No More Learning

If not quite such high praise can be given to his verse, it is
not in regard to form that he fails. On the contrary, there are
strong reasons for assigning to him the first clear perception of
the secret of that prosodic language which almost everybody was
to practise in Southey's own time and ever since. Whether, in actual
date, his early ballads preceded The Ancient Mariner and the first
part of Christabel in the use of substitution, it may be difficult to
decide absolutely; though, even here, the precedence seems to be
his. But, what is absolutely certain is that his formulation of the
principle in a letter to Wynn is twenty years earlier in time
than Coleridge's in the preface to the published Christabel and
very much more accurate in statement. There are many other
references to res metrica in his work, and it is a curious addition
to the losses which the subject suffered by the non-completion
of Jonson's and Dryden's promised treatises, that Guest's English
Rhythms, which was actually sent to him for review, reached him
too late for the treatment which he, also, designed. And, in general
criticism, though his estimate of individual work was sometimes
(not often) coloured by prejudice, he was very often extraordinarily
original and sound. For a special instance, his singling out of
Blake's 'Mad Song' may serve; for a general, the fact that, as
early as 1801, he called attention to the fact that
there exists no tale of romance that does not betray gross and unpardonable
ignorance of the habits of feeling and thought prevalent at the time and in
the scene,
thereby hitting the very blot which spoils nearly all the novel-
writing of the time, and which was first avoided by Scott, much later.
To those who have been able to acquire something of what has
· Letters, vol. I, p. 173.
>


## p. 171 (#193) ############################################

VIII] Southey and Dryden 171
been called 'a horizontal view of literature-a thing even better,
perhaps, than the more famous 'Pisgah sight,' inasmuch as the
slightly deceptive perspective of distance is removed, and the
things pass in procession or panorama before the eye-there are,
with, of course, some striking differences, more striking resem-
blances in the literary character and the literary fates of Southey
and Dryden. The comparison may, at first sight, be exclaimed
against, and some of its most obvious features—such as the charges
of tergiversation brought against both—are not worth dwelling on.
But there are others which will come out and remain out, all the
more clearly the longer they are studied. The polyhistoric or
professional man-of-letters character of both, though equally
obvious, is not equally trivial. Both had a singularly interchange-
able command of the two harmonies of verse and prose; and, in
the case of no third writer is it so difficult to attach any 'ticket'
to the peculiar qualities which have placed the prose style of each
among the most perfect in the plain kind that is known to English.
Their verse, when compared with that of the greater poets of their
own time—Milton in the one case, half a dozen from Coleridge to
Keats in the other has been accused, and can hardly be cleared,
of a certain want of poetical quintessence. Dryden, indeed, was as
much Southey's superior intellectually as, perhaps, he was morally
his inferior: and, neither as poet nor as prose writer, has the later
of the pair any single productions to put forward as rivals to An
Essay of Dramatick Poesie, All for Love, the great satires, the
best parts of the Prefaces, and the best Fables. He will, therefore,
perhaps, never recover, as Dryden, to a great extent, has re-
covered, from the neglect which lay upon him from about 1830
to about 1880. In regard to Southey, this attitude was begun,
not by Byron or Hazlitt or his other contemporary detractors
—who really held him very high as a writer, though they might
dislike him in other ways—but by the more extreme romantics
of a younger generation, and by persons like Emerson. That it
will be wholly removed, or removed to the same extent as the
neglect of Dryden has been, would, perhaps, be too much to expect.
But there is still much that should and can be done in the way
of altering or lessening it; and a sign or two of willingness to
help in the work, has, perhaps, recently been noticeable.
i It is, however, a rather unfortunate revenge of the whirligig of time that, while
Southey's detractors, in his own day, usually made him out to be a very bad man of
genins, some of his rehabilitators seem to see in him a very good man of no genius
at all.


## p. 172 (#194) ############################################

172
[CH.
Lesser Poets
LESSER POETS OF THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
It has been thought proper to group, round or under Southey,
like gunboats under the wings of a 'mother' frigate, certain lesser
poets of the mid- and later eighteenth century, notice of whom may
continue that given to others of their kidney in previous volumes.
It would, indeed, be possible, without very extravagant fanciful-
ness, or wiredrawing, to make out more than an accidental or
arbitrary connection between him and at least some of them.
For, beyond all doubt, he was much indebted to Anstey for patterns
of light anapaestic verse, and more so to Sayers for an example
of rimelessness. Long before he knew Coleridge, he, also, felt that
curious influence of Bowles's Sonnets which supplies one main
historical vindication and reason for existence to minor poetry.
Hayley was his friend and Merry his acquaintance. His connection
with Hanbury Williams is, indeed, a sort of ‘back-handed' one;
for he tells us that he had refused, twenty years before its actual
appearance, to edit the existing collection of Williams's Poems,
disapproving of their contents; and this disapproval would cer-
tainly have extended, perhaps in a stronger form, to Hall Stevenson.
But these are points which need no labouring. Moreover, which
is strictly to the purpose, he was himself all his life distinguished
by a catholic and kindly taste which he showed not only to
minorities of his own time from Kirke White downwards, but in
collecting three agreeable volumes", of seventeenth and eighteenth
century writers to follow Ellis's Specimens. These volumes may
still, in no unpleasant fashion, revive half-forgotten memories of
Amherst and Boyse and Croxall, of Fawkes and Woty and William
Thompson, while they may suggest once more, if, perhaps, in vain,
the removal of more absolute forgetfulness if not original ignorance,
in the cases of Constantia Grierson and Mary Leapor, of Moses
Mendez and Samuel Bellamy.
For such as these last, however, only a chronicle planned on
the scale of L'Histoire Littéraire de la France and destined to
be finished, if ever, in a millennium, could well find room. We may
notice here Anstey, Hanbury Williams and Hall Stevenson among
writers distinctly earlier than Southey; Darwin, Hayley, the Della
Cruscans, Bowles, Sayers and one or two more among his actual
contemporaries, older and younger.
1 To himself, they gave a good deal of trouble—as usual, because he had thought
to spare himself some by devolving part of the work on Grosvenor Bedford. He never
did it again.
ef
a


