the American Rebellion. The thirteen colonies, though irritated by the Stamp Act, were not at once inclined to rebel, and even after Charles Townshend’s proposal of tea-duty, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, and Delaware still held back. Paine could wield a powerful pen, and by this means he kept the flame of discontent alive, and urged the States on till Jefferson composed a Declaration of Independence to which the four backward States were brought reluctantly to agree, and on July 4th, 1776, the American United Colonies declared themselves Free and Independent States.

After this success Paine felt that his pen was equal to any task. Having returned to England and fallen in with the Godwin set, he of course shared with them in their sympathies for the French Revolution, and in addition declared himself a deist, and set himself, in his Age of Reason, to discredit the Bible. It was all very well when he was doing the rough work of fanning rebellion, but he was ludicrously unfit for the fine work of criticizing the Bible. Its poetry and mysticism and manifold wisdom were not even suspected by him. He stolidly read through the sublime chapters of Isaiah, and thought them worse than the production of a schoolboy; and when he came to the stories of the Nativity, which, whether fact or poetry, are marvellously beautiful, he became so grossly indecent that one is bound to relegate him to the vulgarest order of Bible-smashers.

His deism was a symptom of the times. Dr Priestley, who also attended Johnson’s dinners, was a polished ornament of the sect. They persuaded themselves that God, having set the universe agog, remained Himself wholly outside of it. It was well that Blake should come into personal touch with these rebel deists. They could never appeal to him even for a moment, for he was penetrated all his life with the belief that God dwelt inside of His creation; and since all theological rebellion tended more and more in the direction of a mechanical deism, he began to suspect that he must look elsewhere to discover the wisdom that should crown his years.

Yet there was something in Paine that appealed to Blake. They were both worshippers of liberty, and while they could not meet on theological ground, they were stirred alike by the portentous and successive crises on the other side of the Channel. Paine felt that he still had work to do. He had served his apprenticeship in America, he would now put forth his whole strength in his Rights of Man, and help forward the sacred cause of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

There were other rebels—Holcroft, playwright and translator, friend of Godwin, afterwards to be sent to Newgate; Hardy and Thelwall; Horne Tooke, who raised subscriptions for the relief of Americans and spoke of the transactions at Lexington and Concord as “inhuman murders.” He was to be tried along with Holcroft and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment.

Now Blake sympathized with all these rebels in their political aspirations; but whereas their watchword was reason, and their revolt was in the name of reason, he believed that reason carried one very little way, and that the elemental deeps of life and passion that lie far under reason must be stirred and aroused if the work of rebellion was to bring forth lasting fruit. In any case, the reason-bound men had little to teach him. He had looked to Swedenborg, he had taken knowledge of his advanced contemporaries. Godwin rebelled for political liberty, Mary Wollstonecraft for liberty of women and children, Tom Paine for liberty of man. What was left for Blake? The sex question had never been dragged out into the light. The subject was unclean. Sexual morality consisted in repression. Nowhere as here does repression breed such poisonous fruits. Was not sex a part of that vital fire and passion in which Blake believed with his whole heart? Was it not true that whatsoever lives is holy? Must not there be liberty for the sexual instinct if it was to be kept clean? For the next ten years Blake became the advocate of bodily liberty, indistinguishable from free-love. This was to be the recurring theme again and again in his prophetic books. This was to be his contribution towards the new kind of man or superman for whom he was groping. Afterwards, when he had given substance and form in his prophecies to the vague and indefinite thoughts that lay in him, he was to learn how to estimate and place them. Not until he had walked the road of mental excess was he to arrive at the palace of wisdom. Once there, he was to revise even his ideas on rebellion.

Keeping these persons and things steadily in view, let us now follow in order and detail the works of Blake’s most rebellious period.

As was fitting, Blake sounded the note of rebellion in a poem on the French Revolution.

