Chapter IX (6)

Here then the scroll of prophecy is finally wound up; and those who have cared to unroll and decipher it by such light as we can attain or afford may now look back across the tempest and tumult, and pass sentence, according to their pleasure or capacity, on the message delivered from this cloudy and noisy tabernacle. The complete and exalted figure of Blake cannot be seen in full by those who avert their eyes, smarting and blinking, from the frequent smoke and sudden flame. Others will see more clearly, as they look more sharply, the radical sanity and coherence of the mind which put forth its shoots of thought and faith in ways so strange, at such strange times. Faith incredible and love invisible to most men were alone the springs of this turbid and sonorous stream. In Blake, above all other men, the moral and the imaginative senses were so fused together as to compose the final artistic form. No man's fancy, in that age, flew so far and so high on so sure a wing. No man's mind, in that generation, dived so deep or gazed so long after the chance of human redemption. To serve art and to love liberty seemed to him the two things (if indeed they were not one thing) worth a man's life and work; and no servant was ever trustier, no lover more constant than he. Knowing that without liberty there can be no loyalty, he did not fear, whether in his work or his life, to challenge and to deride the misconstruction of the foolish and the fraudulent. It does not appear that he was ever at the pains to refute any senseless and rootless lie that may have floated up during his life on the muddy waters of rumour, or drifted from hand to hand and mouth to mouth along the putrescent weed-beds of tradition. Many such lies, I am told, were then set afloat, and have not all as yet gone down. One at least of these may here be swept once for all out of our way. Mr. Linnell, the truest friend of Blake's age and genius, has assured me--and has expressed a wish that I should make public his assurance--that the legend of Blake and his wife, sitting as Adam and Eve in their garden, is simply a legend--to those who knew them, repulsive and absurd; based probably, if on any foundation at all, on some rough and rapid expression of Blake's in the heat and flush of friendly talk, to the effect (it may be) that such a thing, if one chose to do it, would be in itself innocent and righteous,--wrong or strange only in the eyes of a world whose views and whose deeds were strange and wrong. So far Blake would probably have gone; and so far his commentators need not fear to go. But one thing does certainly seem to me loathsome and condemnable; the imputation of such a charge as has been brought against Blake on this matter, without ground and without excuse. The oral flux of fools, being as it is a tertian or quotidian malady or ague of the tongue among their kind, may deserve pity or may not, but does assuredly demand rigid medical treatment. The words or thoughts of a free thinker and a free speaker, falling upon rather than into the ear of a servile and supine fool, will probably in all times bring forth such fruit as this. By way of solace or compensation for the folly which he half perceives and half admits, the fool must be allowed his little jest and his little lie. Only when it passes into tradition and threatens to endure, is it worth while to set foot on it. It seems that Blake never cared to do this good office for himself; and in effect it can only seem worth doing on rare occasions to any workman who respects his work. This contempt, in itself noble and rational, became injurious when applied to the direct service of things in hand. Confidence in future friends, and contempt of present foes, may have induced him to leave his highest achievements impalpable and obscure. Their scope is as wide and as high as heaven, but not as clear; clouds involve and rains inundate the fitful and stormy space of air through which he spreads and plies an indefatigable wing. There can be few books in the world like these; I can remember one poet only whose work seems to me the same or similar in kind; a poet as vast in aim, as daring in detail, as unlike others, as coherent to himself, as strange without and as sane within. The points of contact and sides of likeness between William Blake and Walt Whitman are so many and so grave, as to afford some ground of reason to those who preach the transition of souls or transfusion of spirits. The great American is not a more passionate preacher of sexual or political freedom than the English artist. To each the imperishable form of a possible and universal Republic is equally requisite and adorable as the temporal and spiritual queen of ages as of men. To each all sides and shapes of life are alike acceptable or endurable. From the fresh free ground of either workman nothing is excluded that is not exclusive. The words of either strike deep and run wide and soar high. They are both full of faith and passion, competent to love and to loathe, capable of contempt and of worship. Both are spiritual, and both democratic; both by their works recall, even to so untaught and tentative a student as I am, the fragments vouchsafed to us of the Pantheistic poetry of the East. Their casual audacities of expression or speculation are in effect wellnigh identical. Their outlooks and theories are evidently the same on all points of intellectual and social life. The divine devotion and selfless love which make men martyrs and prophets are alike visible and palpable in each. It is no secret now, but a matter of public knowledge, that both these men, being poor in the sight and the sense of the world, have given what they had of time or of money, of labour or of love, to comfort and support all the suffering and sick, all the afflicted and misused, whom they had the chance or the right to succour and to serve. The noble and gentle labours of the one are known to those who live in his time; the similar deeds of the other deserve and demand a late recognition. No man so poor and so obscure as Blake appeared in the eyes of his generation ever did more good works in a more noble and simple spirit. It seems that in each of these men at their birth pity and passion, and relief and redress of wrong, became incarnate and innate. That may well be said of the one which was said of the other: that "he looks like a man." And in externals and details the work of these two constantly and inevitably coheres and coincides. A sound as of a sweeping wind; a prospect as over dawning continents at the fiery instant of a sudden sunrise; a splendour now of stars and now of storms; an expanse and exultation of wing across strange spaces of air and above shoreless stretches of sea; a resolute and reflective love of liberty in all times and in all things where it should be; a depth of sympathy and a height of scorn which complete and explain each other, as tender and as bitter as Dante's; a power, intense and infallible, of pictorial concentration and absorption, most rare when combined with the sense and the enjoyment of the widest and the highest things; an exquisite and lyrical excellence of form when the subject is well in keeping with the poet's tone of spirit; a strength and security of touch in small sweet sketches of colour and outline, which bring before the eyes of their student a clear glimpse of the thing designed--some little inlet of sky lighted by moon or star, some dim reach of windy water or gentle growth of meadow-land or wood; these are qualities common to the work of either. Had we place or time or wish to touch on their shortcomings and errors, it might be shown that these too are nearly akin; that their poetry has at once the melody and the laxity of a fitful storm-wind; that, being oceanic, it is troubled with violent groundswells and sudden perils of ebb and reflux, of shoal and reef, perplexing to the swimmer or the sailor; in a word, that it partakes the powers and the faults of elemental and eternal things; that it is at times noisy and barren and loose, rootless and fruitless and informal; and is in the main fruitful and delightful and noble, a necessary part of the divine mechanism of things. Any work or art of which this cannot be said is superfluous and perishable, whatever of grace or charm it may possess or assume. Whitman has seldom struck a note of thought and speech so just and so profound as Blake has now and then touched upon; but his work is generally more frank and fresh, smelling of sweeter air, and readier to expound or expose its message, than this of the prophetic books. Nor is there among these any poem or passage of equal length so faultless and so noble as his "Voice out of the Sea," or as his dirge over President Lincoln--the most sweet and sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church of the world. But in breadth of outline and charm of colour, these poems recall the work of Blake; and to neither poet can a higher tribute of honest praise be paid than this.