## p. 173 (#195) ############################################

vin]
Anstey
173
The three lighter members of the group, Anstey, Stevenson and
Hanbury Williams, were by far the eldest: if Williams had not died
prematurely, he would have been a man of over sixty at Southey's
birth, and, though Anstey lived to the year of Madoc, he was fifty
when Southey was born. All three, in a manner, were survivals of
the school of sarcastic and social verse which had been founded by
Prior and Swift, and taken up by Gay. Nor did Anstey, though
his verse is somewhat ‘freer' than taste has permitted for nearly
a century, exceed limits quite ordinary in his own day. He is
remarkable as being, in poetry, a 'single-speech' writer, that is to
say as having, like Hamilton himself, by no means confined himself
to a single utterance, but as having never achieved any other that
was of even the slightest value. An Etonian and a Cambridge man
of some scholarship; a squire, a sportsman and a member of
parliament, Anstey, in 1766, produced the famous New Bath
Guide, a series of verse letters, mainly in anapaests of the Prior
type, which at once became popular, and which still stands
preeminent, not merely among the abundant literature which
Bath has produced or instigated, for good humour, vivid painting
of manners, facile and welladapted versification, and fun which
need not be too broad for any but a very narrow mind. Anstey
lived, chiefly in the city of which he had made himself the laureate,
for forty years, and wrote much, but, as has been said, produced
nothing of worth after this history of 'The Bl[u]nd[e]rh[ea]d
Family' and their adventures.
A charitable epigrammatist has divided 'loose’ writers of any
merit at all into those who sometimes follow the amusing across
the border of the indecent and those who, in the quest of the
indecent, sometimes hit upon the amusing. If Anstey deserves
the indulgence of the former class, Hanbury Williams and Hall
Stevenson must, it is feared, be condemned to, and by, the latter.
It is true that, in Williams's case, some doubt has been thrown on
the authorship of the grossest pieces attributed to him, and that
most other things recorded of him-except a suspected showing of
the white feather-are rather favourable. He appears, both in
Horace Walpole's letters and in Chesterfield's, as a man extremely
goodnatured and unwearied in serving his friends. It is certain,
however, that the suicide which terminated his life was preceded,
and probably caused, by a succession of attacks of mental disease;
and, in some of the coarsest work assigned to him in the singularly
uncritical hodgepodge of his Works, a little critical kindness may
a


## p. 174 (#196) ############################################

174
[CH.
Hanbury Williams
trace that purely morbid fondness for foulness which mental
disease often, if not always, brings with it. On the whole,
however, Williams's asperity and his indecency have both been
exaggerated. He took part ardently on the side of Sir Robert in
the 'great Walpolian battle' and was never weary of lampooning
Pulteney. But his most famous 'skits'—those on Isabella, duchess
of Manchester, and her way of spending her morning and her
subsequent marriage to the Irishman Hussey—are neither very
virulent nor very 'improper. ' The fault of Williams's political
and social verse is a want of concentration and finish. In these
points, the notes which his editor (Lord Holland? ) gathered
from Horace Walpole in prose are frequently far superior to
the verse they illustrate. But the verse itself is full of flashes
and phrases, some of which have slipped into general use, and
many of which are far superior to their context. Compared with
the brilliant political verse, first on the whig, then on the tory,
side, of the last twenty years of the century, Sir Charles is pointless
and dull; but, in himself, to anyone with a fair knowledge of the
politics and persons of the time, he is far from unamusing. Some-
times, also, he could (if the Ballad in Imitation of Martial,
'Dear Betty come give me sweet kisses,' written on Lord and Lady
Ilchester, be his) be quite goodnatured, quite clean and almost as
graceful as Prior or Martial himself.
The notorious John Hall Stevenson, Sterne's Eugenius, master
of 'Crazy Castle' and author of Crazy Tales, had, beyond all
doubt, greater intellectual ability than Williams; and, though
eccentric in some ways, was neither open to the charge, nor
entitled to plead the excuse, of insanity. He wrote a good deal of
verse-much of it extremely slovenly in form, though, every now
and then as in the lines on Zachary Moore, the description of
the Cleveland deserts at the back of his house and of the house
itself and some others—showing a definite poetical power, which
was far above Sir Charles. But the bulk of his work consists
either of political squibs largely devoted to abuse of Bute (Fables
for Grown Gentlemen, Makarony Tales, etc. ) or of the ‘Crazy'
compositions above referred to. The former, for a man of such
wellauthenticated wit as Stevenson, are singularly verbose, de-
sultory and dull. If anyone has derived his ideas of what political
satire ought to be, say, from Dryden in an earlier, and Canning in a
later, age, he will be woefully disappointed with A Pastoral Cordial
and A Pastoral Puke, which, between them, fill eighty or ninety


## p. 175 (#197) ############################################

3.
ਦੇ!
VIII] Hall Stevenson, Darwin 175
mortal pages, and contain hardly a line that could cheer a friend
or gall an enemy. A very few purely miscellaneous pieces like the
lines to 'the Pumproom Naiad,' Polly Lawrence of Bath, show,
once more, that, if Stevenson had chosen to be goodnatured and
clean, he might have been a very pleasant poet. As for Crazy
Tales, some of them are actual French fabliaux of the coarser
kind translated or adapted, and the rest are imitations of the
same style. It would be unfair to bring up La Fontaine against
them; but anyone who knows, say, the nearly contemporary
gauloiseries of Chamfort—himself neither the most amiable, nor
the cleanest minded, nor the most poetical of men-will find
English at a painful disadvantage in the prosaic brutality of too
much of Stevenson's work. He, sometimes, succeeds even here in
being amusing; but, much more often, he only succeeds in proving
that, if the use of proper words will not by itself produce wisdom,
the use of improper ones will still less by itself produce wit.
માં
to
th
+
2
1
1
Who now reads Erasmus Darwin? Yet he pleased both Horace
Walpole and William Cowper, his verses were called by the latter
'strong, learned and sweet,' and by the former 'sublime,''charm-
ing,' 'enchanting,' 'gorgeous,''beautiful and ‘most poetic. It
is idle to assign Darwin's poetic extinction to Canning's parody,
admirable as that is, for, if there is one critical axiom univer-
sally endorsed by good critics of all ages, schools and principles,
it is that parody cannot kill—that it cannot even harm-any-
thing that has not the seeds of death and decay in itself. The
fact is that Darwin, with a fatal, and, as if metaphysically aided,
certainty, evolved from the eighteenth century couplet poetry all
its worst features, and set them in so glaring a light that only
those still under the actual spell could fail to perceive their
deformity. Unsuitableness of subject; rhetorical extravagance
and, at the same time, convention of phrase; otiose and pad-
ding epithet; monotonously cadenced verse; every fault of the
mere imitators of Pope in poetry, Darwin mustered in The
Botanic Garden, and especially in its constituent The Loves of
the Plants. It is true, but it is also vain, to say that the subject,
in itself, is interesting and positively valuable; that the rhetoric,
the phraseology, the effort, are all very craftsmanlike examples of
crafts bad in themselves. The very merits of the effort are faults
as and where they are; and it has none of the faults which, in
true poetry, are not seldom merits. Although one would not lose
The Loves of the Triangles for anything, it is superfluous as a
3
]