At this stage—1790-91—the Revolution had not advanced far. The Reign of Terror and the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were still in the future. But the Bastille had fallen, and the noise of its fall set the nerves of the overstrung English liberals vibrating. The battle in prose was waged by Paine, Mackintosh, and Mary Wollstonecraft against Burke, and their names came at once into notoriety. Blake was as outspoken, and even more fearless, for he wore publicly the bonnet rouge as the outward and visible sign of his faith, but fortunately for him, his natural medium of expression was poetry, and that of a kind hitherto unknown, and so, say what he would, no one paid him the smallest attention. What came doubtlessly as a surprise to himself was that his poem found a publisher; and the first Book, with the promise that the remaining Books of the Poem, which were finished, should be published in their order, was announced to the world by bookseller Johnson in 1791, at the modest price of one shilling.

Blake has a strange allegorical method of dealing with the Revolution which can only irritate those who are not accustomed to his ways. Thus he speaks of the seven dark and sickly towers of the Bastille. To these he gives the descriptive names of Horror, Darkness, Bloody, Religion, Order, Destiny, the Tower of God, and he gives descriptions of the prisoners in the towers corresponding to their names. All these were imprisoned because in some form or other they had bidden for liberty. One was the author of “a writing prophetic”; another, a woman, “refused to be whore to the Minister and with a knife smote him”; another had raised a pulpit in the city of Paris and “taught wonders to darkened souls.” The horror of their condition is described with great power, although with too congested an accumulation of baneful images. Thus: “In the tower named Darkness was a man pinioned down to the stone floor, his strong bones scarce covered with sinews; the iron rings were forged smaller as the flesh decayed.” That is a Dantesque touch. But when one reads farther down of “an old man, whose white beard covered the stone floor like weeds on margin of the sea, shrivelled up by heat of day and cold of night; his den was short and narrow as a grave dug for a child, with spiders’ webs wove and with slime of ancient horrors covered, for snakes and scorpions are his companions,” then the piled-up details prevent a clear image, and detract from the value of what has gone before. In contrast to the wretched inhabitants of the Bastille, we are presented with the King and his nobles. Here are names, but no portraits. The King stands for the spirit of kingship in all ages and his nobles are those who uphold “this marble-built heaven,” and “all this great starry harvest of six thousand years.” They must resist to the death the crooked sickle stretched out over fertile France “till our purple and crimson is faded to russet, and the Kingdoms of earth bound in sheaves, and the ancient forests of chivalry hewn, and the joys of the combat burnt for fuel.” (As Blake penned these fine words something of his early Elizabethan passion must have stirred in him.) The King, through whom the spirits of ancient Kings speak, peers through the darkness and clouds, and involuntarily sees the truth: “We are not numbered among the living.” Life is with the prisoners who have burst their dens. Let Kings “shivering over their bleached bones hide in the dust! and plague and wrath and tempest shall cease.”

The Archbishop of Paris, symbol of traditional religion, arises and addresses the King. For him revolution can only mean atheism. “God so long worshipped departs as a lamp without oil.... The sound of prayer fails from lips of flesh, and the holy hymn from thickened tongues.”

Clergy as well as nobles vanish, mitre as well as crown. “The sound of the bell, and voice of the sabbath, and singing of the holy choir is turned into songs of the harlot in day, and cries of the virgin in night. They shall drop at the plough and faint at the harrow, unredeemed, unconfessed, unpardoned; the priest rot in his surplice by the lawless lover, the holy beside the accursed, the King, frowning in purple, beside the grey ploughman, and their worms embrace together.”

This, fine as it is, calls out a still finer speech from Orleans. “Can nobles be bound when the people are free, or God weep when His children are happy?” Then to the Archbishop he cries: “Go, thou cold recluse, into the fires of another’s high flaming rich bosom, and return unconsumed, and write laws. If thou canst not do this, doubt thy theories, learn to consider all men as thy equals, thy brethren, and not as thy foot or thy hand, unless thou first fearest to hurt them.”