We have now done what in us lay to help the works of a great man on their way towards that due appreciation and that high honour of which in the end they will not fail. Much, it need not be repeated, has been done for them of late, and admirably done; much also we have found to do, and have been compelled to leave undone still more. If it should now appear to any reader that too much has been made of slight things, or too little said of grave errors, this must be taken well into account: that praise enough has not as yet been given, and blame enough can always be had for the asking; that when full honour has been done and full thanks rendered to those who have done great things, then and then only will it be no longer an untimely and unseemly labour to map out and mark down their shortcomings for the profit or the pleasure of their inferiors and our own; that however pleasant for common palates and feeble fingers it may be to nibble and pick holes, it is not only more profitable but should be more delightful for all who desire or who strive after any excellence of mind or of achievement to do homage wherever it may be due; to let nothing great pass unsaluted or unenjoyed; but as often as we look backwards among past days and dead generations, with glad and ready reverence to answer the noble summons--"Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers who were before us." Those who refuse them that are none of their sons; and among all these "famous men, and our fathers," no names seem to demand our praise so loudly as theirs who while alive had to dispense with the thanksgiving of men. To them doubtless, it may be said, this is now more than ever indifferent; but to us it had better not be so. And especially in the works and in the life of Blake there is so strong and special a charm for those to whom the higher ways of work are not sealed ways that none will fear to be too grudging of blame or too liberal of praise. A more noble memory is hardly left us; and it is not for his sake that we should contend to do him honour.

THE END.

BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Gilchrist's "Life of Blake."

[2] It may be as well set down here as at any further stage of our business, that the date of Blake's birth appears, from good MS. authority, to have been the 20th of November (1757), not the 28th; that he was the second of five children, not four; James, the hosier in Broad Street, being his junior, not, as the biography states, his senior by a year and a half. The eldest son was John, a favourite child who came to small good, enlisted, and died it seems in comparative youth; of him Mr. Gilchrist evidently had not heard. In some verses of the Felpham period (written in 1801, printed in vol. ii. p. 189 of the "Life and Selections") Blake makes mention, hitherto unexplained, of "my brother John the evil one," which may now be comprehensible enough.

[3] Our greatest poet of the later days may be cited as a third witness. Through the marvellous last book of the _Contemplations_ the breath and sound of the sea is blown upon every verse; when he heard as it were the thunder and saw as it were the splendour of revelation, it was amid the murmur and above the motion of the Channel;

pres du dolmen qui domine Rozel,
A l'endroit ou le cap se prolonge en presqu'ile.

[4] W. B. Scott. The few and great words cited above occur, it will be observed, in a poem affording throughout no inapt allegory of Blake's life and works. More accurate and more admirable expression was never given to a theme so pregnant and so great. The whole "fable" may be well applied by students of the matter in hand to the history of Blake's relations with minor men of more turn for success; which, as Victor Hugo has noted in his royal manner, is so often "a rather hideous thing."