## p. 176 (#198) ############################################

176
Darwin, Hayley
[CH.
mere parody. The Loves of the Plants is a parody in itself and of
itself, as well as of the whole school of verse which it crowned and
crushed. Time is not likely to destroy, and may rather increase,
the credit due to Darwin's scientific pioneership: its whirligig is
never likely to restore the faintest genuine taste for his pseudo-
poetry.
For Darwin's opus, however, one cannot, though it may, at
first sight, seem inconsistent to say so, feel actual contempt. It is
simply a huge, and, from one point of view, a ludicrous, but still a
respectable, and, from another point of view, almost lamentable,
mistake. The works of Hayley, the other great idol of the decadence
of eighteenth century poetry, are contemptible. The Loves of the
Plants is not exactly silly. The Triumph of Temper is. That
puerility and anility which were presently to find, for the time, final
expression in the Della Cruscan school, displayed themselves in
Hayley with less extravagance, with less sentimentality and with
less hopelessly bad taste than the revolutionary school were to
impart, but still unmistakably. Hayley himself, as his conduct to
Cowper and to Blake shows, was a man of kindly feelings; indeed,
everybody seems to have liked him. He was something of a
scholar, or, at the worst, a fairly wellread man. His interests
were various and respectable. But, as a poet, he is impossible.
Southey, in deprecating one of Coleridge's innumerable projects-
a general criticism of contemporaries (which would certainly, if
we may judge from the wellknown review of Maturin's Bertram
in Biographia, have been a field of garments rolled in blood)
specified Hayley as a certain, but halfinnocent, victim, urging
that there is nothing bad about the man except his poetry. '
Unfortunately, on the present occasion, nothing about the man
concerns us except his poetry; and the badness, or, at least, the
nullity, of that it is impossible to exaggerate. A fair line may be
found here and there; a fair stanza or passage hardly ever; a good,
or even a fair poem, never.
>
For the nadir of the art, however-which, as if to justify
divers sayings, was reached just before the close of the eighteenth
century, and just before those ascents to the zenith which illus-
trated its actual end, and the early nineteenth-one must go beyond
Darwin, beyond even Hayley, to Robert Merry and those about
him to the school commonly called the Della Cruscans, from the
famous Florentine academy to which Merry actually belonged, and


## p. 177 (#199) ############################################

VIII]
The Della Cruscans
177
the title of which he took as signature. Darwin, as has been said,
is a pattern of mistaken elaborateness, and Hayley one of well-
intentioned nullity. But Darwin was not imbecile; and Hayley
was not, or not very, pretentious. The school just referred to was
preceded in its characteristics by some earlier work, such as that
of Helen Maria Williams and Sir James Bland Burgess (later
(om
Sir James Lamb). But, in itself, it united pretentiousness and
imbecility after a fashion not easy to parallel elsewhere; and was,
inadequately, rather than excessively, chastised in the satires of
Gifford and Mathias. It does not appear that all its members
were, personally, absolute fools. Merry himself is credited by
Soutbey and others with a sort of irregular touch of genius: and
‘Anna Matilda'—Mrs Cowley, the author of The Belle's Stratagem
-certainly had wits. But they, and still more their followers,
‘Laura,''Arley,' 'Benedict,” “Cesario,' 'The Bard,' etc. (some of whom
can be identified, while others, fortunately for themselves, cannot)
drank themselves drunk at the heady tap of German Sturm-und-
Drang romanticism, blending it with French sentimentality and
Italian trifling, so as to produce almost inconceivable balderdash.
Even the widest reading of English verse could hardly enable
anyone to collect from the accumulated poetry of the last three
centuries an anthology of folly and bad taste surpassing the two
volumes of The British Album, the crop of a very few years and
the labour of some half-a-dozen or half-a-score pens.
Of the last constituents of the group under present review,
it is, fortunately, possible to treat Bowles and Sayers, both of them
possessing, as has been said, some special connection with Southey,
in a different fashion. Neither, so far as poetic inspiration goes, was
even a secondclass poet; but both exercised very great influence
over poets greater than themselves, and, therefore, have made good
their place in literary history. William Lisle Bowles, slightly the
elder, and very much the more longlived, of the two, has left (as in
that life of many years he might easily do without neglecting his
duties as a country clergyman) a very considerable amount of
verse, which it is not necessary for anyone save the conscientious
historian or the unwearied explorer of English poetry to read, but
which can be read without any extraordinary difficulty or disgust.
Bowles, indeed, never deserves the severer epithets of condemnation
which have been applied in the last page or two. His theories of
poetry (of which more presently) were sound and his practice was
never offensively foolish, or in bad taste, or even dull. He lacks
12
E, L, XI.
CH. VIII.


## p. 178 (#200) ############################################

178
[ch.
Bowles
distinction and intensity. But he lives, in varying degrees of
vitality, by two things only that he did, one at the very outset of
his career, the other at a later stage of it. His first claim, and by
far his highest, is to be found in Fourteen Sonnets (afterwards
reinforced in number), which originally appeared in 1789, and
which passed through nearly half-a-score of editions in hardly
more than as many years. Grudging critics have observed that
they were lucky in coming before the great outburst of 1798—
1824, and in being contrasted with such rubbish as that which
we have been reviewing. It would be uncritical as well as un-
generous not to add that, actually, they did much to start the
movement that eclipsed them; and that, whatever their faults
may be, these are merely negative—are, in fact, almost positive
virtues—when compared with the defects of Darwin and Hayley
and the Della Cruscans. Although Bowles was not the first
Exerat. poena to revive the sonnet, he was the first
, for more than a century,
a
to perceive its double fitness for introspection and for outlook ;
Pantylic
to combine description with sentiment in the new poetical way.
It is no wonder that schoolboys like Coleridge and Southey,
gluttons alike of general reading and of poetry, should have
fastened on the book at once; no wonder that Coleridge, unable
to afford more printed examples, should have copied his own
again and again in manuscript for his friends. And it is one of the
feathers in the cap of that historic estimate which has been some-
times decried that nothing else could enable the reader to see the
real beauty of Bowles's humble attempts, undazzled and un-
blinded by the splendour of his followers' success. Tynemouth
and Bamborough Castle, Hope and The Influence of Time on
Grief are not very strong meat, not very 'mantling wine'; but
they are the first course, or the hors d'ouvre, of the abounding
banquet which followed.
Bowles's second appearance of importance was rather critical
than poetical, or, perhaps, let us say, had more to do with the
theory, than with the practice, of poetry. Editing Pope, he, not
unnaturally, revived the old question of the value of Pope's poetry:
and a mildly furious controversy followed, in which classically-
minded poets of the calibre of Byron and Campbell took part,
which produced numerous pamphlets, rather fluttered Bowles's
Wiltshire dovecote, but developed in him the fighting power of
birds much more formidable than doves. As usual, it was rather
a case of the gold and silver shield; but Bowles's general con-
tention that, in poetry, the source of subject and decoration alike
I
1


