Part 9

First then for the _Songs of Innocence and Experience_. These at a first naming recall only that incomparable charm of form in which they first came out clothed, and hence vex the souls of men with regretful comparison. For here by hard necessity we miss the lovely and luminous setting of designs, which makes the _Songs_ precious and pleasurable to those who know or care for little else of the master's doing; the infinite delight of those drawings, sweeter to see than music to hear, where herb and stem break into grace of shape and blossom of form, and the branch-work is full of little flames and flowers, catching as it were from the verse enclosed the fragrant heat and delicate sound they seem to give back; where colour lapses into light and light assumes feature in colour. If elsewhere the artist's strange strength of thought and hand is more visible, nowhere is there such pure sweetness and singleness of design in his work. All the tremulous and tender splendour of spring is mixed into the written word and coloured draught; every page has the smell of April. Over all things given, the sleep of flocks and the growth of leaves, the laughter in dividing lips of flowers and the music at the moulded mouth of the flute-player, there is cast a pure fine veil of light, softer than sleep and keener than sunshine. The sweetness of sky and leaf, of grass and water--the bright light life of bird and child and beast--is so to speak kept fresh by some graver sense of faithful and mysterious love, explained and vivified by a conscience and purpose in the artist's hand and mind. Such a fiery outbreak of spring, such an insurrection of fierce floral life and radiant riot of childish power and pleasure, no poet or painter ever gave before: such lustre of green leaves and flushed limbs, kindled cloud and fervent fleece, was never wrought into speech or shape. Nevertheless this decorative work is after all the mere husk and shell of the _Songs_. These also, we may notice, have to some extent shared the comparative popularity of the designs which serve as framework to them. They have absolutely achieved the dignity of a reprint; have had a chance before now of swimming for life; whereas most of Blake's offspring have been thrown into Lethe bound hand and foot, without hope of ever striking out in one fair effort. Perhaps on some accounts this preference has been not unreasonable. What was written for children can hardly offend men; and the obscurities and audacities of the prophet would here have been clearly out of place. It is indeed some relief to a neophyte serving in the outer courts of such an intricate and cloudy temple, to come upon this little side-chapel set about with the simplest wreaths and smelling of the fields rather than incense, where all the singing is done by clear children's voices to the briefest and least complex tunes. Not at first without a sense of release does the human mind get quit for a little of the clouds of Urizen, the fires of Orc, and all the Titanic apparatus of prophecy. And these poems are really unequalled in their kind. Such verse was never written for children since verse-writing began. Only in a few of those faultless fragments of childish rhyme which float without name or form upon the memories of men shall we find such a pure clear cadence of verse, such rapid ring and flow of lyric laughter, such sweet and direct choice of the just word and figure, such an impeccable simplicity; nowhere but here such a tender wisdom of holiness, such a light and perfume of innocence. Nothing like this was ever written on that text of the lion and the lamb; no such heaven of sinless animal life was ever conceived so intensely and sweetly.

"And there the lion's ruddy eyes Shall flow with tears of gold, And pitying the tender cries, And walking round the fold, Saying _Wrath by His meekness And by His health sickness Is driven away From our immortal day. And now beside thee, bleating lamb, I can lie down and sleep, Or think on Him who bore thy name, Graze after thee, and weep._"

The leap and fall of the verse is so perfect as to make it a fit garment and covering for the profound tenderness of faith and soft strength of innocent impulse embodied in it. But the whole of this hymn of _Night_ is wholly beautiful; being perhaps one of the two poems of loftiest loveliness among all the _Songs of Innocence_. The other is that called _The Little Black Boy_; a poem especially exquisite for its noble forbearance from vulgar pathos and achievement of the highest and most poignant sweetness of speech and sense; in which the poet's mysticism is baptized with pure water and taught to speak as from faultless lips of children, to such effect as this.

"And we are put on earth a little space _That we may learn to bear the beams of love_; And these black bodies and this sunburnt face Are like a cloud and like a shady grove."

Other poems of a very perfect beauty are those of the Piper, the Lamb, the Chimney-sweeper, and the two-days-old baby; all, for the music in them, more like the notes of birds caught up and given back than the modulated measure of human verse. One cannot say, being so slight and seemingly wrong in metrical form, how they come to be so absolutely right; but right even in point of verses and words they assuredly are. Add fuller formal completion of rhyme and rhythm to that song of _Infant Joy_, and you have broken up the soft bird-like perfection of clear light sound which gives it beauty; the little bodily melody of soulless and painless laughter.