[5] It appears that some effort, laudable if wholly sincere, and not condemnable if partly coloured by personal feeling, has been made to rebut the charges brought against Stothard and Cromek by the biographer of Blake. What has been written in the text is of course based upon the assumption that Mr. Gilchrist has given an account of the matter as full and as fair as it was assuredly his desire to make it. As junior counsel (so to speak) on behalf of Blake, I have followed the lead of his biographer; for me in fact nothing remained but to revise and restate, with such clearness and brevity as I could, the case as laid down by him. This, finding on the face of it nothing incoherent or incredible, I have done; whether any man can disprove it remains to be seen. Meantime we are not left to our own choice in the matter of epithets. There is but one kind of phrase that will express such things and the doers of such things. Against Stothard no grave charge has been brought; none therefore can be refuted. Any reference to subsequent doings or sufferings of his must be unspeakably irrelevant to the matter in hand. Against Cromek a sufficiently heavy indictment has been laid; one which cannot be in the least degree lightened by countercharges of rash violence on Blake's part or blind hastiness on Mr. Gilchrist's. One thing alone can avail him in the way of whitewash. He is charged with theft; prove that he did not steal. He is charged with breach of contract; prove that his contract was never broken. He is charged with denying a commission given by him; prove that he did not deny it. For no man, it is to be feared, will now believe that Blake, sleeping or waking, forged the story of the commission or trumped up the story of the contract. That point of the defence the counsel for Cromek had best give up with all convenient speed; had better indeed not dream at all of entering upon it. Again: he is charged, as above, with adding to his apparent perfidy a superfetation of insolence, an accretion or excrescence of insult. Prove that he did not write the letter published by Mr. Cunningham in 1852. It is undoubtedly deplorable that any one now living should in any way have to suffer for the misdoings of a man, whom, were it just or even possible, one would be willing to overlook and to forget. But time is logical and equable; and this is but one among many inevitable penalties which time is certain to bring upon such wrong-doers in the end; penalties, or rather simple results of the thing done. Had this man either dealt honestly or while dealing dishonestly been but at the pains to keep clear of Walter Scott and William Blake, no writer would have had to disturb his memory. But now, however strong or sincere may be our just sense of pity for all to whom it may give pain, truth must be spoken; and the truth is that, unless the authorities cited can be utterly upset and broken down by some palpable proof in his favour, Cromek was what has been stated. Mr. Gilchrist also, in the course of his fair and lucid narrative, speaks once of "pity." Pity may be good, but proof is better. Until such proof come, the best that can be done for Cromek is to let well alone. Less could not have been said of him than equitable biography has here been compelled to say; no more need be said now and for ever, if counsel will have the wisdom to let sleeping dogs lie. This advice, if they cannot refute what is set down without more words, we must give them; [Greek: me kinei Kamarinan]. The waters are muddy enough without that. Vague and vain clamour of deprecation or appeal may be plaintive but is not conclusive. As to any talk of cruelty or indelicacy shown in digging up the dead misdeeds of dead men, it is simply pitiable. Were not reason wasted on such reasoners it might be profitable (which too evidently it is not) to reply that such an argument cuts right and left at once. Suppress a truth, and you suggest a lie; and a lie so suggested is the most "indelicate" of cruelties possible to inflict on the dead. If, for pity's sake or contempt's or for any other reason, the biographer had explained away the charges against Cromek which lay ready to his hand, he must have left upon the memory of Scott and upon the memory of Blake the stain of a charge as grave as this: if Cromek was honest, they were calumniators. To one or two the good name of a private man may be valuable; to all men the good name of a great man must be precious. This difference of value must not be allowed to weigh with us while considering the evidence; but the fact seems to be that no evidence in disproof of the main charges has been put forward which can be seriously thought worth sifting for a moment. This then being the sad case, to inveigh against Blake's biographer is utterly idle and hardly honest. If the stories are not true, any man's commentary which assumes their truth must be infinitely unimportant. If the stories are true, no remark annexed to the narrative can now blacken the accused further. Those alone who are responsible for the accusation brought can be convicted of unfairness in bringing it; Mr. Gilchrist, it must be repeated, found every one of the charges which we now find in his book, given under the hand and seal of honourable men. These he found it, as I do now, necessary to transcribe in a concise form; adding, as I have done, any brief remarks he saw fit to make in the interest of justice and for the sake of explanation. Let there be no more heard of appeal against this exercise of a patent right, of invective against this discharge of an evident duty. Disproof is the one thing that will now avail; and to anything short of that no one should again for an instant listen.

[6] It is to be regretted that the share taken in this matter by Flaxman, who defended Stothard from the charge of collusion with Cromek, appears to have alienated Blake from one of his first friends. Throughout the MS. so often cited by his biographer, he couples their names together for attack. In one of his rough epigrams, formless and pointless for the most part, but not without value for the sudden broken gleams of light they cast upon Blake's character and history, he reproaches both sculptor and painter with benefits conferred by himself and disowned by them: and the blundering stumbling verses thus jotted down to relieve a minute's fit of private anger are valuable as evidence for his sincere sense of injury.

