CHAPTER VIII

THE PROPHETIC BOOKS

"The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them, and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, and so be the cause of imposition?

"Isaiah answer'd. I saw no God nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in everything, and as I was then persuaded and remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote." These words are quoted from one of Blake's "Memorable Fancies" in the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and in some such vein as that which Blake makes Isaiah describe, did he himself commence the writing of the "Prophetic Books." The sense of his great, though somewhat indefinite mission, came upon Blake gradually. Much of his time, even when engaged in designing, engraving and painting, was spent in thinking immense and original thoughts. They tyrannized over him, these thoughts, and instead of his guiding their sun-ward and most daring flight, they drew him along on their reckless course, sometimes bringing him to complete overthrow, as did the horses of Apollo when driven by Phaethon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another plate from the "Europe," the lines of which we reproduce, represents two lithe nude women springing upwards with incomparable grace and the true Blake vigour, among arching wheat stems. They blow horns through which descends a fall of blight upon the corn. The decorative rightness, the exquisite appreciation of the melodies of form, the vitality of action, cannot be too much admired. And the colour! The tender flesh-painting contrasted with the young green of the corn!--Yet Mr. Swinburne, usually so intensely alive to the beautiful, and especially Blake's beautiful, describes the plate in these terms: "Mildews are seen incarnate as foul, flushed women with strenuous limbs contorted, blighting ears of corn with the violent breath of their inflated mouths."

There is some delicate tracery of cobwebs, among leaves and greenery, on another page, exhibiting Blake in a marvellously naturalistic mood for once, and a final plate of a man rescuing a woman and child from fierce, rolling flames. No one ever painted fire as Blake did, and over and over again in his treatment of this favourite motive we shall have to own that he is, as Mr. William Michael Rossetti says, in this respect at least, "supreme painter."

As I do not know where to place the tiny book or pamphlet entitled, "There is no Natural Religion,"--it having no date affixed to it,--I shall refer to it here. It consists of eleven illustrated leaves, each containing in the engraved text a didactic statement or thesis by Blake on this favourite subject. Below the words, which give much illumination to his peculiar opinions, are small, rough drawings made with a brush full of heavy black, relieved in parts by outlines in sepia.