Another legend of the period, which has at least more significance, whether true or not, is referred to by both Swinburne and Mr. W. M. Rossetti, on what authority I cannot discover, and is thus stated by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats: 'It is said that Blake wished to add a concubine to his establishment in the Old Testament manner, but gave up the project because it made Mrs. Blake cry.' 'The element of fable,' they add, 'lies in the implication that the woman who was to have wrecked this household had a bodily existence.... There is a possibility that he entertained mentally some polygamous project, and justified it on some patriarchal theory. A project and theory are one thing, however, and a woman is another; and though there is abundant suggestion of the project and theory, there is no evidence at all of the woman.' I have found in the unpublished part of Crabb Robinson's Diary and Reminiscences more than a 'possibility' or even 'abundant suggestion' that Blake accepted the theory as a theory. Crabb Robinson himself was so frightened by it that he had to confide it to his Diary in the disguise of German, though, when he came to compile his Reminiscences many years later he ventured to put it down in plain English which no editor has yet ventured to print. Both passages will be found in their place in the verbatim reprint given later; but I will quote the second here:
'13th June (1826).—I saw him again in June. He was as wild as ever, says my journal, but he was led to-day to make assertions more palpably mischievous and capable of influencing other minds, and immoral, supposing them to express the will of a responsible agent, than anything he had said before. As for instance, that he had learned from the Bible that wives should be in common. And when I objected that Marriage was a Divine institution he referred to the Bible, "that from the beginning it was not so." He affirmed that he had committed many murders, and repeated his doctrine, that reason is the only Sin, and that careless, gay people are better than those who think, etc., etc.'
This passage leaves no doubt as to Blake's theoretical view of marriage, but it brings us no nearer to any certainty as to his practical action in the matter. With Blake, as with all wise men, a mental decision in the abstract had no necessary influence on conduct. To have the courage of your opinions is one thing, and Blake always had this; but he was of all people least impelled to go and do a thing because he considered the thing a permissible one to do. Throughout all his work Blake affirms freedom as the first law of love; jealousy is to him the great iniquity, the unforgivable selfishness. He has the frank courage to praise in The Visions of the Daughters of Albion:
'Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy, nestling for delight
In laps of pleasure! Innocence, honest, open, seeking
The vigorous joys of morning light';
And of woman he asks, 'Who taught thee modesty, subtle modesty?' In the same book, which is Blake's Book of Love, Oothoon offers 'girls of mild silver or of furious gold' to her lover; in the paradisal state of Jerusalem 'every female delights to give her maiden to her husband.' All these things are no doubt symbols, but they are symbols which meet us on every page of Blake, and I no not doubt that to him they represented an absolute truth. Therefore I think it perfectly possible that some 'mentally polygamous project' was at one time or another entertained by him, and 'justified on some patriarchal theory.' What I am sure of, however, is that a tear of Mrs. Blake ('for a tear is an intellectual thing') was enough to wipe out project if not theory, and that one to whom love was pity more than it was desire would have given no nearer cause for jealousy than some unmortal Oothoon.
It was in 1794 that Blake engraved the Songs of Experience. Four of the Prophetic Books had preceded it, but here Blake returns to the clear and simple form of the Songs of Innocence, deepening it with meaning and heightening it with ardor. Along with this fierier art the symbolic contents of what, in the Songs of Innocence, had been hardly more than a child's strayings in earthly or divine Edens, becomes angelic, and speaks with more deliberately hid or doubled meanings. Even 'The Tiger,' by which Lamb was to know that here was 'one of the most extraordinary persons of the age,' is not only a sublime song about a flame-like beast, but contains some hint that 'the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.' In this book, and in the poems which shortly followed it, in that MS. book whose contents have sometimes been labelled, after a rejected title of Blake's, Ideas of Good and Evil, we see Blake more wholly and more evenly himself than anywhere else in his work. From these central poems we can distinguish the complete type of Blake as a poet.
Blake is the only poet who sees all temporal things under the form of eternity. To him reality is merely a symbol, and he catches at its terms, hastily and faultily, as he catches at the lines of the drawing-master, to represent, as in a faint image, the clear and shining outlines of what he sees with the imagination; through the eye, not with it, as he says. Where other poets use reality as a spring-board into space, he uses it as a foothold on his return from flight. Even Wordsworth seemed to him a kind of atheist, who mistook the changing signs of 'vegetable nature' for the unchanging realities of the imagination. 'Natural objects,' he wrote in a copy of Wordsworth, 'always did and now do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me. Wordsworth must know that what he writes valuable is not to be found in nature.' And so his poetry is the most abstract of all poetry, although in a sense the most concrete. It is everywhere an affirmation, the register of vision; never observation. To him observation was one of the daughters of memory, and he had no use for her among his Muses, which were all eternal, and the children of the imagination. 'Imagination,' he said, 'has nothing to do with memory.' For the most part he is just conscious that what he sees as 'an old man grey' is no more than a 'frowning thistle':
'For double the vision my eyes do see,
And a double vision is always with me.
With my inward eyes, 'tis an old man grey,
With my outward, a thistle across my way.'
In being so far conscious, he is only recognizing the symbol, not admitting the reality.
In his earlier work, the symbol still interests him, he accepts it without dispute; with, indeed, a kind of transfiguring love. Thus he writes of the lamb and the tiger, of the joy and sorrow of infants, of the fly and the lily, as no poet of mere observation has ever written of them, going deeper into their essence than Wordsworth ever went into the heart of daffodils, or Shelley into the nerves of the sensitive plant. He takes only the simplest flowers or weeds, and the most innocent or most destroying of animals, and he uses them as illustrations of the divine attributes. From the same flower and beast he can read contrary lessons without change of meaning, by the mere transposition of qualities, as in the poem which now reads: