William Blake

by Arthur Symons

V

It is to the seven years at Lambeth that what may be called the first period of the Prophetic Books largely belongs, though it does not indeed begin there. The roots of it are strongly visible in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which was written at Poland Street, and they may be traced even further back. Everything else, until we come to the last or Felpham period, which has a new quality of its own, belongs to Lambeth.

In his earlier work Blake is satisfied with natural symbols, with nature as symbol; in his later work, in the final message of the Prophetic Books, he is no longer satisfied with what then seems to him the relative truth of the symbols of reality. Dropping the tools with which he has worked so well, he grasps with naked hands after an absolute truth of statement, which is like his attempt in his designs to render the outlines of vision literally, without translation into the forms of human sight. He invents names harsh as triangles, Enitharmon, Theotormon, Rintrah, for spiritual states and essences, and he employs them as Wagner employed his leading motives, as a kind of shorthand for the memory. His meaning is no longer apparent in the ordinary meaning of the words he uses; we have to read him with a key, and the key is not always in our hands; he forgets that he is talking to men on the earth in some language which he has learnt in heavenly places. He sees symbol within symbol, and as he tries to make one clear to us, he does but translate it into another, perhaps no easier, or more confusing. And it must be remembered, when even interpreters like Mr. Ellis and Mr. Yeats falter, and confess 'There is apparently some confusion among the symbols,' that after all we have only a portion of Blake's later work, and that probably a far larger portion was destroyed when the Peckham 'angel,' Mr. Tatham (copartner in foolish wickedness with Warburton's cook), sat down to burn the books which he did not understand. Blake's great system of wheels within wheels remains no better than a ruin, and can but at the best be pieced together tentatively by those who are able to trace the connection of some of its parts. It is no longer even possible to know how much consistency Blake was able to give to his symbols, and how far he failed to make them visible in terms of mortal understanding. As we have them, they evade us on every side, not because they are meaningless, but because the secret of their meaning is so closely kept. To Blake actual contemporary names meant even more than they meant to Walt Whitman. 'All truths wait in all things,' said Walt Whitman, and Blake has his own quite significant but perplexing meaning when he writes:

'The corner of Broad Street weeps; Poland Street
languishes
To Great Queen Street and Lincoln's Inn: all is distress
and woe.'

He is concerned now only with his message, with the 'minutely particular' statement of it; and as he has ceased to accept any mortal medium, or to allow himself to be penetrated by the sunlight of earthly beauty, he has lost the means of making that message visible to us. It is a miscalculation of means, a contempt for possibilities; not, as people were once hasty enough to assume, the irresponsible rapture of madness. There is not even in these crabbed chronicles the wild beauty of the madman's scattering brain; there is a concealed sanity, a precise kind of truth, which, as Blake said of all truth, 'can never be so told as to be understood, and not be believed.'

Blake's form, or apparent formlessness, in the Prophetic Books, was no natural accident, or unconsidered utterance of inspiration. Addressing the public on the first plate of Jerusalem he says: 'When this verse was first dictated to me, I considered a monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare and all writers of English blank verse, derived from the bondage of rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I have therefore produced a variety in every line, both of cadences and number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, and the prosaic for inferior parts; all are necessary to each other,' This desire for variety at the expense of unity is illustrated in one of Blake's marginal notes to Reynolds' Discourses. 'Such harmony of coloring' (as that of Titian in the Bacchus and Ariadne) 'is destructive of Art. One species of equal hue over all is the cursed thing called harmony. It is the smile of a fool.' This is a carrying to its extreme limit of the principle that 'there is no such thing as softness in art, and that everything in art is definite and minute... because vision is determinate and perfect'; and that 'coloring does not depend on where the colors are put, but on where the lights and darks are put, and all depends on form or outline, on where that is put.' The whole aim of the Prophetic Books is to arrive at a style as 'determinate and perfect' as vision, unmodified by any of the deceiving beauties of nature or of the distracting ornaments of conventional form. What is further interesting in Blake's statement is that he aimed, in the Prophetic Books, at producing the effect, not of poetry but of oratory, and it is as oratory, the oratory of the prophets, that the reader is doubtless meant to take them.

'Poetry fettered,' he adds, 'fetters the human race,' and I doubt not that he imagined, as Walt Whitman and later vers-libristes have imagined, that in casting off the form he had unfettered the spirit of poetry. There seems never to have been a time when Blake did not attempt to find for himself a freer expression than he thought verse could give him, for among the least mature of the Poetical Sketches are poems written in rhythmical prose, in imitation partly of Ossian, partly of the Bible. An early MS. called Tiriel, probably of hardly later date, still exists, written in a kind of metre of fourteen syllables, only slightly irregular in beat, but rarely fine in cadence. It already hints, in a cloudy way, at some obscure mythology, into which there already come incoherent names, of an Eastern color, Ijim and Mnetha. Tiriel appears again in The Book of Urizen as Urizen's first-born, Thiriel, 'like a man from a cloud born.' Har and Heva reappear in The Song of Los. The Book of Thel, engraved in 1789, the year of the Songs of Innocence, is in the same metre of fourteen syllables, but written with a faint and lovely monotony of cadence, strangely fluid and flexible in that age of strong caesuras, as in:

'Come forth, worm of the silent valley, to thy pensive
queen.'

The sentiment is akin to that of the Songs of Innocence, and hardly more than a shadow of the mythology remains. It sings or teaches the holiness and eternity of life in all things, the equality of life in the flower, the cloud, the worm, and the maternal clay of the grave; and it ends with the unanswered question of death to life: why? why? In 1790 Blake engraved in two forms, on six and ten infinitesimal plates, a tractate which he called, There is no Natural Religion. They contain, the one commenting on the other, a clear and concise statement of many of Blake's fundamental beliefs; such as: 'That the poetic Genius is the true Man, and that the Body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius.' 'As all men are alike in outward form, so (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius.' 'Man's perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception, he perceives more than sense (though ever so acute) can discover.' Yet, since 'Man's desires are limited by his perceptions, none can desire what he has not perceived.' 'Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may become as he is.'

In the same year, probably, was engraved The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a prose fantasy full of splendid masculine thought, and of a diabolical or infernal humour, in which Blake, with extraordinary boldness, glorifies, parodies, and renounces at once the gospel of his first master in mysticism, 'Swedenborg, strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches,' as he was to call him long afterwards, in Milton. Blake's attitude towards Christianity might be roughly defined by calling him a heretic of the heresy of Swedenborg. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell begins: 'As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting on the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up.' Swedenborg himself, in a prophecy that Blake must have heard in his childhood, had named 1757, the year of Blake's birth, as the first of a new dispensation, the dispensation of the spirit, and Blake's acceptance of the prophecy marks the date of his escape from the too close influence of one of whom he said, as late as 1825, 'Swedenborg was a divine teacher. Yet he was wrong in endeavoring to explain to the rational faculty what reason cannot comprehend.' And so we are warned, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, against the 'confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning. Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new, though it is only the contents or index of already published books.' And again: 'Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's, and from those of Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number. But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.' With Paracelsus it is doubtful if Blake was ever more than slightly acquainted; the influence of Behmen, whom he had certainly read in William Law's translation, is difficult to define, and seems to have been of the most accidental or partial kind, but Swedenborg had been a sort of second Bible to him from childhood, and the influence even of his 'systematic reasoning' remained with him as at least a sort of groundwork, or despised model; 'foundations for grand things,' as he says in the Descriptive Catalogue. When Swedenborg says, 'Hell is divided into societies in the same manner as heaven, and also into as many societies as heaven; for every society in heaven has a society opposite to it in hell, and this for the sake of equilibrium,' we see in this spirit of meek order a matter-of-fact suggestion for Blake's 'enormous wonders of the abysses,' in which heavens and hells change names and alternate through mutual annihilations.

The last note which Blake wrote on the margins of Swedenborg's Wisdom of Angels is this: 'Heaven and Hell are born together.' The edition which he annotated is that of 1788, and the marginalia, which are printed in Mr. Ellis's Real Blake, will show how attentive, as late as two years before the writing of the book which that note seems to anticipate, Blake had been to every shade of meaning in one whom he was to deny with such bitter mockery. But, even in these notes, Blake is attentive to one thing only, he is reaching after a confirmation of his own sense of a spiritual language in which man can converse with paradise and render the thoughts of angels. He comments on nothing else, he seems to read only to confirm his conviction; he is equally indifferent to Swedenborg's theology and to his concern with material things; his hells and heavens, 'uses,' and 'spiritual suns,' concern him only in so far as they help to make clearer and more precise his notion of the powers and activities of the spirit in man. To Blake, as he shows us in Milton, Swedenborg's worst error was not even that of 'systematic reasoning,' but that of:

'Showing the Transgressors in Hell: the proud
Warriors in Heaven:
Heaven as a Punisher and Hell as one under
Punishment.'