Against all articulate authority we do however class several of the _Songs of Experience_ higher for the great qualities of verse than anything in the earlier division of these poems. If the _Songs of Innocence_ have the shape and smell of leaves or buds, these have in them the light and sound of fire or the sea. Entering among them, a fresher savour and a larger breath strikes one upon the lips and forehead. In the first part we are shown who they are who have or who deserve the gift of spiritual sight: in the second, what things there are for them to see when that gift has been given. Innocence, the quality of beasts and children, has the keenest eyes; and such eyes alone can discern and interpret the actual mysteries of experience. It is natural that this second part, dealing as it does with such things as underlie the outer forms of the first part, should rise higher and dive deeper in point of mere words. These give the distilled perfume and extracted blood of the veins in the rose-leaf, the sharp, liquid, intense spirit crushed out of the broken kernel in the fruit. The last of the _Songs of Innocence_ is a prelude to these poems; in it the poet summons to judgment the young and single-spirited, that by right of the natural impulse of delight in them they may give sentence against the preachers of convention and assumption; and in the first poem of the second series he, by the same "voice of the bard," calls upon earth herself, the mother of all these, to arise and become free: since upon her limbs also are bound the fetters, and upon her forehead also has fallen the shadow, of a jealous law: from which nevertheless, by faithful following of instinct and divine liberal impulse, earth and man shall obtain deliverance.

"Hear the voice of the bard! Who present, past, and future sees: Whose ears have heard The ancient Word That walked among the silent trees: Calling the lapsed soul And weeping in the evening dew; That might control The starry pole And fallen fallen light renew!"

If they will hear the Word, earth and the dwellers upon earth shall be made again as little children; shall regain the strong simplicity of eye and hand proper to the pure and single of heart; and for them inspiration shall do the work of innocence; let them but once abjure the doctrine by which comes sin and the law by which comes prohibition. Therefore must the appeal be made; that the blind may see and the deaf hear, and the unity of body and spirit be made manifest in perfect freedom: and that to the innocent even the liberty of "sin" may be conceded. For if the soul suffer by the body's doing, are not both degraded? and if the body be oppressed for the soul's sake, are not both the losers?

"O Earth, O Earth, return! Arise from out the dewy grass! Night is worn, And the morn Rises from the slumberous mass. Turn away no more; Why wilt thou turn away? The starry shore, The watery floor, Are given thee till the break of day."

For so long, during the night of law and oppression of material form, the divine evidences hidden under sky and sea are left her; even "till the break of day." Will she not get quit of this spiritual bondage to the heavy body of things, to the encumbrance of deaf clay and blind vegetation, before the light comes that shall redeem and reveal? But the earth, being yet in subjection to the creator of men, the jealous God who divided nature against herself--father of woman and man, legislator of sex and race--makes blind and bitter answer as in sleep, "her locks covered with grey despair."

"Prisoned on this watery shore, Starry Jealousy does keep my den; Cold and hoar, Weeping o'er, I hear the father of the ancient men."

Thus, in the poet's mind, Nature and Religion are the two fetters of life, one on the right wrist, the other on the left; an obscure material force on this hand, and on that a mournful imperious law: the law of divine jealousy, the government of a God who weeps over his creature and subject with unprofitable tears, and rules by forbidding and dividing: the "Urizen" of the prophetic books, clothed with the coldness and the grief of remote sky and jealous cloud. Here as always, the cry is as much for light as for license, the appeal not more against prohibition than against obscurity.

"Can the sower sow by night, Or the ploughman in darkness plough?"

In the _Songs of Innocence_ there is no such glory of metre or sonorous beauty of lyrical work as here. No possible effect of verse can be finer in a great brief way than that given in the second and last stanzas of the first part of this poem. It recals within one's ear the long relapse of recoiling water and wash of the refluent wave; in the third and fourth lines sinking suppressed as with equal pulses and soft sobbing noise of ebb, to climb again in the fifth line with a rapid clamour of ripples and strong ensuing strain of weightier sound, lifted with the lift of the running and ringing sea.

Here also is that most famous of Blake's lyrics, _The Tiger_; a poem beyond praise for its fervent beauty and vigour of music. It appears by the MS. that this was written with some pains; the cancels and various readings bear marks of frequent rehandling. One of the latter is worth transcription for its own excellence and also in proof of the artist's real care for details, which his rapid instinctive way of work has induced some to disbelieve in.

"Burnt in distant deeps or skies The cruel fire of thine eyes? Could heart descend or wings aspire?[16] What the hand dare seize the fire?"

Nor has Blake left us anything of more profound and perfect value than _The Human Abstract_; a little mythical vision of the growth of error; through soft sophistries of pity and faith, subtle humility of abstinence and fear, under which the pure simple nature lies corrupted and strangled; through selfish loves which prepare a way for cruelty, and cruelty that works by spiritual abasement and awe.

"Soon spreads the dismal shade Of Mystery over his head; And the caterpillar and fly Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit, Ruddy and sweet to eat; And the raven his nest has made In the thickest shade."