## p. 179 (#201) ############################################

VIII]
Sayers
179
should be rather nature than art, and Byron's incidental insist-
ence (very inconsistently maintained) that execution is the great
secret, were somewhat valuable by-products of a generally un-
profitable dispute.
Frank Sayers, a member of the almost famous Norwich literary
group of which William Taylor was a sort of coryphaeus, con-
tributed less to the actual body of English verse than Bowles.
His life was much shorter; he was, at any rate for a time, a
practising physician, and had a considerable number of other
avocations and interests besides poetry. But he touches the
subject, in theory and practice both, at one point, in a fashion
which was to prove decidedly important, if not in actual pro-
duction, yet influentially and historically. Whether Sayers was
originally attracted to unrimed verse, not blank in the ordinary
restricted sense, by the Germans, or by his own fancy, or by the
reading which, after his own practice, he showed to a rather re-
markable extent in a dissertation-defence on the subject—does not
seem to be quite clear. The dissertation itself, which was published
,
poetry, which was doing much to prepare the great romantic out-
burst that followed. Collins's Evening, and the now deservedly
forgotten choruses of Glover's Medea, would have been known to
anyone at the time, and, perhaps, Watts’s Sapphics (Cowper's were
not published). Most men must have known, though, perhaps,
few would have brought into the argument, Milton’s ‘Pyrrha’
version. But Sidney's practice in Arcadia, The Mourning Muse
of Thestylis, which was still thought Spenser's, and Peele's
Complaint of Oenone would have been present to the minds of
1
in 1793, shows the temarkable extension of knowledge of English persistent
very few.
But whether he had known all these before he wrote, as
Southey almost certainly did, or whether it was learning got
up to support practice, Sayers's own earlier Dramatic Sketches had
supplied the most ambitious and abundant experiments in un-
rimed verse since Sidney himself, or, at least, since Campion. He
does not entirely abjure rime; but, in Moina, Starno and his
version of the Euripidean Cyclops, he tried the unrimed Pindaric;
and (in a rather naïve, or more than rather unwisely ambitious,
manner) he actually supplemented Collins's ode with one To
Night, on the same model. Elsewhere, it is perfectly plain, not
merely from his rimelessness but from his titles and his diction,
that the influence of Ossian had a great deal to do with the
12-2


## p. 180 (#202) ############################################

180
[CH. VIII
Sayers
id
matter. He adopts, however, in all cases, regular verse-stanzas
instead of rimed prose. Sayers's poetical powers—wildly exalted
by some in that day of smallest poetical things and of darkness
before dawn-are very feeble: but he intends greatly, and does
not sin in either of the three directions of evil which, as we have
seen, Darwin and Hayley and the Della Cruscans respectively
represent. But the most interesting thing about him is the way in
which, like nearly everybody who has made similar attempts except
Southey (v. sup. ), he succumbs, despite almost demonstrable efforts
to prevent it, to the danger of chopped decasyllables, which unite
themselves in the reading and so upset the intended rhythm.
Such things as the parallel openings of Thalaba and of Queen
Mab he was incapable of reaching; but, if he had reached them,
their inherent poetry might have carried off the almost inevitable
defect of the scheme. As it is, that effect is patent and glaring.
Sir William Jones, who, in a life which did not reach the half
century, accumulated a singular amount of learning and of well-
deserved distinction, was more of an orientalist and of a jurist
than of a poet. But he managed to write two pieces—the Ode in
imitation of Alcaeus, 'What constitutes a state? ' and the beautiful
epigram From the Persian, 'On parent knees a naked new-born
child,' which have fixed themselves in literary history, and, what is
better, in memories really literary. If there is in these at least as
much of the scholar as of the poet, it can only be wished that we
had more examples of the combination of such scholarship with
such poetry.


## p. 181 (#203) ############################################

CHAPTER IX
1
BLAKE
6
WILLIAM BLAKE, born 28 November 1757, was the son of
a London hosier, who is said to have had leanings towards Sweden-
borgianism. This may explain Blake's acquaintance with writings
that exercised a marked influence upon his later doctrines and
symbolism, though he always held that the Swedish mystic failed
'by endeavouring to explain to the reason what it could not
understand. ' The boy never went to school, on account, it is said,
of a difficult temper. He 'picked up his education as well as he
could. ' According to one authority ? , Shakespeare's Venus and
Adonis, Lucrece and Sonnets, with Jonson's Underwoods and
Miscellanies were the favourite studies of his early days. To
these must be added Shakespeare's plays, Milton, Chatterton
and the Bible, "a work ever at his hand, and which he often
assiduously consulted in several languages'; for he acquired, at
different times, some knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, Italian
and Hebrew. Ossian and Gesnerian prose were less fortunate
influences.
At the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to James Basire, the
engraver, who sent him to make drawings of monuments in West-
minster abbey and other ancient churches in and about London.
Thus, he came under the direct influence of Gothic art, which
increased its hold upon his imagination, till it finally appeared to
him the supreme expression of all truth, while classicism was the
embodiment of all error. After leaving Basire, he studied for a
time in the antique school of the Royal Academy, and then began
work as an engraver on his own account. Shortly after his marriage
in 1782, Flaxman introduced him to Mrs Mathew, a famous blue-
stocking. The outcome of this was the printing of Poetical Sketches
(1783) at the expense of these two friends. In the Advertisement,
1 Benjamin Heath Malkin, author of A Father's Memoir of his Child (1806), the
dedicatory epistle to which contains a valuable note on Blake.
a


## p. 182 (#204) ############################################

182
[CH.
Blake
6
by another hand than Blake's, the contents of this slight volume are
said to have been written between the ages of twelve and twenty ;
while Malkin, apparently quoting Blake, asserts that the song
'How sweet I roam'd from field to field' was composed before his
fourteenth year. But his earliest writings seem to have been in
the distinctly rhythmical prose of the fragment known as The
Passions, which, like similar pieces included in Poetical Sketches,
is a juvenile essay in the inflated style and overstrained pathos
that gave popularity to Gesner's Death of Abel.
But Blake's early verse stands in quite another class. Much
of it, indeed, is more directly imitative than his later work; yet
this is due less to slavish copying than to an unconscious
recognition of the community between his own romantic spirit and
that of our older poetry. Spenserian stanza, early Shakespearean
and Miltonic blank verse, ballad form, octosyllabics and lyric
metres, all are tried, with least success in the blank verse, but
often with consummate mastery in the lighter measures. One who
met Blake in these years says that he occasionally sang his poems
to melodies of his own composing, and that 'these were sometimes
most singularly beautiful' It is, therefore, not improbable that
.
these lyrics were composed to music, like the songs of Burns or of
the Elizabethans.
His genuine delight in the older verse preserved him from the
complacency with which his age regarded its own versification.
Like Keats, but with more justice, he laments, in his lines To the
Muses, the feeble, artificial and meagre achievement of the time.
His notes are neither languid nor forced, but remarkably varied
and spontaneous. Even in his less perfect work, there is not any
abatement of fresh enthusiasm, but, rather, an overtasking of
powers not yet fully equipped for high flights. So, in the midst of
Fair Elenor, a tale of terror and wonder, and sorry stuff in the
main, occur passages like the stanza beginning
My lord was like a flower upon the brows
Of lusty May! Ah life as frail as flower!
while there is something more than promise in the youth who could
capture the sense of twilight and evening star so completely as
Blake in the lines
Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake: speak silence with thy glimmering eyes
And wash the dusk with silver.
The six songs, which include almost all Blake's love-poetry,
illustrate the versatility of his early genius. 'How sweet I roam'd'