It is for this more than for any other error that Swedenborgs 'memorable relations' are tossed back to him as 'memorable fancies,' in a solemn parody of his own manner; that his mill and vault and cave are taken from him and used against him; and that one once conversant with his heaven, and now weary of it, 'walks among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torments and insanity.' Blake shows us the energy of virtue breaking the Ten Commandments, and declares: 'Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.' Speaking through 'the voice of the Devil,' he proclaims that 'Energy is eternal delight,' and that 'Everything that lives is holy.' And, in a last flaming paradox, still mocking the manner of the analyst of heaven and hell, he bids us: 'Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together, in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well. I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no.' The Bible of Hell is no doubt the Bible of Blake's new gospel, in which contraries are equally true. We may piece it together out of many fragments, of which the first perhaps is the sentence standing by itself at the bottom of the page: 'One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression.'

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is loud with 'the clangor of the Arrows of Intellect,' each of the 'Proverbs of Hell' is a jewel of concentrated wisdom, the whole book is Blake's clearest and most vital statement of his new, his reawakened belief; it contains, as I have intimated, all Nietzsche; yet something restless, disturbed, uncouth, has come violently into this mind and art, wrenching it beyond all known limits, or setting alight in it an illuminating, devouring, and unquenchable flame. In common with Swedenborg, Blake is a mystic who enters into no tradition, such as that tradition of the Catholic Church which has a liturgy awaiting dreams. For Saint John of the Cross and for Saint Teresa the words of the vision are already there, perfectly translating ecstasy into familiar speech; they have but to look and to speak. But to Blake, as to Swedenborg, no tradition is sufficiently a matter of literal belief to be at hand with its forms; new forms have to be made, and something of the crudity of Swedenborg comes over him in his rejection of the compromise of mortal imagery.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell may be called or not called a Prophetic Book, in the strict sense; with The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, engraved at Lambeth in 1793, the series perhaps more literally begins. Here the fine masculine prose of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell has given place to a metre vaguer than the metre of The Book of Thel, and to a substance from which the savor has not yet gone of the Songs of Innocence, in such lines as:

'The new washed lamb tinged with the village smoke,
and the bright swan
By the red earth of our immortal river.'

It is Blake's book of love, and it defends the honesty of the natural passions with unslackenning ardor. There is no mythology in it, beyond a name or two, easily explicable. Oothoon, the virgin joy, oppressed by laws and cruelties of restraint and jealousy, vindicates her right to the freedom of innocence and to the instincts of infancy.

'And trees and birds and beasts and men behold their
eternal joy.
Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant
joy:
Arise, and drink your bliss, for everything that lives
is holy!'

It is the gospel of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and, as that proclaimed liberty for the mind, so this, with abundant rhetoric, but with vehement conviction, proclaims liberty for the body. In form it is still clear, its eloquence and imagery are partly biblical, and have little suggestion of the manner of the later Prophetic Books.

America, written in the same year, in the same measure as the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, is the most vehement, wild, and whirling of all Blake's prophecies. It is a prophecy of revolution, and it takes the revolt of America against England both literally and symbolically, with names of 'Washington, Franklin, Paine and Warren, Gates, Hancock and Green,' side by side with Orc and the Angel of Albion; it preaches every form of bodily and spiritual liberty in the terms of contemporary events, Boston's Angel, London's Guardian, and the like, in the midst of cataclysms of all nature, fires and thunders temporal and eternal. The world for a time is given into the power of Orc, unrestrained desire, which is to bring freedom through revolution and the destroying of the bonds of good and evil. He is called 'Antichrist, Hater of Dignities, lover of wild rebellion, and transgressor of God's Law.' He is the Satan of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and he also proclaims:

'For everything that lives is holy, life delights in
life;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be
defil'd.'

As, in that book, Blake had seen 'the fiery limbs, the flaming hair' of the son of fire 'spurning the clouds written with curses, stamping the stony law to dust'; so, here, he hears the voice of Orc proclaiming:

'The fierce joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts through the wild
wilderness;
That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion
abroad
To the four winds as a torn book, and none shall
gather the leaves.'

