deceit. In the age of experience, as Swinburne finely puts it, “inspiration shall do the work of innocence,” and the “Introduction” to the Songs of Experience tells us that it is by listening to the Voice of the Bard that innocence can be renewed. It is, in fact, the inspiration to be derived from Blake, and not the particular instructions in which he sometimes phrased the call, that we should take from him. The loved disciple is not he who slavishly mimics any master, but one who by embracing his master’s example is inspired to make the most of his own gifts and to follow the way of his own understanding.
The best of the second group of songs present us with rudiments of thoughts dissolved in music, and it is the strange magic of this music, by leading us to think for ourselves, that we should carry away from them. Their intellectual fascination consists in suggesting rather than in defining their meaning. They make the intellect a thing of beauty by lending it an air of darkness, and the readers, like bats awakened by falling shadows, find in the darkness the opportunity for the most crooked of their flights. Blake loved to put his feelings into intellectual forms, but he achieved greatness when he let his imagination run free with lines like, “When the stars threw down their spears / And water’d Heaven with their tears”, “The lost traveller’s dream under the hill”, “Nor is it possible to thought / A greater than itself to know”, or the splendid:
For a tear is an intellectual thing,
And a sigh is the sword of an angel king,
And the bitter groan of a martyr’s woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty’s bow.
William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 5, 1794.
Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 14.1 × 11.8 cm.
The British Museum, London.
William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, Preludium, plate 2, 1794.
Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 16.9 × 10.4 cm.
The British Museum, London.
All Blake’s emotions, and many of his images, were “intellectual things” to him, but for the reader who would do the poet justice, it is the poetry and not the cloudy forms in which it is often presented that is the truth of Blake’s writing. Here is the vital energy that was the foundation of Blake’s creed, and for this essence to be separated and praised in poetry it was indispensable that it should not be limited to the very bonds and definitions that are more coherent than itself. Blake’s way of attempting to defend intellectually a vitality that is its own defence has misled his less lyrical readers, who forget his relation to his age and the fact that he was protesting against an over-intellectual tradition. Law was his particular enemy, and to apply anything like logic to his lyrics, or to the lyrical prose that was soon to overflow from them, is to confuse his tactics with his genius. Blake was to stand or fall by his own inspiration, and there are very blank lines here and there. The reader should not shut his eyes to them, though quotation would be ungracious, for they will lead him to study the almost verbal revisions of “Tiger,” the only example we have of Blake’s tireless revision of verse. That this was abundantly rewarded, and that Blake remained to the end impatient even of self-criticism, shows how much his mind and work suffered from being continuously in revolt. His storehouse of ideas was the cosmogony of Swedenborg and the sculptured figures of the Abbey from which he had shaped his ideas on the fathers and heroes of human history. We respect this for the courage in regard to worldly things that accompanied it, which makes the home of Blake a sanctuary for those whose gifts are unwanted by the world. The following lines might have been written on any day of his long life, and since cheerfulness is the best evidence of courage, the courage of Blake is unusually moving in them:
For everything besides I have;
It is only for riches that I can crave.
I have mental joy, and mental health,
And mental friends, and mental wealth;
I’ve a wife I love, and that loves me;
I’ve all but riches bodily.
So, as a church is known by its steeple,
If I pray it must be for other people.
Here again Blake shows himself to be an artist in thought, delighting to tack an intellectual inference to a state of mind, or rather of heart, that does not need it. The other-worldliness of his mind is not only the privilege of a poet and a mystic but the legacy of a boyhood spent among the unearthly and sepulchral corners of an ancient Gothic church. Just as his writings are too much considered apart from the beautiful pages, which was a principal part of their beauty to himself, so his works and his intelligence are too much studied as if no peculiar influences went into his making, as if all impressionable boys were brought up alone in the companionship of Gothic tombs. It becomes necessary to apply some of his aphorisms to himself. A favourite quotation from his Gnomic Verses:
Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,
But Desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there.
William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 10, 1794.
Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 15.1 × 10.9 cm.
The British Museum, London.
William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 16, 1794.
Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 14.9 × 10.8 cm.
The British Museum, London.
These lines should not only cause the reader to rejoice, but also remind us of the many things from which Blake abstained: abstentions, both forced or part proudly assumed, which choked even his lyrical intelligence again and again. In the second half of the eighteenth century, liberty seemed an end in itself, but its most ardent disciples were the first to learn, though they did not always admit, that it is another name for responsibility and that it depends upon as many voluntary checks as the external bonds that it overthrows. Blake was above his age, but the voice of his age can be heard distinctly in his challenging verses.
The note of compassion is no less remarkable in both of them. The songs on the sadder sights of London may have been occasioned in part by the talk that Blake heard at the Mathews’, but there is no verse more poignant, even in Blake, than this:
Seek love in the pity of others’ woe,
In the gentle relief of another’s care;
In the darkness of night and the winter’s snow,
In the naked and outcast, seek Love there.
It seems to come from the heart of Christian charity; the gaiety of goodness, the spontaneity of joy, is expressed in a perfect motto:
He who bends to himself a Joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the Joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.
All happy people live completely for the moment, and who does not remember with sacred delight the days of youth? Blake was later to give a divine blessing to this spontaneousness by declaring that “Jesus acted from impulse,