Under the shadow of this tree of mystery,[17] rooted in artificial belief, all the meaner kind of devouring things take shelter and eat of the fruit of its branches; the sweet poison of false faith, painted on its outer husk with the likeness of all things noble and desirable; and in the deepest implication of barren branch and deadly leaf, the bird of death, with priests for worshippers ("the priests of the raven of dawn," loud of lip and hoarse of throat until the light of day have risen), finds house and resting-place. Only in the "miscreative brain" of fallen men can such a thing strike its tortuous root and bring forth its fatal flower; nowhere else in all nature can the tyrants of divided matter and moral law, "Gods of the earth and sea," find soil that will bear such fruit.

Nowhere has Blake set forth his spiritual creed more clearly and earnestly than in the last of the _Songs of Experience_. "Tirzah," in his mythology, represents the mere separate and human nature, mother of the perishing body and daughter of the "religion" which occupies itself with laying down laws for the flesh; which, while pretending (and that in all good faith) to despise the body and bring it into subjection as with control of bit and bridle, does implicitly overrate its power upon the soul for evil or good, and thus falls foul of fact on all sides by assuming that spirit and flesh are twain, and that things pleasant and good for the one can properly be loathsome or poisonous to the other. This "religion" or "moral law," the inexplicable prophet has chosen to baptize under the singular type of "Rahab"--the "harlot virgin-mother," impure by dint of chastity and forbearance from such things as are pure to the pure of heart: for in this creed the one thing unclean is the belief in uncleanness, the one thing forbidden is to believe in the existence of forbidden things. Of this mystical mother and her daughter we shall have to take some further account when once fairly afloat on those windy waters of prophecy through which all who would know Blake to any purpose must be content to steer with such pilotage as they can get. For the present it will be enough to note how eager and how direct is the appeal here made against any rule or reasoning based on reference to the mere sexual and external nature of man--the nature made for ephemeral life and speedy death, kept alive "to work and weep" only through that mercy which "changed death into sleep"; how intense the reliance on redemption from such a law by the grace of imaginative insight and spiritual freedom, typified in "the death of Jesus."[18] Nor are any of these poems finer in structure or nobler in metrical form.

This present edition of the _Songs of Experience_ is richer by one of Blake's most admirable poems of childhood--a division of his work always of especial value for its fresh and sweet strength of feeling and of words. In this newly recovered _Cradle Song_ are perhaps the two loveliest lines of his writing:

"Sleep, sleep: in thy sleep Little sorrows sit and weep."[19]

Before parting from this chief lyrical work of the poet's, we may notice (rather for its convenience as an explanation than its merit as a piece of verse) this projected _Motto to the Songs of Innocence and of Experience_, which editors have left hitherto in manuscript:

"The good are attracted by men's perceptions, And think not for themselves Till Experience teaches them how to catch And to cage the Fairies and Elves.

And then the Knave begins to snarl, And the Hypocrite to howl; And all his[20] good friends show their private ends, And the Eagle is known from the Owl."

Experience must do the work of innocence as soon as conscience begins to take the place of instinct, reflection of perception; but the moment experience begins upon this work, men raise against her the conventional clamour of envy and stupidity. She teaches how to entrap and retain such fugitive delights as children and animals enjoy without seeking to catch or cage them; but this teaching the world calls sin, and the law of material religion condemns: the face of "Tirzah" is set against it, in the "shame and pride" of sex.

"Thou, mother of my mortal part, With cruelty didst mould my heart, And with false self-deceiving fears Didst bind my nostrils, eyes, and ears."

And thus those who live in subjection to the senses would in their turn bring the senses into subjection; unable to see beyond the body, they find it worth while to refuse the body its right to freedom.

In these hurried notes on the _Songs_ an effort has been made to get that done which is most absolutely necessary--not that which might have been most facile or most delightful. Analytic remark has been bestowed on those poems only which really cannot dispense with it in the eyes of most men. Many others need no herald or interpreter, demand no usher or outrider: some of these are among Blake's best, some again almost among his worst.[21] Poems in which a doctrine or subject once before nobly stated and illustrated is re-asserted in a shallower way and exemplified in a feebler form,[22] require at our hands no written or spoken signs of either assent or dissent. Such poems, as the editor has well indicated, have places here among their betters: none of them, it may be added, without some shell of outward beauty or seed of inward value. The simpler poems claim only praise; and of this they cannot fail from any reader whose good word is in the least worth having. Those of a subtler kind (often, as must now be clear enough, the best worth study) claim more than this if they are to have fair play. It is pleasant enough to commend and to enjoy the palpable excellence of Blake's work; but another thing is simply and thoroughly requisite--to understand what the workman was after. First get well hold of the mystic, and you will then at once get a better view and comprehension of the painter and poet. And if through fear of tedium or offence a student refuses to be at such pains, he will find himself, while following Blake's trace as poet or painter, brought up sharply within a very short tether. "It is easy," says Blake himself in the _Jerusalem_, "to acknowledge a man to be great and good while we derogate from him in the trifles and small articles of that goodness; those alone are his friends who admire his minute powers."