Liberty comes in like a flood bursting all barriers:

'The doors of marriage are open, and the Priests in
rustling scales
Rush into reptile coverts, hiding from the fires of
Orc,
That play around the golden roofs in wreaths of fierce
desire,
Leaving the females naked and glowing with the lusts
of youth.
For the female spirits of the dead pining in bonds of
religion
Run from their fetters reddening, and in long-drawn
arches sitting,
They feel the nerves of youth renew, and desires of
ancient times,
Over their pale limbs as a vine when the tender grape
appears.'

The world, in this regeneration through revolution (which seemed to Blake, no doubt, a thing close at hand, in those days when France and America seemed to be breaking down the old tyrannies), is to be no longer a world laid out by convention for the untrustworthy; and he asks:

'Who commanded this? what God? what Angel?
To keep the generous from experience till the
ungenerous
Are unrestrained performers of the energies of
nature,
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science
That men get rich by.'

For twelve years, from the American to the French revolution, 'Angels and weak men' are to govern the strong, and then Europe is to be overwhelmed by the fire that had broken out in the West, though the ancient guardians of the five senses 'slow advance to shut the five gates of their law-built houses.'

'But the gates were consumed, and their bolts and
hinges melted,
And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens, and
round the abode of men.'

Here the myth, though it is present throughout, is an undercurrent, and the crying of the message is what is chiefly heard. In Europe (1794), which is written in lines broken up into frequent but not very significant irregularities, short lines alternating with long ones, in the manner of an irregular ode, the mythology is like a net or spiders web over the whole text. Names not used elsewhere, or not in the same form, are found: Manatha-Varcyon, Thiralatha, who in Europe is Diralada. The whole poem is an allegory of the sleep of Nature during the eighteen hundred years of the Christian era, under bonds of narrow religions and barren moralities and tyrannous laws, and of the awakening to forgotten joy, when 'Nature felt through all her pores the enormous revelry,' and the fiery spirit of Ore, beholding the morning in the east, shot to the earth:

'And in the vineyards of red France appear'd the light
of his fury.'

It is another hymn of revolution, but this time an awakening more wholly mental, with only occasional contemporary allusions like that of the judge in Westminster whose wig grows to his scalp, and who is seen 'groveling along Great George Street through the Park gate.' 'Howlings and hissings, shrieks and groans, and voices of despair,' are heard throughout; we see thought change the infinite to a serpent:

'Then was the serpent temple formed, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions, and man become an
angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown'd.'

The serpent temple shadows the whole island:

'Enitharmon laugh'd in her sleep to see (O woman's
triumph)
Every house a den, every man bound: the shadows
are filled
With spectres, and the windows wove over with curses
of iron:
Over the doors Thou shalt not: and over the chimneys
Fear is written:
With bands of iron round their necks fasten'd into the
walls
The citizens: in leaden gyves the inhabitants of
suburbs
Walk heavy: soft and bent are the bones of villagers.'

The whole book is a lament and protest, and it ends with a call to spiritual battle. In a gay and naïve prologue, written by Blake in a copy of Europe in the possession of Mr. Linnell, and quoted by Ellis and Yeats, Blake tells us that he caught a fairy on a streaked tulip, and brought him home:

'As we went along
Wild flowers I gathered, and he show'd me each eternal
flower.
He laughed aloud to see them whimper because they
were pluck'd,
Then hover'd round me like a cloud of incense. When
I came
Into my parlour and sat down and took my pen to
write,
My fairy sat upon the table and dictated Europe.

The First Book of Urizen (1794) is a myth, shadowed in dark symbols, of the creation of mortal life and its severing from eternity; the birth of Time out of the void and self-contemplating shadow' of unimaginative Reason; the creation of the senses, each a limiting of eternity, and the closing of the tent of heavenly knowledge, so that Time and the creatures of Time behold eternity no more. We see the birth of Pity and of Desire, woman the shadow and desire the child of man. Reason despairs as it realizes that life lives upon death, and the cold pity of its despair forms into a chill shadow, which follows it like a spider's web, and freezes into the net of religion, or the restraint of the activities. Under this net the senses shrink inwards, and that creation which is 'the body of our death' and our stationing in time and space is finished:

'Six days they shrank up from existence,
And on the seventh they rested
And they bless'd the seventh day, in sick hope,
And forgot their eternal life.'

Then the children of reason, now 'sons and daughters of sorrow,'

'Wept and built
Tombs in the desolate places,
And form'd laws of prudence and call'd them
The eternal laws of God.'