## p. 183 (#205) ############################################

IX]
Poetical Sketches
183
a
6
anticipates, in a remarkable way, the spirit and imagery of La
Belle Dame, though, perhaps, it has less of romantic strangeness
and the glamour of faerie than of sheer joy, the Elizabethan
wantonness of love, so wonderfully reembodied in My silks and
fine array. The remaining four pieces are in a homelier vein, and
more closely personal in tone. Like his poems on the seasons, they
reveal, in spite of a slight conventionality in expression, a sincere
delight in nature, quickening rural sights and sounds into sympathy
with his own mood. Yet, he was so far of his age that he shrank
from the idea of solitude in nature; knowing only the closely
cultivated districts of Middlesex and Surrey, he held that 'where
man is not, Nature is barren. ' But, apart from their freer, if still
limited, appreciation of natural beauty, these songs are noteworthy
by reason of their revelation of a new spirit in love. Burns was to
sing on this theme out of pure exuberance of physical vitality; in
Blake, love awes passion to adoration in the simple soul.
The wide range of poetic power in Blake is proved by the
distance between the gentleness of these pieces and the tense emo-
tion of Mad Song. Saintsbury has dealt at length with its prosodic
excellence : particularly, in the first stanza, the sudden change in
metre carries a vivid suggestion of frenzy breaking down, at its
height, into dull despair. Stricken passion seems bared to the
nerves; each beat of the verse is like a sharp cry, rising to the
haunted terror of the closing lines.
The incomplete chronicle-play King Edward the Third is
chiefly of interest as indicating Blake's juvenile sympathies and
the limitations of his genius. He had little of the dramatic
instinct, as his 'prophetic' writings prove, while his vehement
denial of the validity of temporal existence cut him off from
the ordinary themes of tragedy and comedy. And, even in this
early work, he is chiefly occupied, not with any development of the
plot, but with the consideration of abstract moral questions. His
characters are all projections of his own personality, and the action
halts while they discourse on points of private and civic virtue.
Yet, the spirit behind the work is generous, and occasional passages
come nearer to Shakespeare than most of the more pretentious
efforts of the time. So, too, A War Song to Englishmen, though
over-rhetorical in parts, is a stirring thing in an age that produced
little patriotic verse.
The incomplete manuscript known as An Island in the Moon
has been described as 'a somewhat incoherent and pointless pre-
cursor of the Headlong Hall type of novel. ' Intended to satirise


## p. 184 (#206) ############################################

184
[CH.
Blake
the members of Mrs Mathew's learned coterie, its offence against
decency would be inexpiable were it not almost certain that no
eye but Blake's ever saw it in his lifetime. As literature, the work
has little value, except that it contains drafts of three of the Songs
of Innocence, as well as the quaint little Song of Phebe and
Jellicoe. The satirical verse is generally coarse and noisy, and but
rarely effectual, though the piece When old corruption first begun
is powerful in an unpleasant way. The prose has the faults of the
verse, being too highpitched and too uncontrolled to give penetra-
tive power to the caricature of a learned circle such as Blake had
known at Mrs Mathew's. It contains, however, an interesting,
though, unfortunately, incomplete, account of the process adopted
later for producing the engraved books. There are also indi-
cations of antipathies which were afterwards developed in the
prophetic' books, notably a contempt for experimental science
and 'rational philosophy. '
A comparison of Songs of Innocence (1789) with Poetical
Sketches shows that the promise of Blake's earlier poetry has,
indeed, been fulfilled, but in a somewhat unexpected way.
Naturally, the naturer work is free from the juvenile habit of
imitation ; it is, however, of interest to note in passing the
suggestion that the hint of the composition of these Songs
may have come from a passage in Dr Watts's preface to his
Divine and Moral Songs for Children? Moreover, the baneful
Ossianic influence is suspended for a space. But the vital
difference is that here, for the first time, Blake gives clear
indication of the mystical habit of thought, which, though at
first an integral part of his peculiar lyrical greatness, ultimately
turned to his undoing. In Poetical Sketches, his vision of life is
direct and naïve: he delights in the physical attributes of nature,
its breadth and its wonders of light and motion, of form and
melody. But, in Songs of Innocence, his interest is primarily
ethical. The essence of all being, as set forth in the piece called
The Divine Image, is the spirit of • Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love';
and, as, later, he uses the terms 'poetic genius' and 'imagination
to express his conception of this fundamental principle, so, here,
the 'Divine Image' is his vision of that spirit which is at once
1 John Sampson makes the conjecture in the general preface to his edition of
Blake's Poetical Works : 'In the preface to that popular work Watts modestly refers
to his songs as "a slight specimen, such as I could wish some happy and condescending
genius would undertake for the use of children, and perform much better"; and it is
likely enough that Blake may have rightly felt himself to be this destined genius. '


## p. 185 (#207) ############################################

IX
]
Songs of Innocence
185
universal and particular, God and Man. Under the inspiration of
this belief, the world of experience fades away: there is nothing of
death, pain or cruelty, except in the opening couplet of The
Chimney Sweeper, and, even then, the idea of suffering is almost
lost in the clear sense of a sustaining presence of love in the rest of
the poem. Every other instance shows sorrow and difficulty to be
but occasions for the immediate manifestation of sympathy. God,
as the tender Father, the angels, the shepherd, the mother, the
nurse, or even the humbler forms of insect and flower, as in The
Blossom, or A Dream,-all are expressions of the same universal
ethic of love. But, perhaps, the most remarkable illustration of
this belief, particularly when contrasted with Blake's later criti-
cism of public charity, is Holy Thursday. Clearly, in the world of
these Songs there is not any suspicion of motives, no envy or
jealousy. To use a later phrase by Blake, it is a ‘lower Paradise,'
very near to the perfect time wherein the lion shall lie down with
the lamb: as in the poem Night, the angels of love are always by,
to restrain violence or to bring solace to its victims.
The theological reference in this simple ethic is slight. God
and Jesus are but visions of the love that animates all forms of
being. Hence, at this period, Blake's position is distinct from that
of mystical poets like Henry Vaughan, in whom a more dogmatic
faith tends to overshadow the appeal of the natural universe. So,
too, Blake's poetry has more of the instinct of human joy. Mercy,
pity, peace and love, the elements of the Divine Image, are ‘virtues
of delight,' and nothing is clearer in these Songs than his quick
intuition and unerring expression of the light and gladness in
common things. In this, he returns to poems in Poetical Sketches
like I love the jocund dance, rather than to the more formal
pieces of nature-poetry. His delight in the sun, the hills, the
streams, the flowers and buds, in the innocence of the child and
of the lamb, comes not from sustained contemplation but as an
immediate impulse. There is not as yet any sign of his later atti-
tude towards the physical world as a 'shadow of the world of
eternity. His pleasure in the consciousness of this unifying spirit
in the universe was still too fresh to give pause for theorising ;
and, perhaps for this reason, such pieces as Laughing Song, Spring,
The Echoing Green, The Blossom and Night, sung in pure joy of
heart, convey more perfectly than all his later attempts at exposi-
tion the nature of his visionary faith. In Blake's later writings,
there is a wide gulf between the symbol and the reality it
conveys; so, the reader must first grapple with a stubborn mass