To F. AND S.

"I found them blind: I taught them how to see;
And now they know neither themselves nor me.
'Tis excellent to turn a thorn to a pin,
A fool to a bolt, a knave to a glass of gin."

Whether or not he had in fact thus utilized his rivals by making the most out of their several qualities, may be questionable. If so, we must say he managed to scratch his own fingers with the pin, to miss his shot with the bolt, and to spill the liquor extracted from the essence of knavery. The following dialogue has equal virulence and somewhat more sureness of aim.

MR. STOTHARD TO MR. CROMEK.

"For fortune's favour you your riches bring;
But fortune says she gave you no such thing.
Why should you prove ungrateful to your friends,
Sneaking, and backbiting, and odds-and-ends?"

MR. CROMEK TO MR. STOTHARD.

"Fortune favours the brave, old proverbs say;
But not with money; that is not the way:
Turn back, turn back; you travel all in vain;
Turn through the iron gate down Sneaking Lane."

For the "iron gate" of money-making the brazen-browed speaker was no unfit porter. The crudity of these rough notes for some unfinished satire is not, let it be remembered, a fair sample of Blake's capacity for epigram; and it would indeed be unfair to cite them but for their value as to the matter in hand.

[7] Since writing the lines above I have been told by Mr. Seymour Kirkup that one picture at least among those exhibited at this time was the very noblest of all Blake's works; the "Ancient Britons." It appears to have dropped out of sight, but must be still hidden somewhere. Against the judgment of Mr. Kirkup there can be no appeal. The saviour of Giotto, the redeemer of Dante, has power to pronounce on the work of Blake. I allow what I said to stand as I said it at first, only that I may not miss the chance of calling attention to the loss and paying tribute to the critic.

[8] Written in 1863. Mr. Landor died Sept. 17th, 1864.

[9] Since the lines above were written, I have been informed by a surviving friend of Blake, celebrated throughout Italy as over England, in a time nearer our own, as (among other things) the discoverer of Giotto's fresco in the Chapel of the Podesta, that after Blake's death a gift of L100 was sent to his widow by the Princess Sophia, who must not lose the exceptional honour due to her for a display of sense and liberality so foreign to her blood. At whose suggestion it was made is not known, and worth knowing. Mrs. Blake sent back the money with all due thanks, not liking to take or keep what (as it seemed to her) she could dispense with, while many to whom no chance or choice was given might have been kept alive by the gift; and, as readers of the "Life" know, fell to work in her old age by preference. One complaint only she was ever known to make during her husband's life, and that gently. "Mr. Blake" was so little with her, though in the body they were never separated; for he was incessantly away "in Paradise"; which would not seem to have been far off. Mr. Kirkup also speaks of the courtesy with which, on occasion, Blake would waive the question of his spiritual life, if the subject seemed at all incomprehensible or offensive to the friend with him: he would no more obtrude than suppress his faith, and would practically accept and act upon the dissent or distaste of his companions without visible vexation or the rudeness of a thwarted fanatic. It was in the time of this intimacy (see note at p. 58) that Mr. Kirkup also saw, what seems long since to have dropped out of human sight, the picture of _The Ancient Britons_; which, himself also an artist, he thought and thinks the finest work of the painter: remembering well the fury and splendour of energy there contrasted with the serene ardour of simply beautiful courage; the violent life of the design, and the fierce distance of fluctuating battle.

[10] The direct cause of Blake's death, it appears from a MS. source, "was the mixing of the gall with the blood." It may be worth remark, that one brief notice at least of Blake's death made its way into print; the "Literary Gazette" (No. 552; the "Gentleman's Magazine" published it in briefer form but nearly identical words as far as it went) of August 18, 1827, saw fit to "record the death of a singular and very able man," in an article contributed mainly by "the kindness of a correspondent," who speaks as an acquaintance of Blake, and gives this account of his last days, prefaced by a sufficiently humble reference to the authorities of Fuseli, Flaxman, and Lawrence. "Pent, with his affectionate wife, in a close back-room in one of the Strand courts, his bed in one corner, his meagre dinner in another, a ricketty table holding his copper-plates in progress, his colours, books (among which his Bible, a Sessi Velutello's Dante, and Mr. Carey's translation, were at the top), his large drawings, sketches, and MSS.; his ankles frightfully swelled, his chest disordered, old age striding on, his wants increased, but not his miserable means and appliances; even yet was his eye undimmed, the fire of his imagination unquenched, and the preternatural never-resting activity of his mind unflagging. He had not merely a calmly resigned, but a cheerful and mirthful countenance. He took no thought for his life, what he should eat or what he should drink; nor yet for his body, what he should put on; but had a fearless confidence in that Providence which had given him the vast range of the world for his recreation and delight. Blake died last Monday; died as he had lived, piously, cheerfully, talking calmly, and finally resigning himself to his eternal rest like an infant to its sleep. He has left nothing except some pictures, copper-plates, and his principal work, a series of a hundred large designs from Dante.... He was active" (the good correspondent adds, further on) "in mind and body, passing from one occupation to another without an intervening minute of repose. Of an ardent, affectionate, and grateful temper, he was simple in manner and address, and displayed an inbred courteousness of the most agreeable character." Finally, the writer has no doubt that Mrs. Blake's "cause will be taken up by the distributors of those funds which are raised for the relief of distressed artists, and also by the benevolence of private individuals": for she "is left (we fear, from the accounts which have reached us) in a very forlorn condition, Mr. Blake himself having been much indebted for succour and consolation to his friend Mr. Linnell the painter." The discreet editor, "when further time has been allowed him for inquiry, will probably resume the matter:" but, we may now more safely prophesy, assuredly will not.

[11] Of course, there can be no question here of bad art: which indeed is a non-entity or contradiction in terms, as to speak of good art is to run into tautology. It is assumed, to begin with, that the artist has something to say or do worth doing or saying in an artistic form.

[12] Observe especially in Chaucer's most beautiful of young poems that appalling passage, where, turning the favourite edgetool of religious menace back with point inverted upon those who forged it, the poet represents men and women of religious habit or life as punished in the next world, beholding afar off with jealous regret the salvation and happiness of Venus and all her servants (converse of the Hoersel legend, which shows the religious or anti-Satanic view of the matter; though there too there is some pity or sympathy implied for the pagan side of things, revealing in the tradition the presence and touch of some poet): expressly punished, these monks and nuns, for their continence and holiness of life, and compelled after death to an eternity of fruitless repentance for having wilfully missed of pleasure and made light of indulgence in this world; which is perfect Albigeois. Compare the famous speech in _Aucassin et Nicolette_, where the typical hero weighs in a judicial manner the respective attractions of heaven and hell; deciding of course dead against the former on account of the deplorably bad company kept there; priests, hermits, saints, and such-like, in lieu of knights and ladies, painters and poets. One may remark also, the minute this pagan revival begins to get breathing-room, how there breaks at once into flower a most passionate and tender worship of nature, whether as shown in the bodily beauty of man and woman or in the outside loveliness of leaf and grass; both Chaucer and his anonymous southern colleague being throughout careful to decorate their work with the most delicate and splendid studies of colour and form. Either of the two choice morsels of doctrinal morality cited above would have exquisitely suited the palate of Blake. He in his time, one need not doubt, was considerably worried and gibbered at by "monkeys in houses of brick," moral theorists, and "pantopragmatic" men of all sorts; what can we suppose he would have said or done in an epoch given over to preachers (lay, clerical, and mixed) who assert without fear or shame that you may demand, nay are bound to demand, of a picture or poem what message it has for you, what may be its moral utility or material worth? "Poetry must conform itself to" &c.; "art must have a mission and meaning appreciable by earnest men in an age of work," and so forth. These be thy gods, O Philistia.

[13] I will not resist the temptation to write a brief word of comment on this passage. While my words of inadequate and now of joyless praise were in course of printing, I heard that a mortal illness had indeed stricken the illustrious poet, the faultless critic, the fearless artist; that no more of fervent yet of perfect verse, no more of subtle yet of sensitive comment, will be granted us at the hands of Charles Baudelaire: that now for ever we must fall back upon what is left us. It is precious enough. We may see again as various a power as was his, may feel again as fiery a sympathy, may hear again as strange a murmur of revelation, as sad a whisper of knowledge, as mysterious a music of emotion; we shall never find so keen, so delicate, so deep an unison of sense and spirit. What verse he could make, how he loved all fair and felt all strange things, with what infallible taste he knew at once the limit and the licence of his art, all may see at a glance. He could give beauty to the form, expression to the feeling, most horrible and most obscure to the senses or souls of lesser men. The chances of things parted us once and again; the admiration of some years, at last in part expressed, brought me near him by way of written or transmitted word; let it be an excuse for the insertion of this note, and for a desire, if so it must be, to repeat for once the immortal words which too often return upon our lips;

"Ergo in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale!"

[14] There are exceptions, we are told from the first, to all rules; and the sole exception to this one is great enough to do all but establish a rival rule. But, as I have tried already to say, the work--all the work--of Victor Hugo is in its essence artistic, in its accident alone philanthropic or moral. I call this the sole exception, not being aware that the written work of Dante or Shelley did ever tend to alter the material face of things; though they may have desired that it should, and though their unwritten work may have done so. Accidentally of course a poet's work may tend towards some moral or actual result; that is beside the question.