But Fuzon, the spirit of fire, forsook the 'pendulous earth' with those children of Urizen who would still follow him.

Here, crystallized in the form of a myth, we see many of Blake's fundamental ideas. Some of them we have seen under other forms, as statement rather than as image, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and There is no Natural Religion. We shall see them again, developed, elaborated, branching out into infinite side-issues, multiplying upon themselves, in the later Prophetic Books, partly as myth, partly as statement; we shall see them in many of the lyrical poems, transformed into song, but still never varying in their message; and we shall see them, in the polemical prose of all the remaining fragments, and in the private letters, and in the annotations of Swedenborg, and in Crabb Robinson's records of conversations. The Book of Urizen is a sort of nucleus, the germ of a system.

Next to the Book of Urizen, if we may judge from the manner of its engraving, came The Song of Los (1795), written in a manner of vivid declamation, the lines now lengthening, now shrinking, without fixed beat or measure. It is the song of Time, 'the Eternal Prophet,' and tells the course of inspiration as it passes from east to west, 'abstract philosophy' in Brahma, 'forms of dark delusion' to Moses on Mount Sinai, the mount of law; 'a gospel from wretched Theotormon' (distressed human love and pity) to Jesus, 'a man of sorrows'; the 'loose Bible' of Mahomet, setting free the senses,'Odin's 'code of war.'

'These were the Churches, Hospitals, Castles, Palaces,
Like nets and gins and traps to catch the joys of
Eternity,
And all the rest a desart:
Till like a dream Eternity was obliterated and erased.'

'The vast of Nature' shrinks up before the 'shrunken eyes' of men, till it is finally enclosed in the 'philosophy of the five senses,' the philosophy of Newton and Locke. 'The Kings of Asia,' the cruelties of the heathen, the ancient powers of evil, call on 'famine from the heath, pestilence from the fen:'

'To turn man from his path,
To restrain the child from the womb,
To cut off the bread from the city,
That the remnant may learn to obey,
That the pride of the heart may fail,
That the lust of the eyes may be quench'd,
That the delicate ear in its infancy
May be dull'd, and the nostrils clos'd up:
To teach mortal worms the path
That leads from the gates of the grave.'

But, in the darkness of their 'ancient woven dens,' they are startled by 'the thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of Orc'; and at their cry Urizen comes forth to meet and challenge the liberating spirit; he thunders against the pillar of fire that rises out of the darkness of Europe; and at the clash of their mutual onset 'the Grave shrieks aloud.' But 'Urizen wept,' the cold pity of reason which, as we have seen in the book named after him, freezes into nets of religion, 'twisted like to the human brain.'

The Book of Los (also dated 1795) is written in the short lines of Urizen and Ahania, a metre following a fixed, insistent beat, as of Los's hammer on his anvil. It begins with the lament of 'Eno, aged Mother,' over the liberty of old times:

'O Times remote!
When Love and Joy were adoration,
And none impure were deem'd.
Not Eyeless Covet,
Nor Thin-lip'd Envy,
Nor Bristled Wrath,
Nor Curled Wantonness;'

None of these, that is, yet turned to evil, but still unfallen energies. At this, flames of desire break out, 'living, intelligent,' and Los, the spirit of Inspiration, divides the flames, freezes them into solid darkness, and is imprisoned by them, and escapes, only in terror, and falls through ages into the void ('Truth has bounds, Error none'), until he has organized the void and brought into it a light which makes visible the form of the void. He sees it as the backbone of Urizen, the bony outlines of reason, and then begins, for the first time in the Prophetic Books, that building of furnaces, and wielding of hammer and anvil of which we are to hear so much in Jerusalem. He forges the sun, and chains cold intellect to vital heat, from whose torments:

'A twin
Was completed, a Human Illusion
In darkness and deep clouds involved.'

In The Book of Los almost all relationship to poetry has vanished; the myth is cloudier and more abstract. Scarcely less so is The Book of Ahania (1795), written in the same short lines, hut in a manner occasionally more concrete and realizable. Like Urizen, it is almost all myth. It follows Fuzon, 'son of Urizen's silent burnings,' in his fiery revolt against:

'This cloudy God seated on waters,
Now seen, now obscured, king of Sorrows.'

From the stricken and divided Urizen is born Ahania ('so name his parted soul'), who is 'his invisible lust,' whom he loves, hides, and calls Sin.