## p. 186 (#208) ############################################

186
[CH.
Blake
6
of symbolism. But, in Songs of Innocence, this faculty of spiritual
sensation' transfigures rather than transforms. Thus, in The Lamb,
pleasure in the natural image persists, but is carried further
and exalted by the implication of a higher significance. It is the
manifest spontaneity of this mystical insight that carries Blake
safely over dangerous places. A little faltering in the vision or
straining after effect would have sunk him, by reason of the sim-
plicity of theme, diction and metre, now the sources of peculiar
pleasure, into unthinkable depths of feebleness. Contrast with
the strength of these seemingly fragile lines the more consciously
didactic pieces like The Chimney Sweeper and The Little Black
Boy. These, indeed, have the pleasant qualities of an unpre-
tentious and sincere spirit; but their burden of instruction brings
them too near to the wellmeant but somewhat pedagogic verse
that writers like Nathaniel Cotton and Isaac Watts thought
most suitable for the young. Blake regarded children more
humanly, as the charming "Introduction' to these Songs bears
witness, or the poem Infant Joy, a perfect expression of the
appeal of infancy. And, in The Cradle Song, almost certainly
suggested by Watts's lines beginning ‘Hush ! my dear, lie still and
slumber,' Blake's deeper humanity lifts him far above the common-
place moralisings of his model.
The Book of Thel was engraved in the same year (1789), though
its final section is almost certainly later in date. The regularity of
its unrimed fourteeners, the idyllic gentleness of its imagery and
the not unpleasant blending of simplicity and formalism in the
diction, proclaim the mood of Songs of Innocence. It treats of the
same all-pervading spirit of mutual love and selfsacrifice. In
response to the 'gentle lamentations' of the virgin Thel, to whom
life seems vain, and death utter annihilation, the lily of the valley,
the cloud, the worm and the clod, rise up to testify to the inter-
dependence of all forms of being under the law of the Divine
Image, and to show that death is not final extinction, but the
supreme manifestation of this impulse to willing sacrifice of self. '
Blake's original conclusion to this argument is lost, for the last
section has not any perceptible connection in its context. In it,
the whole conception of life is changed. This world is a dark
prison, and the physical senses are narrow windows darkening the
infinite soul of man by excluding the wisdom and joy of eternity,'
the condition of which is freedom. The source of this degradation
is the tyranny of abstract moral law, the mind-forged manacles'
upon natural and, therefore, innocent desires ; its symbols are the
6


## p. 187 (#209) ############################################

9
IX] The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 187
silver rod of authority and the golden bowl of a restrictive ethic
that would mete out the immeasurable spirit of love. Here, Blake
is clearly enough in the grip of the formal antinomianism that pro-
duced the later 'prophecies. '
The undated manuscript Tiriel apparently belongs to this period.
It is written in the measure of Thel, but is less regular, and the
Ossianic influence is strong in its overwrought imagery and violent
phrase. Blake's purpose in writing this history of the tyrant Tiriel
and his rebellious children is not clear; perhaps, he was already
drawing towards the revolutionary position of the later books. The
final section, which appears to be a later addition, repeats with
greater vehemence the substance of the last part of Thel.
But this early spirit of revolt is most notably expressed in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), the only considerable prose
work engraved by Blake. It is a wellsustained piece of iconoclastic
writing, full of verve and abounding in quite successful paradox.
Critically regarded, Blake's position as the devil's disciple, main-
taining the 'great half-truth Liberty' against the great half-truth
Law,' is not unassailable ; yet the abiding impression is one of
exuberant satirical power, of youthful freshness and buoyancy and
of unflagging energy. Blake shows himself the master of firmly-
knit, straight-hitting phrase, entirely without artifice, and he dis-
plays a wonderful fertility of apt illustration, in aphorism, in ironic
apologue and in skilful reinterpretations of familiar episodes,
chiefly biblical. The vivid scene wherein Blake and the angel
contemplate their 'eternal lots' is in the spirit of Swift's early
work, though its imagery has greater breadth and shows an artist's
sense of colour.
Of the tangled strands of opinion in this work, the two chief
would seem to be Blake's theory of reality and his denial of authority.
Here, as before, he lays stress on the identity of the universal and
the particular spirit, the oneness of God and man; though now, and
in the contemporary No Natural Religion plates, he calls this
prime essence the ‘Poetic Genius,' or the soul, of which latter, body
is but a partial and modified percept, due to narrowed physical
senses. From this, it follows, first, that there cannot be any valid
law external to man, and, secondly, that the phenomenon of
absolute matter is an illusion, due to empirical reasoning. For,
since all forms of being are coextensive with the ‘Universal Poetic
Genius,' it must be that all knowledge is intuitive. So, it comes to
pass that Blake runs tilt against all civil, moral and religious
codes and all exercise of reason, while, on the positive side, he


## p. 188 (#210) ############################################

188
[CH.
Blake
affirms the sufficiency and sanctity of natural impulse and desire, of
'firm persuasions' and 'the voice of honest indignation. ' Energy
is exalted ; to attempt to limit or divert it is to threaten man's
spiritual integrity. The strong man resists such tyranny, the weak
succumb; yet, unable wholly to repress natural instincts, they veil
their inevitable gratification under legal sanction, by their hypocrisy
generating all forms of moral, spiritual and physical corruption.
By cunning, the weak come to power in this world, and, setting up
their slave-moralities as the measure of truth, call themselves the
righteous, the elect, the angels and heirs of heaven, while those
whose clearer vision refuses obedience are cast out as of the devil's
party': they are the rebels in Hell. Angels repress joy as sin ;
devils hold it to be the justification of all action.
The original purpose of The Marriage was to expose Sweden-
borg's inconsistency, in that, while pretending to expose the fallacy
of the normal religious acceptance of moral distinctions, he was
himself infected with the same error. But, this particular inten-
tion is soon absorbed in the general onslaught upon the legalist
positions, though the earlier purpose is recalled from time to time,
particularly in the remarkably virile satire of Memorable Fancies,
written in mockery of the Swedish mystic's Memorable Relations.
It is strange that, having thus proved his power as a writer of
clean-limbed muscular prose, he should have returned almost
immediately to the fourteener, and developed therein what is too
often the windy rhetoric of the prophetic' books. He seems to
have aimed at creating a body of quasi-epic poetry, dealing with
the origin, progress and ultimate purpose of mortality. To this
end, he invented his mythology, wherein the passions and aspira-
tions of man, and the influences that made for or against vision,
appear in human form, but magnified to daemonic proportions. It
is clear that he was largely influenced by Milton, whom he regarded
as the great heresiarch, and whose theological opinions he felt
himself called upon to confute. This is explicit in The Marriage
and in the book called Milton, as well as in recorded passages
of Blake's conversation, while much of his imagery, and occasionally,
his rhythm and diction, are reminiscent of the older poet. But
there are also evidences of Biblical, Ossianic and Swedenborgian
1 The present account of the doctrines of Blake's 'prophetic' books must, neces-
sarily, from considerations of space, be brief and, in a measure, dogmatic. It may,
however, be stated that the interpretation here given is based upon a long and detailed
study of these works, undertaken by the present writer in conjunction with Duncan J.
Sloss.