[15] The reader who cares to remember that everything here set down is of immediate importance and necessity for the understanding of the matter in hand (namely, the life of Blake, and the faith and works which made that life what it was) may as well take here a word of comment. It will soon be necessary for even the very hack-writers and ingenious people of ready pens and wits who now babble about Balzac in English and French as a splendid specimen of their craft, fertile but faulty, and so forth--to understand that they have nothing to do with Balzac; that he is not of their craft, nor of any but the common craft of all great men--the guild of godlike things and people; that a shelf holding "all Balzac's novels--forty volumes long," is not "cabin-furniture" for any chance "passenger" to select or reject. Error and deficiency there may be in his work; but none such as they can be aware of. Of poetic form, for example, we know that he knew nothing; the error would be theirs who should think his kind of work the worse for that. Among men equally great, the distinctive supremacy of Balzac is this; that whereas the great men who are pure artists (Shakespeare for instance) work by implication only, and hardly care about descending to the level of a preacher's or interpreter's work, he is the only man not of their kind who is great enough to supply their place in his own way--to be their correlative in a different class of workmen; being from his personal point of view simply impeccable and infallible. The pure artist never asserts; he suggests, and therefore his meaning is totally lost upon moralists and sciolists--is indeed irreparably wasted upon the run of men who cannot work out suggestions. Balzac asserts; and Balzac cannot blunder or lie. So profound and extensive a capacity of moral apprehension no other prose writer, no man of mere analytic faculty, ever had or can have. This assuredly, when men become (as they will have to become) capable of looking beyond the mere clothes and skin of his work, will be always, as we said, his great especial praise; that he was, beyond any other man, the master of morals--the greatest direct expounder of actual moral fact. Once consent to forget or overlook the mere _entourage_ and social habiliment of Balzac's intense and illimitable intellect, you cannot fail of seeing that he of all men was fittest to grapple with all strange things and words, and compel them by divine violence of spiritual rape to bring forth flowers and fruits good for food and available for use.

[16] Could God bring down his heart to the making of a thing so deadly and strong? or could any lesser daemonic force of nature take to itself wings and fly high enough to assume power equal to such a creation? Could spiritual force so far descend or material force so far aspire? Or, when the very stars, and all the armed children of heaven, the "helmed cherubim" that guide and the "sworded seraphim" that guard their several planets, wept for pity and fear at sight of this new force of monstrous matter seen in the deepest night as a fire of menace to man--

"Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?"

We may add another cancelled reading to show how delicately the poem has been perfected; although by an oversight of the writer's most copies hitherto have retained some trace of the rough first draught, neglecting in one line a change necessary to save the sense as well as to complete the sentence.

"And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet

Could fetch it from the furnace deep
And in thy horrid ribs dare steep?
In what clay and in what mould
Were thine eyes of fury rolled?"

Having cancelled this stanza or sketched ghost of a stanza, Blake in his hurry of rejection did not at once remember to alter the last line of the preceding one; leaving thus a stone of some size and slipperiness for editorial feet to trip upon, until the recovery of that nobler reading--

"What dread hand _framed thy_ dread feet?"

Nor was this little "rock of offence" cleared from the channel of the poem even by the editor of 1827, who was yet not afraid of laying hand upon the text. So grave a flaw in so short and so great a lyric was well worth the pains of removing and is yet worth the pains of accounting for; on which ground this note must be of value to all who take in verse with eye and ear instead of touching it merely with eyelash and finger-tip in the manner of sand-blind students.

[17] Compare the passage in _Ahania_ where the growth of it is defined; rooted in the rock of separation, watered with the tears of a jealous God, shot up from sparks and fallen germs of material seed; being after all a growth of mere error, and vegetable (not spiritual) life; the topmost stem of it made into a cross whereon to nail the dead redeemer and friend of men.

[18] Compare again in the _Vision of the Last Judgment_ (v. 2, p. 163), that definition of the "Divine body of the Saviour, the true Vine of Eternity," as "the Human Imagination, who appeared to me as coming to judgment among his saints, and throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal might be established." The whole of that subtle and eloquent rhapsody is about the best commentary attainable on Blake's mystical writings and designs. It is impossible to overstate the debt of gratitude due from all students of Blake to the transcriber and editor of the _Vision_, whose indefatigable sense and patient taste have made it legible for all. To have extracted it piecemeal from the chaos of notes jotted down by Blake in the most inconceivable way, would have been a praiseworthy labour enough; but without addition or omission to have constructed these abortive fragments into a whole so available and so admirable, is a labour beyond praise.

[19] This exquisite verse did not fall into its place by chance; the poem has been more than once revised. Its opening stanza stood originally thus:--

"Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep
Thou wilt every secret keep;
Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,
Thou shalt taste the joys of night."

Before recasting the whole, Blake altered the second line into--

"Canst thou any secret keep?"

The gist of the song is this; the speaker, watching a girl newly-born, compares her innocuous infancy with the power that through beauty will one day be hers, her blameless wiles and undeveloped desires with the strong and subtle qualities now dormant which the years will assuredly awaken within her; seeing as it were the whole woman asleep in the child, he smells future fruit in the unblown bud. On retouching his work, Blake thus wound up the moral and tune of this song in a stanza forming by its rhymes an exact antiphonal complement to the end of the first _Cradle Song_.

"When thy little heart does wake,
Then the dreadful lightnings break
From thy cheek and from thine eye,
O'er the youthful harvests nigh;
Infant wiles and infant smiles
Heaven and earth of peace beguiles."