'She fell down, a faint shadow wandering,
In chaos, and circling dark Urizen,
As the moon anguished circles the earth,
Hopeless, abhorred, a death shadow,
Unseen, unbodied, unknown,
The mother of Pestilence.'

But Urizen, recovering his strength, seizes the bright son of fire, his energy or passion, and nails him to the dark 'religious' 'Tree of Mystery,' from under whose shade comes the voice of Ahania, 'weeping upon the void,' lamenting her lost joys of love, and the days when:

'Swelled with ripeness and fat with fatness,
Bursting on winds my odours,
My ripe figs and rich pomegranates,
In infant joy at my feet,
O Urizen, sported and sang.'

In The Four Zoas Ahania is called 'the feminine indolent bliss, the indulgent self of weariness.' 'One final glimpse,' says Mr. Swinburne, 'we may take of Ahania after her division—the love of God, as it were, parted from God, impotent therefore and a shadow, if not rather a plague and blight; mercy severed from justice, and thus made a worse thing than useless.' And her lament ends in this despair:

'But now alone over rocks, mountains,
Cast out from thy lovely bosom
Cruel jealousy, selfish fear,
Self-destroying; how can delight
Renew in these chains of darkness
Where bones of beasts are strown
On the bleak and snowy mountains,
Where bones from the birth are buried
Before they see the light.'

The mythology, of which parts are developed in each of these books, is thrown together, in something more approaching a whole, hut without apparent cohesion or consistency, in The Four Zoas, which probably dates from 1797 and which exists in seventy sheets of manuscript, of uncertain order, almost certainly in an unfinished state, perhaps never intended for publication, but rather as a storehouse of ideas. This manuscript, much altered, arranged in a conjectural order, and printed with extreme incorrectness, was published by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats in the third volume of their book on Blake, under the first, rejected, title of Vala.[3] They describe it as being in itself a sort of compound of all Blake's other books, except Milton and Jerusalem, which are enriched by scraps taken from Vala, but are not summarized in it. In the uncertain state in which we have it, it is impossible to take it as a wholly authentic text; but it is both full of incidental beauty and of considerable assistance in unravelling many of the mysteries in Milton and Jerusalem, the books written at Felpham, both dated 1804, in which we find the final development of the myth, or as much of that final development as has come to us in the absence of the manuscripts destroyed or disposed of by Tatham. Those two books indeed seem to presuppose in their readers an acquaintance with many matters told or explained in this, from which passages are taken bodily, but with little apparent method. As it stands, Vala is much more of a poem than either Milton or Jerusalem; the cipher comes in at times, but between there are broad spaces of cloudy but not wholly unlighted imagery. Blake still remembers that he is writing a poem, earthly beauty is still divine beauty to him, and the message is not yet so stringent as to forbid all lingering by the way.

In some parts of the poem the manner is frankly biblical, and suggests the book of Proverbs, as thus:

'What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for
a song,
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought
with the price
Of all that a man hath—his wife, his house, his
children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none
comes to buy,
And in the withered fields where the farmer ploughs
for bread in vain.'

Nature is still an image accepted as an adequate symbol, and we get reminiscences here and there of the simpler, early work of Thel, for instance, in such lines as:

'And as the little seed waits eagerly watching for its
flower and fruit,
Anxious its little soul looks out into the clear
expanse
To see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible
array;
So man looks out in tree and herb, and fish and bird
and beast,
Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortal
body
Into the elemental forms of everything that grows.'

There are descriptions of feasts, of flames, of last judgments, of the new Eden, which are full of color and splendor, passing without warning into the 'material sublime' of Fuseli, as in the picture of Urizen 'stonied upon his throne' in the eighth 'Night.' In the passages which we possess in the earlier and later version we see the myth of Blake gradually crystallizing, the transposition of every intelligible symbol into the secret cipher. Thus we find 'Mount Gilead' changed into 'Mount Snowdon,' 'Beth Peor' into 'Cosway Vale,' and a plain image such as this:

'The Mountain called out to the Mountain, Awake,
oh brother Mountain,'

Is translated backwards into:

'Ephraim called out to Tiriel, Awake, oh brother
Mountain.'

Images everywhere are seen freezing into types; they stop half-way, and have not yet abandoned the obscure poetry of the earlier Prophetic Books for the harder algebra of Milton and Jerusalem.