## p. 189 (#211) ############################################

ix] The French Revolution and America 189
influences in works written between the years 1793 and 1800, the
period of his residence in Lambeth.
A brief examination of the Lambeth books will show how the
freight of ideas gradually broke down the frail semblance of form
with which they started. The first, the recently rediscovered
French Revolution (1791), is in almost regular fourteeners, and
its style, though distorted and over-emphatic, is comparatively in-
telligible. Only the first of seven books appears to have been
printed; it opens the series of what may be called visionary
histories, and embodies Blake's interpretation of events in Paris
and Versailles between 5 May and 16 July 1789, though it does
not describe the actual attack upon the Bastille (14 July). Its
literary interest is slight: what is, perhaps, the most striking
passage describes the various towers and the prisoners in the
famous fortress, when premonitions of its impending fate are in the
air. Otherwise, the work is only of value for its indications of ideas
developed later. For Blake, the stand made by the tiers état
marks the first step towards universal emancipation from the
thraldom of authority. Yet, his portrayal of Louis XVI has none
of his later violence towards kings, for the French monarch is seen
as one overborne by circumstances and the influence of his nobles.
But, Blake's lifelong feud against priestcraft utters itself in an
attack upon clericalism in the person of the archbishop of Paris.
The French Revolution was printed by Johnson, and it may
have been about this time that Blake became one of the circle-of
which Paine, Godwin, Holcroft and Mary Wollstonecraft were also
members—that used to meet at the publisher's table. It is, there-
fore, natural to conclude that this society, to a considerable extent,
was responsible for the extreme revolutionary spirit of the Lam-
beth books, and it is likely that those which deal with the rebellion
in France and America may have owed something, in the way of
suggestion or information, to Paine. The French Revolution was
followed by A Song of Liberty and America (1793). The former,
being, substantially, a précis of the latter, is only remarkable
because of its form, being cast into short numbered paragraphs
like the verses in the Bible. But America, one of the most
beautifully engraved of these books, marks a considerable advance
in the use of symbolism. Here, the conflict between England and
her colonies is interpreted as presaging the imminent annihilation
1 This work, from the fact that it is sometimes bound up with The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, has generally been ascribed to the year 1790. But its symbolism
would seem to put it later than The French Revolution (1791).


## p. 190 (#212) ############################################

190
[ch.
Blake
of authority and the reestablishment of the Blakean ideal of
a condition of complete licence. On the side of law stands Urizen,
the aged source of all restrictive codes ; his ministers are the king,
councillors and priests of England. On the opposite side stands
Orc, the fiery daemon of living passion and desire, the archrebel,
* Antichrist, hater of Dignities, Lover of wild rebellion and trans-
gressor of God's Law,' and, therefore, the liberator of man from
the power of law : he inspires the colonial leaders, Washington
and the rest. But Blake handles history much more freely here
than in The French Revolution, for the fact that he wrote after
the successful issue of the revolt made it possible for him to claim
it as a vindication of his own anarchic theory. Ever after, in his
symbolism, the western quarter, either America or the sunken
continent of Atlantis, stands for the visionary ideal of perfect
liberty, from which fallen man, in Europe and Asia, is cut off by
the floods of moral fallacies, the 'Atlantic deep. ' This concept
appears in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), which, in
its vigorous enthusiasm and comparative buoyancy, most nearly
resembles America. Like that work, too, it is easily intelligible,
but deals with the physical and moral, rather than with the
political, tyranny of legal codes. The myth tells how the virgin
Oothoon, 'the soft soul of America,' the spirit of delight, plucks
the flower of instant and complete gratification of desire ; further,
she is ravished by a violent daemon, Bromion. On both these
accounts, she is condemned and mourned over by the spirit of
prudential morality, and the major part of the book is a vehement
vindication of physical appetite. The whole argument, of course,
is very unreal; yet the force of Blake's conviction gives his state-
ment of the case a certain vitality, and keeps it unfalteringly above
the low places of thought.
Up to this point, Blake's writings preserve the spontaneity and
confident strength that mark The Marriage : his faith in the
immediate efficacy of passion to free itself by revolt gives energy
and freshness to the measure and language. But, from this time,
his outlook becomes increasingly overcast. He comes to see that
the will to freedom is not all-powerful, but must endure, for a
time, the limitations of temporal experience. Salvation is still to
come through passionate revolt, and, in an indefinite way, this is
associated with the French revolution; but, Blake now emphasises
the strength of the moral heresy, and the impetuous enthusiasm of
America and Visions is, to a considerable degree, checked. The
simplest indications of this change occur in Songs of Experience


## p. 191 (#213) ############################################

]
IX
Songs of Experience 191
(1794) and those poems in the Rossetti MS belonging to the same
period. The contrast between these and Songs of Innocence is not
merely formal, but is the direct expression of the change already
referred to. In the early collection, there are no shadows: to Blake's
unaccustomed eyes, the first glimpse of the world of vision was
pure light. But, in the intervening years, experience had brought
a fuller sense of the power of evil, and of the difficulty and loneli-
ness of his lot who would set himself against the current of this
world. So he writes of himself
The Angel that presided o'er my birth
Said, 'Little creature, formed of Joy and Mirth
Go, love without the help of anything on Earth. '
The title-page for the combined Songs of Innocence and of
Experience describes them as ‘Shewing the Contrary States of
the Human Soul' while, in the motto, he writes, in a spirit of dis-
enchantment,
The Good are attracted by Men's perceptions
And think not for themselves;
Till Experience teaches them to catch
And to cage the Fairies and Elves,
the catching of the fairies and elves, apparently, signifying the
deliberate searching after the hidden mystical meaning of things,
in place of a docile acceptance of other men's faith.
Signs of the change lie on every hand. If the introduction in
Songs of Experience be compared with its earlier counterpart, the
piper is seen to have become the more portentous bard, the laugh-
ing child upon a cloud gives place to the lapsed Soul weeping in
the evening dew. And there is, also, apparent, at times, the vague
consciousness of 'some blind hand' crushing the life of man, as
man crushes the fly. This, however, is not quite constant, though
,
something of the same mystery lies behind the question in The
Tiger,
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
More commonly, Blake lays stress upon the fallacy of law, and
this, chiefly, in its relation to love. Thus, in The Clod and the
Pebble, his own ethic of the love that 'seeketh not itself to please,'
is set against the concept of love governed by moral duty, and,
therefore, cold and interested. Similarly, in Holy Thursday,
there is white passion beneath the simplicity and restraint of his
picture of the little victims of a niggard charity ; perhaps, nothing
gives so complete an impression of the change in Blake as the
6