Looking into the larger MS. volume of notes we seem to gain at once a clearer insight into the writer's daily habit of life and tone of thought, and a power of judging more justly the sort of work left us by way of result. Here, as by fits and flashes, one is enabled to look in upon that strange small household, so silent and simple on the outside, so content to live in the poorest domestic way, without any show of eccentric indulgence or erratic aspiration; husband and wife to all appearance the commonest citizens alive, satisfied with each other and with their minute obscure world and straitened limits of living. No typical churchwarden or clerk of the parish could rub on in a more taciturn modest manner, or seem able to make himself happy with smaller things. It may be as well for us to hear his own account of the matter:

PRAYER.

I.

"I rose up at the dawn of day; 'Get thee away; get thee away! Pray'st thou for riches? away, away! This is the throne of Mammon grey.'

II.

Said I, 'This sure is very odd; I took it to be the throne of God; For everything besides I have; It is only for riches that _I_ can crave.

III.

'I have mental joys and mental health, And mental friends and mental wealth; I've a wife I love and that loves me; I've all but riches bodily;

IV.

'Then, if for riches I must not pray, God knows I little of prayers need say; So, as a church is known by its steeple, If I pray, it must be for other people.

V.

'I am in God's presence night and day, And he never turns his face away; The accuser of sins by my side does stand, And he holds my money-bag in his hand;

VI.

'For my worldly things God makes him pay, And he'd pay for more if to him I would pray; And so you may do the worst you can do, Be assured, Mr. Devil, I won't pray to you.

VII.

'He says, if I do not worship him for a God,[23] I shall eat coarser food and go worse shod; So, as I don't value such things as these, You must do, Mr. Devil--just as God please.'"

One cannot doubt that to a man of this temper his life was endurable enough. Faith in God and goodwill towards men came naturally to him, being a mystic; on the one side he had all he wanted, and on the other he wanted nothing. The praise and discipleship of men might no doubt have added a kind of pleasure to his way of life, but they could neither give nor take away what he most desired to have; and this he never failed of having. His wife, of whose "goodness" to him he has himself borne ample witness, was company enough for all days. And indeed, by all the evidence left us, it appears that this goodness of hers was beyond example. Another woman of the better sort might have had equal patience with his habit of speech and life, equal faith in his great capacity and character; but hardly in another woman could such a man have found an equal strength and sweetness of trust, an equal ardour of belief and tenderness, an equal submission of soul and body for love's sake;--submission so perfect and so beautiful in the manner of it, that the idea of sacrifice or a separate will seems almost impossible. A man living with such a wife might well believe in some immediate divine presence and in visible faces like the face of an angel. We have not now of course much chance of knowing at all what manner of angel she was; but the few things we do know of her, no form of words can fitly express. To praise such people is merely to waste words in saying that divine things are praiseworthy. No doubt, if we knew how to praise them, they would deserve that we should try.[24]

The notes bearing in any way upon this daily life of Blake's are few and exceptional. In the mass of floating verse and prose there is absolutely no hint of order whatever, save that, at one end of the MS., some short poems are transcribed in a slightly more coherent form. Among these and the other lyrics, strewn as from a liberal but too lax hand about the chaotic leaves of his note-book, are many of Blake's best things. Some of the slight and scrawled designs, as noted in the _Catalogue_ (pp. 242, 243), have also a merit and a power of their own; but it is with the poet's lyrical work that we have to do at this point of our present notes; and here we may most fitly wind up what remains to be said on that matter.

The inexhaustible equable gift of Blake for the writing of short sweet songs is perceptible at every turn we take in this labyrinth of lovely words, of strong and soft designs. Considering how wide is the range of date from the earliest of these songs to the latest, they seem more excellently remote than ever from the day's verse and the day's habit. They reach in point of time from the season of Mason to the season of Moore; and never in any interval of work by any chance influence do these poems at their weakest lapse into likeness or tolerance of the accepted models. From the era of plaster to the era of pinchbeck, Blake kept straight ahead of the times. To the pseudo-Hellenic casts of the one school or the pseudo-Hibernian tunes of the other he was admirably deaf and blind. While a grazing public straightened its bovine neck and steadied its flickering eyelids to look up betweenwhiles, with the day's damp fodder drooping half-chewed from its relaxed jaw, at some dim sick planet of the Mason system, there was a poet, alive if obscure, who had eyes to behold

"the chambers of the East, The chambers of the sun, that now From ancient melody have ceased;"