The epithet "infant" has supplanted that of "female," which was perhaps better: as to the grammatical licence, Blake followed in that the Elizabethan fashion which made the rule of sound predominate over all others. The song, if it loses simplicity, seems to gain significance by this expansion of the dim original idea; and beauty by expression of the peril latent in a life whose smiles as yet breed no strife between friends, kindle no fire among the unripe shocks of growing corn; but whose words shall hereafter be as very swords, and her eyes as lightning; _teterrima belli causa_.

[20] "His," the good man's: this lax piece of grammar (shifting from singular to plural and back again without much tangible provocation) is not infrequent with Blake, and would hardly be worth righting if that were feasible. A remarkable instance is but too patent in the final "chorus" of the _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_. Such rough licence is given or taken by old poets; and Blake's English is always beautiful enough to be pardonable where it slips or halts: especially as its errors are always those of a rapid lyrical style, never of a tortuous or verbose ingenuity: it stammers and slips occasionally, but never goes into convulsions like that of some later versifiers.

[21] Such we must consider, for instance, the second _Little Boy Lost_, which looks at first more of a riddle and less worth solution than the haziest section of the prophetic books. A cancelled reading taken from the rough copy in the _Ideas_ will at all events make one stanza more amenable to reason:

"I love myself; so does the bird
That picks up crumbs around the door."

Blake was rather given to erase a comparatively reasonable reading and substitute something which cannot be confidently deciphered by the most daring self-reliance of audacious ingenuity, until the reader has found some means of pitching his fancy for a moment in the ordinary key of the prophet's. This uncomfortable little poem is in effect merely an allegoric or fabulous appeal against the oppression of formulas (or family "textualism" of the blind and unctuous sort) which refuse to single and simple insight, to the outspoken innocence of a child's laughing or confused analysis, a right to exist on any terms: just as the companion poem is an appeal, so vague as to fall decidedly flat, against the externals of moral fashion. Both, but especially the _Girl_, have some executive merit: not overmuch. To the surprising final query, "Are such things done on Albion's shore?" one is provoked to respond, "On the whole, not, as far as we can see;" but the "Albion" of Blake's verse is never this weaving and spinning country of our working days; it is rather some inscrutable remote land of Titanic visions, moated with silent white mist instead of solid and sonorous surf, and peopled with vague pre-Adamite giants symbolic of more than we can safely define or conceive. An inkling of the meaning may, if anything can, be extracted from some parts of the _Jerusalem_; but probably no one will try.

[22] With more time and room to work in, we might have noticed in these less dramatic and seemingly less original poems of the second series which take up from the opposite point of view matters already handled to such splendid effect in the _Songs of Innocence_, a depth and warmth of moral quality worth remark; infinite tenderness of heart and fiery pity for all that suffer wrong; something of Hugo's or Shelley's passionate compassion for those who lie open to "all the oppression that is done under the sun"; something of the anguish and labour, the fever-heat of sleepless mercy and love incurable which is common to those two great poets. The second _Holy Thursday_ is doubtless far enough below the high level of the first; but the second _Chimney-sweeper_ as certainly has a full share of this passionate grace of pain and pity. Blake's love of children never wrung out into his work a more pungent pathos or keener taste of tears than in the last verse of this poem. It stood thus in the first draught:

"And because I am happy and dance and sing
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his priest and king,
Who wrap themselves up in our misery."

The quiet tremulous anger of that, its childish sorrow and contempt, are no less true than subtle in effect. It recalls another floating fragment of verse on social wrongs which shall be rescued from the chaos of the _Ideas_:

"There souls of men are bought and sold,
And milk-fed infancy, for gold;
And youths to slaughter-houses led,
And maidens, for a bit of bread."

[23] This verse is of course to be read as one made up of rough but regular anapaests; the heavier accents falling consequently upon every third syllable--that is, upon the words _if_, _not_, and _him_. The next line is almost as rough, and seems indeed to slip into the solid English iambic; but may also be set right by giving full attention to accent.

[24] A strange and rather beautiful, if grotesque, evidence of the unity of faith and feeling to which Blake and his wife had come by dint of living and thinking so long together, is given by one of the stray notes in this same book: which we transcribe at full on account of its great biographical value as a study of character. Space might have been found for it in the Life, if only to prove once again how curiously the nature and spiritual habits of a great man leave their mark or dye upon the mind nearest to his own.

"SOUTH MOLTON STREET.