## p. 192 (#214) ############################################

192
Blake
[ch.
6
comparison of the earlier and later poems under this title. More-
over, he always opposed any interference with the natural
development of the individual genius. "There is no
use in
education,' he told Crabb Robinson, 'I hold it wrong. It is the
great Sin. ' This text he develops in The Schoolboy and in the two
versions, manuscript and engraved, of Infant Sorrow. Something
of the kind appears in A Little Boy Lost, though there is also a
return to the baiting of the Philistine with paradox, as in The
Marriage. For, here, as before, churches and priests represent
the extreme forms of obscurantism and repression, and the exalta-
tion of the letter of a rigid law above the spirit of love that
transcends mere obligation. But, by far the greater bulk of the
engraved and manuscript verse of this period repeats the theme of
Visions, the infallibility of the human instinct towards gratifica-
tion of appetite, and the iniquity of all that interferes with it.
Hence, modesty, continence and asceticism become glosing terms,
hiding the deformity and corruption that arise from the covert
satisfaction of desire; they are the fair-seeming fruit of the
poison-tree, the tree of moral virtue.
Such is a summary of the main ideas embodied in these Songs.
There are, indeed, moments when this passion of disputation tells
heavily against the verse, prosodically perfect though it is; only
the unfaltering sincerity and directness of Blake's spirit bears him
safely through. Indeed, he never surpassed the best work of this
period. Notably in The Tiger, his imagination shakes off the
encumbrances of doctrine, and beats out new rhythm and new
imagery for a more exalted vision of life. The poem proceeds en-
tirely by suggestion; its succession of broken exclamations, scarcely
coherent in their rising intensity, gives a vivid impression of a vast
creative spirit labouring at elemental furnace and anvil to mould
a mortal form adequate to the passion and fierce beauty of the
wrath of God, the wild furies' of the human spirit: it is as though
the whole mighty process had been revealed to him in vivid gleams
out of great darkness. Of a lower flight, but still unequalled
before Keats, are poengs in the 'romantic'mood of human sorrow,
in harmony with the more desolate aspects of nature. Such are
the Introduction and Earth's Answer, the lovely first stanza of
The Sunflower or the manuscript quatrain, almost perfect in its
music, beginning ‘I laid me down upon a bank. Yet, Blake could
ruin the effect of such lines by adding an atrocious verse in crude
three-foot anapaests on the iniquity of moral law. He gives his
own version of this obsession in another manuscript poem :
6
6


## p. 193 (#215) ############################################

IX]
The Lambeth Books
193
Thou hast a lap full of seed
And this is a fine country.
Why dost thou not cast thy seed,
And live in it merrily?
Shall I cast it on the sand
And turn it into fruitful land ?
For on no other ground
Can I sow my seed,
Without tearing up
Some stinking weed.
Yet, some seed of song fell into the sandy wastes of Blake's
ethical disputations, and sprang up and blossomed in spite of the
tearing up of noxious moral heresies in their neighbourhood.
Such are the delicate minor melody of The Wild Flower's Song,
the lines I told my love, To My Myrtle-a notable instance, by
the way, of Blake's rigorous use of the file in his lyrics and Cradle
Song. He still has his old delight in natural beauty, though his
perverse antipathies often stood in the way of its expression ; and
his utterance is almost always singularly clear, concise and un-
forced.
But, in the remaining Lambeth writings, Blake is no longer
controlled by the exigencies of lyrical form, and the first freshness
of his revolutionary enthusiasm is past; hence, his energy turns to
exposition or affirmation, not so much of his own faith as of the
errors of the opposite party. To this end, he invented the mystical
mythology which is chiefly contained in The Book of Urizen (1794),
with its complements The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los
(1795). These trace the fallacies of the moral law to their pre-
(
mundane source. Europe (1794) and The Song of Los (1795)
though they have the same mythological basis, come rather nearer
in tone to America. The Urizen series, too, is written in a shorter
and very irregular measure, generally containing three or four
stresses. The other two works combine the fourteener and the
shorter line.
Blake's antagonism to Milton's theodicy led him to reinterpret
the story of the fall, affirming that it was not Satan, but the God
of this world, the author of the moral codes, or, in Blake's mytho-
logy, Urizen, who fell. Hence, The Book of Urizen contains
obvious inversions of Miltonic episodes. But, here, as elsewhere
in Blake, the root-idea is that existence is made up of two great
bodies of contraries ; on the one side, the eternals, the expression
of the ideal ethic, on the other, Urizen. This latter daemon plots
to impose his will upon the eternals, but fails, and is cast out into
13
a
B. L. XI.
CH. IX.


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194
[CH.
Blake
6
chaos, wherein is ultimately developed the world of time and space.
This process of evolution is not directed to any discernible end,
except that it gives extension and duration to the unreal forms
begotten of Urizen's perverted moral and intellectual sense, which
become apparent as the phenomena of a physical universe, wherein
man forgets 'the wisdom and joy of eternity' and shrinks, spiritually
and bodily, to mortal stature. But, since Urizen is the negation
of all creative activity, Blake is constrained to introduce a forma-
tive agent in Los, the eternal prophet—though, as yet, there seems
little to justify this title. Labouring at his furnaces and anvils,
he gives permanence to the successive modifications of the Urizenic
substance of which this new world is made, binding them in the
chains of time. From him, also, derive two important develop-
ments, the ‘separation of the first female, the manifestation of
Los's pity for the sterile universe, and the birth of Orc. But,
apparently because The Book of Urizen is incomplete, nothing
comes of these episodes, and the work concludes with the enslave-
ment of all mortality beneath Urizen’s net of religion. In this
myth, Blake's main purpose is to demonstrate, by reference to
their origins, the falsity of the ethical spirit and the unreality of
the material universe. In The Book of Ahania, he further identifies
Urizen, as the author of the Mosaic code, with Jehovah. He also
emphasises, in new symbols, the antagonism of morality, first to
'masculine' or positive energy, and, secondly, to physical desire,
imaged in the female Ahania. In the remaining member of this
trilogy, The Book of Los, the strangeness of the symbolism makes
interpretation too much a matter of conjecture to warrant any
conclusion as to its place in the development of Blake's ideas.
In Europe and The Song of Los, Blake turns from universal
history to consider the present portents of immediate emancipation
through the French revolution. This change is reflected in the
greater prominence given to Los and Enitharmon, who, as regents
of this world, act as the ministers of Urizen to transmit to men his
systems of religion and philosophy, from that of ‘Brama' to the
Newtonian ‘Philosophy of the Five Senses. ' But the most im-
portant point is that Blake here utters his plainest criticism of
Christianity. According to his own statement in Africa, the first
section of The Song of Los, the asceticism of Jesus's gospel would
have depopulated the earth, had not Mohammedanism, with its
‘loose Bible,' that is, apparently, its laxer moral code, been set to
counteract it. And, in Europe, the Christian era is the period of
the 'Female dream,' the false ideal that makes passivity a virtue


## p. 195 (#217) ############################################

IX]
Vala
195
and the gratification of innate desire a sin. Thus, Enitharmon is
the typical female, at once the source and the symbol of repressive
morality.
The next work, the manuscript originally called Vala, belongs
to two distinct periods of Blake's development. The earlier portion,
dated 1797, extends and elaborates the symbolism of The Book of
Urizen, with certain modifications, of which the most important is
that man is conceived, ideally, as a harmony of four spiritual
powers, Urizen, Luvah, Urthona-apparent in time as Los—and
Tharmas. It may be that these, later known as the Zoas, have a
psychological significance, as the symbols of reason, emotion,
energy and instinct or desire; but the indications are too vague
and contradictory to admit of assured interpretation. Further
difficulties arise with the four females joined with the male qua-
ternion.