Their minds are touched by the sense of tears in human things, but to Blake 'a tear is an intellectual thing.' They sing of 'a woman like a dewdrop,' but Blake of 'the lineaments of gratified desire.' They shout hymns to God over a field of battle or in the arrogance of material empire; but Blake addresses the epilogue of his Gates of Paradise 'to the Accuser who is the God of this world':
'Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce,
And dost not know the garment from the man;
Every harlot was a virgin once,
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.
Though thou art worshipped by the names divine
Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still
The son of morn in weary night's decline,
The lost traveller's dream under the hill.'
Other poets find ecstasy in nature, but Blake only in imagination. He addresses the Prophetic Book of The Ghost of Abel 'to Lord Byron in the wilderness,' and asks: 'What doest thou here, Elijah? Can a poet doubt of the visions of Jehovah? Nature has no outline, but Imagination has. Nature has no time, but Imagination has. Nature has no supernatural, and dissolves. Imagination is eternity.' The poetry of Blake is a poetry of the mind, abstract in substance, concrete in form; its passion is the passion of the imagination, its emotion is the emotion of thought, its beauty is the beauty of idea. When it is simplest, its simplicity is that of some 'infant joy' too young to have a name, or of some 'infant sorrow' brought aged out of eternity into the 'dangerous world,' and there:
'Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.'
There are no men and women in the world of Blake's poetry, only primal instincts and the energies of the imagination.
His work begins in the garden of Eden, or of the childhood of the world, and there is something in it of the naïveté of beasts: the lines gambol awkwardly, like young lambs. His utterance of the state of innocence has in it something of the grotesqueness of babies, and enchants the grown man, as they do. Humour exists unconscious of itself, in a kind of awed and open-eyed solemnity. He stammers into a speech of angels, as if just awakening out of Paradise. It is the primal instincts that speak first, before riper years have added wisdom to intuition. It is the supreme quality of this wisdom that it has never let go of intuition. It is as if intuition itself ripened. And so Blake goes through life with perfect mastery of the terms of existence, as they present themselves to him: 'perfectly happy, wanting nothing,' as he said, when he was old and poor; and able in each stage of life to express in art the corresponding stage of his own development. He is the only poet who has written the songs of childhood, of youth, of mature years, and of old age; and he died singing.
IV
Blake lived in Poland Street for five years, and issued from it the Songs of Innocence (1789), and, in the same year, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in 1790, and, in 1791, the first book of The French Revolution: a Poem in Seven Books, which Gilchrist says was published anonymously, in ordinary type, and without illustrations, by the bookseller Johnson. No copy of this book is known to exist. At this time he was a fervent believer in the new age which was to be brought about by the French Revolution, and he was much in the company of revolutionaries and freethinkers, and the only one among them who dared wear the 'bonnet rouge' in the street. Some of these, Thomas Paine, Godwin, Holcroft, and others, he met at Johnson's shop in St. Paul's Churchyard, where Fuseli and Mary Wollstonecraft also came. It was at Johnson's, in 1792, that Blake saved the life of Paine, by hurrying him off to France, with the warning, 'You must not go home, or you are a dead man,' at the very moment when a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Johnson himself was in 1798 put into gaol for his republican sympathies, and continued to give his weekly literary dinners in gaol.
Blake's back-windows at Poland Street looked out on the yard of Astley's circus, and Tatham tells a story of Blake's wonder, indignation, and prompt action on seeing a wretched youth chained by the foot to a horse's hobble. The neighbor whom he regarded as 'hired to depress art,' Sir Joshua Reynolds, died in 1792. A friend quoted by Gilchrist tells us: 'When a very young man he had called on Reynolds to show him some designs, and had been recommended to work with less extravagance and more simplicity, and to correct his drawing. This Blake seemed to regard as an affront never to be forgotten. He was very indignant when he spoke of it.' There is also a story of a meeting between Blake and Reynolds, when each, to his own surprise, seems to have found the other very pleasant. Blake's mother died in 1792, at the age of seventy, and was buried in Bunhill Fields on September 9. In the following year he moved to 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,[2] where, during the next seven years, he did engraving, both of his own designs and of those of others, and published the engraved book of designs called The Gates of Paradise (1793), the poems and illustrations of the Songs of Experience (1794), and the greater part of the Prophetic Books, besides writing, apparently in 1797, the vast and never really finished MS. of The Four Zoas. This period was that of which we have the largest and most varied result, in written and engraved work, together with a large number of designs, including five hundred and thirty-seven done on the margin of Young's Night Thoughts, and the earliest of the color-prints. It was Blake's one period of something like prosperity, as we gather from several stories reported by Tatham, who says that during the absence of Blake and his wife on one of their long country walks, which would take up a whole day, thieves broke into the house, and 'carried away plate to the value of £60 and clothes to the amount of £40 more.' Another £40 was lent by Blake to 'a certain freethinking speculator, the author of many elaborate philosophical treatises,' who complained that 'his children had not a dinner.' A few days afterwards the Blakes went to see the destitute family, and the wife 'had the audacity to ask Mrs. Blake's opinion of a very gorgeous dress, purchased the day following Blake's compassionate gift.' Yet another story is of a young art-student who used to pass the house every day carrying a portfolio under his arm, and whom Blake pitied for his poverty and sickly looks, and taught for nothing and looked after till he died. Blake had other pupils too, among 'families of high rank,' but being 'aghast' at the prospect of 'an appointment to teach drawing to the Royal Family,' he gave up all his pupils, with his invariably exquisite sense of manners, on refusing the royal offer.
It was in 1799 that Blake found his first patron, and one of his best friends, in Thomas Butts, 'that remarkable man—that great patron of British genius,' as Samuel Palmer calls him, who, for nearly thirty years, with but few intervals, continued to buy whatever Blake liked to do for him, paying him a small but steady price, and taking at times a drawing a week. A story which, as Palmer says, had 'grown in the memory,' connects him with Blake at this time, and may be once more repeated, if only to be discredited. There was a back-garden at the house in Hercules Buildings, and there were vines in it, which Blake would never allow to be pruned, so that they grew luxuriant in leaf and small and harsh in fruit. Mr. Butts, according to Gilchrist, is supposed to have come one day into 'Blake's Arcadian Arbour,' as Tatham calls it, and to have found Blake and his wife sitting naked, reading out Milton's Paradise Lost 'in character,' and to have been greeted with: 'Come in, it is only Adam and Eve.' John Linnell, in some notes written after reading Gilchrist, and quoted in Story's Life of Linnell, writes with reason: 'I do not think it possible. Blake was very unreserved in his narrations to me of all his thoughts and actions, and I think if anything like this story had been true, he would have told me of it. I am sure he would have laughed heartily at it if it had been told of him or of anybody else, for he was a hearty laugher at absurdities.' In such a matter, Linnell's authority may well be final, if indeed any authority is required, beyond a sense of humour, and the knowledge that Blake possessed it.