"_Sunday, August, 1807._--My wife was told by a spirit to look for
her fortune by opening by chance a book which she had in her hand; it
was Bysshe's 'Art of Poetry.' She opened the following:--

'I saw 'em kindle with desire,
While with soft sighs they blew the fire;
Saw the approaches of their joy,
He growing more fierce and she less coy;
Saw how they mingled melting rays,
Exchanging love a thousand ways.
Kind was the force on every side;
Her new desire she could not hide,
Nor would the shepherd be denied.
The blessed minute he pursued,
Till she, transported in his arms,
Yields to the conqueror all her charms.
His panting breast to hers now joined,
They feast on raptures unconfined,
Vast and luxuriant; such as prove
The immortality of love.
For who but a Divinity
Could mingle souls to that degree
And melt them into ecstasy?
Now like the Phoenix both expire,
While from the ashes of their fire
Springs up a new and soft desire.
Like charmers, thrice they did invoke
The God, and thrice new vigour took.'--_Behn._

"I was so well pleased with her luck that I thought I would try my
own, and opened the following:--

'As when the winds their airy quarrel try,
Jostling from every quarter of the sky,
This way and that the mountain oak they bear,
His boughs they scatter and his branches tear;
With leaves and falling mast they spread the ground;
The hollow valleys echo to the sound;
Unmoved, the royal plant their fury mocks,
Or, shaken, clings more closely to the rocks:
For as he shoots his towering head on high,
So deep in earth his fixed foundations lie.'--_Dryden's Virgil._"

Nothing is ever so cynical as innocence, whether it be a child's or a mystic's. As a poet, Blake had some reason to be "well pleased" with his wife's curious windfall; for those verses of the illustrious Aphra's have some real energy and beauty of form, visible to those who care to make allowance, first for the conventional English of the time, and secondly for the naked violence of manner natural to that she-satyr, whose really great lyrical gifts are hopelessly overlaid and encrusted by the rough repulsive husk of her incredible style of speech. Even "Astraea" must however have fair play and fair praise; and the simple truth is that, when writing her best, this "unmentionable" poetess has a vigorous grace and a noble sense of metre to be found in no other song-writer of her time. One song, fished up by Mr. Dyce out of the weltering sewerage of Aphra's unreadable and unutterable plays, has a splendid quality of verse, and even some degree of sentiment not wholly porcine. Take four lines as a sample, and Blake's implied approval will hardly seem unjustifiable:--

"From thy bright eyes he took those fires
Which round about in sport he hurled;
But 'twas from mine he took desires
Enough to undo the amorous world."

The strong and subtle cadence of that magnificent fourth verse gives evidence of so delicate an ear and such dexterous power of hand as no other poet between the Restoration date and Blake's own time has left proof of in serious or tragic song. Great as is Dryden's lyrical work in more ways than one, its main quality is mere strength of intellect and solidity of handling--the forcible and imperial manner of his satires; and in pure literal song-writing, which (rather than any 'ode' or such-like mixed poem) may be taken as the absolute and final test of a poet's lyrical nature, he never came near this mark. Francois Villon and Aphra Behn, the two most inexpressibly non-respectable of male or female Bohemians and poets, were alike in this as well; that the supreme gift of each, in a time sufficiently barren of lyrical merit, was the gift of writing admirable songs; and this, after all, has perhaps borne better fruit for us than any gift of moral excellence.

[25] Another version of this line, with less of pungent and brilliant effect, has yet a touch of sound in it worth preserving: some may even prefer it in point of simple lyrical sweetness:

"She played and she melted in all her prime:
Ah! that sweet love should be thought a crime."

[26] On closer inspection of Blake's rapid autograph I suspect that in the second line those who please may read "the ruddy limbs and flowering hair," or perhaps "flowery;" but the type of flame is more familiar to Blake. Compare further on "A Song of Liberty."

[27] Other readings are "soothed" and "smiled"--readings adopted after the insertion of the preceding stanza. As the subject is a child not yet grown to standing and walking age, these readings are perhaps better, though less simple in sound, than the one I have retained.

[28] Here and throughout to the end, duly altering metre and grammar with a quite laudable care, Blake has substituted "my father" for the "priests;" not I think to the improvement of the poem, though probably with an eye to making the end cohere rather more closely with the beginning. This and the "Myrtle" are shoots of the same stock, and differ only in the second grafting. In the last-named poem the father's office was originally thus;

"Oft my myrtle sighed in vain
To behold my heavy chain:
Oft my father saw us sigh,
And laughed at our simplicity."

Here too Blake had at first written, "Oft the priest beheld us sigh;" he afterwards cancelled the whole passage, perhaps on first remarking the rather too grotesque confusion of a symbolic myrtle with a literal wife; and the last stanza in either form is identical. The simple subtle grace of both poems, and the singular care of revision bestowed on them, are equally worth notice.

[29] Those who insist on the tight lacing of grammatical stays upon the "pained loveliness" of a muse's over-pliant body may use if they please Blake's own amended reading; in which otherwise the main salt of the poem is considerably diluted as by tepid water: the angel (one might say) has his sting blunted and the best quill of his pinion pulled out.

"And without one word said
Had a peach from the tree;
And still as a maid," &c.

[30] We may find place here for another fairy song, quaint in shape and faint in colour, but with the signet of Blake upon it; copied from a loose scrap of paper on the back of which is a pencilled sketch of Hercules throttling the serpents, whose twisted limbs make a sort of spiral cradle around and above the child's triumphant figure: an attendant, naked, falls back in terror with sharp recoil of drawn-up limbs; Alcmena and Amphitryon watch the struggle in silence, he grasping her hand.